A few weeks ago, someone who had read this column wrote to me to tell me “stick to the knitting in future”. I wasn’t upset – I don’t use social media partly to spare myself this stuff but, inevitably, worse than that still comes my way. I was intrigued by the hierarchy in his mind, where knitting was feminine, private, trivial and writing was masculine, public, important. I had offended him by confusing two creative practices, by using up space in a serious newspaper with thoughts about handicrafts. (Or maybe just by thinking in public while female.)
I knit and write. I also sew and even – the frivolity of it! – embroider. Writing is more serious for me because it’s my profession and I’m better at it than needlecraft; if it’s hard to earn a living by writing, it’s much harder to do so by hand-knitting and sewing. People sometimes watch me knit for a few minutes and then ask how long it takes to make a jumper. I don’t have an answer. Months, but I knit only for pleasure while doing other things, over coffee with friends or while watching TV, never in time that could be spent reading or writing. You could sell that, people say, as if commercial value is the ultimate compliment, but I couldn’t, not for a sum that made any sense of the time required. One friend pushed me to find the number, timed a few rows of a jumper and multiplied up. The answer seemed to be about €11,000 at minimum wage, not allowing for materials. You can’t buy love and you can’t buy hand-knits, or at least not complicated jumpers made at amateur speed in fine yarn.
So, unlike writing, hand-knitting and sewing are rarely done for profit, but that doesn’t make textile art or craft trivial. “Text” and “textile” have the same root, Latin texere, to weave. For centuries, paper was made from rags, a recycling of textile into text. We spin a yarn when we tell a story, or maybe weave a tissue or web of lies. (“Tissu” is French for fabric, “weben” German for weave.) Come to that, we fabricate, which is inventing facts, not making fabric. (Latin “fabrica” from “faber”, manual work). The words for making with cloth and making with words are entangled (another textile word) from the beginning in most European languages, if not, I am told, Irish. Archaeology shows that all over the world, weaving and sewing are as old and often older than writing.
Our most intimate and constant physical relationships are with cloth. The first act of care is to wrap the newborn, and in many cultures that wrapping is made and adorned in pregnancy and kept for life. The last act of care is to wrap or dress our dead, and those garments or winding cloths go with the departed where mourners cannot. In life, we are almost always touched and held by knitting and weaving, even between the sheets and under the blanket.
Sarah Moss: A reader tried to needle me by scoffing at knitting - I was intrigued
Sarah Moss: I cycle to central Dublin several times a week. I’m a hypocrite not allowing my teenager to do the same
I’d rather be in Connemara than anywhere tropical, wearing wellies and a woolly hat
English was never pure or logical. Policing how other people speak is pointless and unattractive
Global history is shaped by our need for cloth. Manchester, where I grew up, was known as Cottonopolis in the 19th century, and we all know the immense suffering fuelling the growing and picking of that cotton. The factory workers, whose own lives were brief and brutal, went on strike in protest against American slavery. The hills surrounding England’s industrial cities are moorland, a landscape made by centuries of sheep-farming, and the rivers and streams turned mill-wheels for spinning yarn. The first computer programmes were cards to set the patterns of looms.
[ Here’s why I’ve become addicted to knittingOpens in new window ]
The silk trade carried goods, knowledge and design (and disease) across Europe and Asia to bring luxury fabrics to the courts of Europe. Flax-growing for linen shaped the landscapes of parts of Ireland, the Baltic countries and the Low Countries.
I learned to work with a needle before I learned to work with a pen. The pen, for me, will always come first, but I am no more ashamed of my textile literacy than my textual literacy. I am not even sure they are separable. Humans will always need stories, but come the end times – hard to not to think they may be at hand – knitting may well be more urgent than writing.
