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Ripped sheets

If you ask Google if knitting is good for you it will tell you that knitting can help lower anxiety, increase self-worth, improve concentration, help with visual/spatial awareness, aid anger management, increase feelings of empowerment, and provide an activity that is self-soothing.

Google describes knitting a lot like taking a walk, which, it says, reduces stress and anxiety, enhances overall mental health, improves your mood, increases awareness, helps you feel connected, enhances self-expression, improves your cognitive function, is beneficial for cardiovascular health, manages weight and improves overall physical well-being.

I’m thinking that knitting interspersed with walking Piper should, as my father would have said, “fix whatever ails you.”

In her book The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times Michelle Obama writes about how knitting helped her get through some of the nasty, early, dark days of COVID, “In all my decades of staying busy, I had always presumed that my head was fully in charge of everything, including telling my hands what to do. …(K)nitting…reversed the flow. It buckled my churning brain into the back seat and allowed my hands to drive the car for a while. It detoured me away from my anxiety, just enough to provide some relief.” 

A lot has been written over the past decade or so about the therapeutic value of knitting. Our grandmothers and great grandmothers would hardly believe how their essential work making socks and sweaters and mittens and their peaceful pastime creating doilies, table cloths and tea cozies has become such an obsession.

Previous generations of women had their own anxieties—pre vaccinations, childhood diseases were terrifying. Mothers watched children die from conditions we, for the most part, no longer worry about. The family economy, their own health, for many, their lack of autonomy, and, as they aged, losing a tooth and then another and another was cause enough to be anxious.

Although our grandmothers didn’t write books about the therapeutic characteristics of knitting, the afternoons they spent with their friends drinking tea, discussing life’s challenges and knitting would have been just as healing then, as they are now.

But these days. These bizarre, chaotic, disruptive, insane days of turmoil require knitting on a whole other level. Gentle yarn overs. Rhythmic click, click, clicking. Soft sensuous slide of cashmere. Harmonized, coordinated shades of muted pinks and blues and greens. Polite, mannerly circles of well-behaved women, need to step aside, need to be interrupted for a moment by a metaphorical clash of a cymbal. We need to, as it were, take the mic out of the stand and storm the stage…a bit like Mick or Elvis.

This weekend we had that moment. No gentle knitting. No soft matching yarns. No stitch-by-stitch instructions. No expensive wool.

We used old sheets and duvet covers from the bags of cast-offs in our basement or from the second-hand store. We ripped them up to make our yarn. We pulled off the frayed edges. We combined colours we had never imagined ever using, never mind putting them together with other colours we never imagined ever using. Then we knit these bizarre balls of string? Not quite. Yarn? Not really. Cotton? Not purely. Into bathmats.

Bathmats. That’s it. Women travelled to Saturna Island to rip up sheets to make bathmats. Why? Why not? And then there were all the other reasons for spending a sunny spring weekend on Saturna. Joni’s stories of her Coast Salish grandmothers hard work and knitting innovations. Good food. Whale watching. The peaceful bliss of birdsong, the cacophony of frogs and the stars. On our out-of-the-way island there is little to dim the lights in the night sky. There is no better place to immerse yourself in the wonder of the light show than on the patio, wrapped in a blanket, with a cup of hot tea.

When you come to the Lodge you will have a ripped-sheet, knitted bathmat. You’ll find ripped-sheet, knitted doormats and ripped-sheet knitted bed shawls…everywhere. I might be wearing a ripped-sheet cape. Or, you might eat your breakfast on a ripped-sheet placemat (I haven’t made them yet).

This weekend we ate together and ripped sheets. We talked together and ripped sheets. We listened to each other and ripped sheets. And then we knit. Inside we knit. Outside we knit. Loudly we knit. Quietly we knit. We knit with an edge. Ours weren’t gentle stitches. Ripped-sheet yarn knitting is not elegant. It is not noble. It has attitude. Deliberateness. Determination.

Why did we do it? Not just because it is good for us for all the Google reasons. But because we need to. The simple over and under. The around and through. The ripping. The fraying. The thinking it out. The making it work. The work of making it. It helps us keep our balance.

And when women get together and recalibrate their equilibrium they go home and reestablish balance in their homes and workplaces. And when their homes and workplaces are rebalanced our world has a hope of refinding its balance. I know. I know that going from ripped-sheet bathmats to balance in the world is a stretch. But it’s also a start.

Each one is sufficiently bizarre and beautiful on its own. Together they take crazy to a whole other level.

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Hats, more hats, woollen bowls and a beautiful boy

“Cool stuff.”

Koa, a six year old guest at the Lodge from Duncan, got it. He thought if one hat was cool, 7 hats were cooler. And then as many bowls as he could balance…how cool was that?

Soon my hats and bowls will be available in Joni’s shop, Salish Fusion, which will open in a few months in Brentwood Bay. Joni will be highlighting and selling handwork and other forms of art from local people.

I’ve avoided selling my work, mostly because I don’t know how to put a price on what I make.

Some artists price their products based on how many hours it took for them to make the thing. This raises complicated issues. First the better an artist is and the more experience an artist has likely means it will take that person much less time to make something than someone less skilled and less experienced. Thus the hourly wage approach would often mean the better the product the less it would cost. There are so many other factors to think about…the quality of the materials, the precision of the final product, its uniqueness and its wow appeal.

Of course the most important factor in pricing something is people’s willingness to pay. You don’t want to sell too cheap. You want to push the buyer to pay more than they might otherwise have. You want the price of handwork to honour the skill, creativity and love of its creators. You also want the price of handwork to respect people’s ability to pay and these days, for many, that ability is diminishing. Which, of course, raises the question “Is handwork only for the rich?”

These are questions for Joni, when she opens Salish Fusion. For now I love Koa’s enthusiasm and appreciation. That is more than enough for me to keep creating.

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Ella’s hat

It’s all about the hat

“I’m just going to stay here and knit with Grandma.” That’s Ella’s response to suggestions to do almost anything. 

So here we sit. Across from each other. Talking about how much she loves Saturna Island, the Lodge, her brother Silas, her school, learning to speak SENCOTEN, playing soccer and most of all knitting. 

“I’m your knitting partner,” she says. And she is. 

Ella was born with the knitting gene.

At 10 years old her needles click in her hands while she looks around, giggles and talks. Like her great grandma, Laura Olsen, I’m sure she could knit with her eyes closed. 

Ella doesn’t knit what she’s told or knit from a pattern. She designs what she knits. She amends it as she goes. She adds colours and stitches depending on what she sees emerging. She designed and knit the skirt she wore on her first day of school in grade one.

This weekend it was all about the hat. She had to have a hat.

“I’ll knit one for myself if you tell me how,” she said. 

She tried on all the hats on the table and knew exactly which one was perfect for her.

“It’s yours,” I said. “A gift from me.”

But Ella is really the gift. To me. To the world.

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Going small

Knitted hats on the table

I’m reading Michelle Obama’s book The Light We Carry and was interested to see the lead photo was of her sitting on her foot on a wing back chair…knitting. She bought needles and wool and learned to knit as a way to get through isolation during the pandemic. She soon found out that knitting is more than one stitch after the other. It is a gentle, quiet, therapeutic practice that helped her manage her pandemic anxiety. But she found out that it’s also not more than one stitch after the other. It is a simple motion, a beautiful rhythm—yarn around, pull through, push off, repeat, repeat, repeat. Simply motion.

“Everything was big. Everything was consequential. It was hard not to feel overwhelmed.” Michelle was talking about how she felt during the pandemic. “Nothing felt even remotely like enough. There were just too many gaps to fill.”

Now that stage of the pandemic is over many of us are left with the “nothing is enough” feeling about everything.

The rise of fanaticism and narcissism (perhaps two expressions of the same condition) leave us bewildered and beleaguered. The right to maintain the personal freedom to travel, to express oneself in any way we choose, to make up our own facts, to purchase at will and to preserve our western privilege have become our causes while the voices of the historically oppressed, the people who for generations/centuries have had their rights trampled, have been sidelined. At the same time the real threat to all of us bickering humans—climate change—marches along. 

Insanity rules at the highest level of our society. The U.S. nomination of the speaker of house is a case in point. The recent sideshow was a disturbing display of dysfunction. Each player, clearly a bundle of anxiety, driven by their own priorities and imperatives looked more like circus performers than elected leaders. There was just too much wrong with the situation to get it right.

Watching the Canadian parliament or BC legislature isn’t much better. We all know there’s a systemic problem. The structure of our democracies needs to be rethought, rejigged, refreshed…those are thoughts for another day. But for now, for me, that project is too big, too consequential, too overwhelming because I don’t think we can get there. As long as we continue on the path we are taking madly chasing big ideas while our inner selves are in chaos we won’t get it right.

Being someone who is convinced that our real challenge is climate not personal freedom I am thinking we don’t have a lot of time to do “inner” work. But we have no choice. 

Wonder if each one of us took time to get mentally and physically healthy. Wonder if we stopped with the “busy, busy, busy” and be still. Wonder if we took a break from the “important, important, important” and focused on the simple and the light. 

Wonder if we got out of our heads and how significant our ideas are. Wonder if we stopped letting our feelings, our triggers, our grudges inform our every action. Wonder if we got into our bodies, its simple functions.

Not golf, where we take our business to the course. Not exercising, where we beat ourselves up to achieve ulterior goals…better bodies, better looks, better opportunities… Not counting laps at the pool or steps as we go about our daily tasks. 

Sigh. We are so damned goal orientated. We are so damned impressed by the busy, the important and the loud. 

Michelle recommends “going small”. Rather than letting her head stay in charge she reversed the flow by picking up knitting needles and letting her hands lead. As she says “I buckled my churning brain into the back seat and allowed my hands to drive the car.” Once she got the hang of the yarn overs and unders she said, “Something in the tiny and precise motion on repeat, the gentle rhythm of those clicking needles, moved my brain in a new direction.”

I’m thinking each one of us has our own sort of knitting that will help us reset our anxious brains and let go of our troubled feelings. Something that will help us find a new inner rhythm. Not counting steps, just putting one foot in front of the other. Not swimming laps, just taking the breaths and kicking the feet. Not networking on the golf course, just swinging the club and following the ball. Not getting the gardening done, just turning the soil.

I’m with Michelle. I hope 2023 is the year people decide to go small. And if we take it slow, relax, get quiet and enjoy simple movements on repeat for no other reason than to enjoy simple movements on repeat I think we can find a new groove. That’s it. Just a new groove. But if you need a big and significant reason for letting go of the big and significant I’m pretty sure your new groove will benefit the consequential things as well.

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Born with the knitting gene

Joni’s knitted interpretation of Coast Salish weaving

The day Joni, my oldest daughter, was born 43 years ago, I was spinning wool so I had something to knit when I came home from the hospital. I birthed her with the help of a Caesarean Section. She was a perfect, beautiful little baby. Almost immediately people commented on her dimple. Perhaps a knitting needle poked her, people joked. For nine months she had been the shelf for my knitting.

Joni was born with the knitting gene. No one taught her. From the time she was a little girl she knew exactly what to do with needles and yarn. Joni inherited the gene from both sides of her family. Her Coast Salish Grandmother, Laura Olsen, also knit every day of her life until she could no longer lift her needles.

Joni is not just a knitter, she is a designer as well. She isn’t satisfied just knitting what everyone else is making. She is interested in pushing knitting in new directions donning her needles for a machine and then pushing the machine to its limits.

One of Joni’s most interesting creations was highlighted in the Qw’an Qw’anakwal Exhibition of Coast Salish Art at the University of Victoria in 2021. During a visit to the Chicago Field Museum in 2012 Joni viewed an early Coast Salish woven tunic. The piece inspired her to design a knitting stitch that reproduces classic Coast Salish weaving and to create her own fascinating rendition of the garment in the museum.

Joni’s tunic is a demonstration of fusion—using new tools and materials to reproduce old shapes and textures.

Stay tuned. There is more to come.

Joni’s latest design is the new home for Salish Fusion. The shop is currently being constructed and with luck and hard work should be open in time for Christmas.

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Interviews

Thank you thank you Christopher Walker/Cabinboy knits for this interview

The book is out. The interviews are coming in. Why did you take the tour? Why did you write the book? What surprised you? What do you know now that you didn’t know before? First we took went on a road trip. Then I wrote the book. And now…there’s a whole other level of reflection.

            To start…a word about the publisher; Douglas & McIntyre does a great job of promotions. I am surprised at how much interest they have gathered—how many interviews they’ve scheduled. I had never imagined that a knitting road trip book would be on the BC best sellers’ list for the first two weeks it is out.

            My next surprise? As I’ve said before, a lot of people are interested in knitting…millions of them. But I am beginning to think that everyone has someone who loves to knit—someone who they want to buy the book for. Or perhaps I am right when I facetiously say that there are only two kinds of people in the world—people who knit and people who wish they could knit.

            And then there’s the roadtrippers. The book is only partly about knitting. It’s equally or even more about the road trip. And who, especially during COVID, doesn’t wish they could go on a road trip?

             Finally a word about the interviewers. I have been interviewed many times on various topics. I always hope for the best—that the interviewer is interested and somewhat knowledgeable—that he or she has done some research on the topic. What do I know now that I didn’t know before? There are a lot of interviewers who are fascinated by the idea of a knitting road trip and if they are any indication of the general interest then it’s no wonder this book is doing much better than I had ever expected.