respect

August 2, 2012 By Kate in knitting, memory, review, Shetland, textiles, the life of things Tags: Franklin Habit, knitting, Real Shetland Yarns, representation, review, Shetland, Shetland knitting, Shetland Lace, Shetland Museum 76 Comments

(Orkney and Shetland in Blaeu’s 1654 Atlas.)

I am not a Shetlander. I love Shetland, and I feel a connection to those islands and their culture that is (for me) profound and meaningful, but I am not a Shetlander. I think it is important for me to remember that, particularly as I am currently working on a collection of designs that use Shetland wool, and are all inspired by different aspects of Shetland and its landscape. In my previous job as an historian, I found it very useful to remind myself of the distance between myself and the eighteenth-century subjects I was working on. If you read a lot of eighteenth-century diaries and letters, you start to get to feel like you ‘know’ the people who wrote them. But you don’t know them, and it is really important to remember the distance that separates you from those folk, because that distance stops you from making foolish assumptions, and helps you to maintain respect.

I am not a Shetlander. But I feel a profound sense of irritation — that occasionally approaches outrage — when I happen across certain kinds of misrepresentation of Shetlanders and Shetland. Knitting books and magazines are particularly bad in this regard. There are many things that irk me in these knitterly accounts (don’t even get me started on the romanticisation of the truck system) but one of the things that irritates me most is the assumption that the islands are “remote” and difficult to access. Really? What does “remote” even mean? Shetland was not remote for the Vikings, and nor was it remote for the merchants of the 17th- and 18th-century Baltic. By the early 19th Century, commercial shipping meant that Shetland was actually much better connected than many English provincial towns — the sea meant that these islands were not remote at all. And what, really, is ‘remote’ about Shetland today? We are a nation of islands, and like many other parts of the British Isles, you can access Shetland easily by flight or ferry. No one ever describes the Isle of Man or Guernsey as ‘remote’ — but what’s the difference? It is, in fact, much more difficult for me to get to the Channel Islands than it is to hop on a plane to Shetland.

The assumption that Shetland, its people, and its culture, are terribly ‘remote’ feeds into a discourse of exoticism within which the islands are marked by a sense of arcane difference. And this is not only completely misleading, but, in making Shetland seem like some sort of antediluvian curiosity, is also profoundly damaging (and disrespectful) to its culture: a culture within which which wool and knitting play an important role. As I said, mainstream knitting books and magazines have a disappointing tendency to reinforce these ‘exoticising’ assumptions, and this is perhaps because (with a handful of notable exceptions: Miller, Starmore, Amedro, Johnston), they have been produced by people who know an awful lot about knitting but not very much about Shetland. Examples abound, but here is a recent one that I found all the more galling for being produced by someone whose work I otherwise like and admire.

(extract from Franklin Habit’s article in Interweave’s new e-mag, LaceKnits (2012). On the map, at least, the Shetland islands are correctly located)

In an article published recently in Interweave’s new e-mag Lace Knits (2012), Franklin Habit describes Shetland as “a windswept, sheep-infested archipelago off the northwest coast of Scotland,” a statement which not only feeds into the discourse of the exotic, but is also geographically incorrect (Shetland is located to Scotland’s northeast). The article purports to unlock the mysteries of the origins of Shetland lace — but there’s no mystery about it: basic geography might also have enabled Habit to understand the connection between the first ‘Shetland’ knitting patterns produced by Jane Gaugain and the remote ‘sheep-infested archipelago’. (Gaugain traded on the North side of Edinburgh, whose ships, warehouses, and shops were, by the 1840s, stuffed full of finished Shetland goods, including fine openwork shawls produced by the knitters of Unst and Dunrossness) Describing Shetland lace, as Habit does, as “set-dressing for a high budget fairytale”, simply compounds the misleading idea of the islands as unreal, remote fantasy-places, detaching lace from its real (and important) role in Shetland as a constituent of the skills and materials of everyday life. Habit’s piece has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing what he acknowledges are ‘myths’ about Shetland lace simply by repeating them in lieu of historical fact. I found the lack of basic, accurate information in his article all the more odd, because it really is not difficult, even when one is located on another continent, to research Shetland knitting history and culture. In fact, unlike other parts of Britain, Shetland is unusually well-resourced in this regard. There is a wonderful archive, with a great online catalogue and other accessible material. This archive is staffed by an equally wonderful team of people who are more than happy to help anyone with an interest in any aspect of Shetland culture. Shetland also abounds with well-known, generous, and knowledgable knitters, who are more than happy to talk about their craft and its history. Why not just do some research?

If you have any interest at all in Shetland knitting, then there is no better place to start than with Real Shetland Yarns, a book supported by the Shetland Museum and which, in so many respects, is the complete opposite of Habit’s article. During Shetland Wool Week last year, you might remember that I mentioned the Shetland Stories competition — a project highlighting the importance of wool and knitted textiles to Shetland culture. Forty of these stories have now been gathered together in this wonderful collection, which is seriously the best book about textiles that I’ve come across since Vladimir Arkhipov’s Home Made (2006). Here, told in Shetlanders’ own words, is the story of Shetland wool. Each ‘story’ is short (just 300 words) and reading each piece in isolation gives you a snapshot of the role of “oo” in an individual life: an incident, a garment, an animal, a memory. The stories are brief, then, but their cumulative effect is profound. Taken as a whole, the book effectively unlocks the division of labour, and lays it out before you, introducing Shetland wool at every stage from husbandry through to retail. We learn of the care of sheep, of common grazing, of rooing and gathering hentilags, of carding and spinning, of knitting by hand or by machine, of weaving cloth, of finishing garments, of dressing shawls, of brokering, buying and selling, of designing and exporting. We see a boy’s perspective on the work that is going on around him; we see a girl being taught to knit by her father; we see men and women supporting their families through their craft; we read of knitted garments loved and hated; knitted garments that won prizes; knitted garments inspired by archeological finds; knitted garments that were worn by several generations of the same family, and are still being worn today. We meet Jacko the extraordinary caddy lamb, and equally extraordinary knitting heroines like Ena Leslie; we see vet, Debbie Main taking an impromptu ride on the back of a too-lively tup; we are privileged to peer into the pages of Hazel Tindall’s mother’s diary and to read Norma Anderson’s thoughts about her grandmother’s beautiful lace garments; we see young Eva Irvine, selling her family’s hand-knit hosiery in Lerwick, and catch a glimpse of of Andy Holt, working away on his pasap machine during the long winter nights on Papa Stour. Some of these stories are funny, some are deeply moving, but this is in no way a sentimental book. It is a real book. It is a book that shows just how important wool, and the creative skills associated with it are to the everyday lives of people in a community which is emphatically not exotic, not ‘remote’, but rather an ordinary — though distinctive — part of the contemporary British Isles. It is a book that instills respect for that community and the crafts and culture that are so important to it. It is a book that all knitters should read.

Jacko in his later years. Image ©Hazel Mackenzie, reproduced in Real Shetland Yarns, p.62.

album

February 13, 2012 By Kate in fashion, History, memory, photography Tags: fashion, history of fashion, material objects, victorian photograph album 41 Comments

I have a downstairs neighbour (also a knitter) who, in the course of her work, often comes across interesting objects. She sometimes brings these up to show me, and together we will enthuse over a gorgeous set of art-deco buttons or an ancient pair of butter-pats. The other day she brought up a very special object, which I thought you’d like to see.

It resembles a small bible, but it isn’t.

One clasp is broken, but the other is in fine shape. The pages are heavy, gilt-edged.

Shall we look inside?

On the first leaf is a print of a young and grieving Queen Victoria.

It is a photograph album. A typically Victorian repository of memory.

The style of the clasped book, and the particular settings of the cartes-de-visites dates it, I’d say, to the late 1860s.

But there are many types of studio portrait in here, from the 1850s to the 1890s.

This fragile-looking woman has a face that seems to recede from the camera. Her shawl is simple and heavy – perhaps the property of a photographer who requires some drapery to set this pale and light-boned figure off against the studio background.

I love the drape of the mantle over the crinoline; the detail around the skirt; the combination of the mantle’s internal pockets with the rather elaborate corded bag.

You can almost hear the rustle of her dark, heavy silks.

His beard-quiff combo is really quite extraordinary.

And I love the jewelery and piled hair of this woman of later era, who appears in the album several times.

To whose memories do these faces, long dead, belong?

Tandle Hill

January 30, 2011 By Kate in landscape, memory, walking Tags: Lancashire, Oldham, Peterloo Massacre, Rochdale, Rochdale Canal, Samuel Bamford, Tandle Hill, walking 44 Comments

We spent this weekend in Rochdale, where my parents live, and where I grew up. I wanted to walk to a special place – somewhere I’ve been meaning to introduce to Tom for a very long time. It is always lovely to have a walk with my Dad.

The Roch valley, crisscrossed with canals and railways, dotted with mills and factories, is the landscape of my childhood. Shaped by the industrial revolution, and decimated by Thatcher, the mills and factories are now mostly demolished, though some have found new life as distribution centres. Behind my parents’ home runs the Rochdale canal.

I used to play around these towpaths when I was a kid. Not all of the paths were accessible then, as parts of the old waterway had been in-filled and diverted. There were stagnant pools, and shopping trolleys. But there were also foxes and wildflowers. On one legendary occasion, a brave pal went swimming in the canal behind our house, and came out covered in leeches. About a decade ago, the canal was extensively restored, and is once again fully-navigable, by boat or by foot. There are new loch-gates and walkways. . .

It was wonderful to see the canal looking in such good nick, but this wasn’t the point of the journey.

I wanted to climb up from the valley to the beech woods behind Tandle Hill. These woods, planted in the early Nineteenth Century, and now managed by Oldham Council, are where I first discovered my love of walking. They were a beautiful space in which to potter about, and were far enough from home to feel like a real adventure. As one got older, one’s circle widened: you could walk right through the woods, and follow the lanes all the way across to Royton. You could take a tent and camp up there (although you weren’t supposed to).

I remember feeling, as a teenager, that these woods had a cathedral-like majesty, with their grand columns of mature beech forming leaf-lined aisles. They still look like that to me today.

They are at their best in the Autumn, of course, when the hollow behind the hill becomes a shadowy symphony of bronze and gold. But I like it here at any season. My Dad (who keeps a wonderful garden) waxed lyrical about leaf mould. And there was plenty for Bruce to do.

I had always loved Tandle Hill. Then I went away to university and got interested in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. I didn’t know, until then, that Tandle Hill was where the radical weavers of Middleton and Rochdale famously assembled.

(view from Tandle Hill, North, toward Rochdale)

In the words of Samuel Bamford:

“When dusk came, and we could no longer see to work, we jumped from our looms and rushed to the sweet cool air of the fields, or the waste lands, or the green lane sides. We mustered, we fell into rank, we faced, marched, halted, faced about, countermarched, halted again, dressed, and wheeled in quick succession and without confusion; or, in the grey of a fine Sunday morn, we would saunter through the mists, fragrant with the night odour of flowers and new hay, and, ascending Tandle Hill, salute the broad sun, as he climbed from behind the high moors of Saddleworth”*

Looking out from Tandle Hill, Bamford saw the promise of political reform on the Southern horizon

(view South, toward Manchester)

“And, lo! what a world is before me spread,
From the fringed dell to the mountain head!
From the spangled turf, whereon I stand,
To the bend of heaven and the verge of land!
Like an ocean cradle deep it lies;
To the right, to the left, dark hills arise,
And Blackstone-Edge, in his sunless pride,
Doth York from Lancaster divide;
Whilst, on to the south if away we bear,
Oh! what shall bar our progress there?
Nought, save the blending of earth and sky,
Dim, and afar as eternity!”**

Three months after writing these verses, Bamford, and six thousand other working men and women from Middleton and Rochdale, marched South to Manchester, and Peterloo

We had a great walk: just under six miles, 200 metres of ascent, and an awful lot of memories for me. It was chilly and uneven underfoot, but my leg held out reasonably well.

*Bamford, Passages in the life of a radical (1843)
**Bamford, “View from Tandle Hill, May, 1819″ (in Homely Rhymes, 1864 edn)

P.S indeed, yes, that is the most amazing scarf! I intend to tell you about it later.

correspondence

April 25, 2010 By Kate in knitting, landscape, memory, recovery, stroke, textiles, the life of things, walking, writing Tags: cards, correspondence, friendship, gift, gifts, letters, objects, postcards, recovery, stroke, things 26 Comments

These are my pinboards at the Astley Ainsley Hospital, covered with the wonderful cards and messages you sent. Being in hospital is a difficult business. For me, the dissociating effect of being a patient in an institution was compounded by the fact that I was inhabiting a body which did not seem to be mine at all. But when I was feeling low; when I returned to the ward from a tough physio session or became frustrated with fatigue, there displayed in front of me, were all these messages of support, beautiful cards, and words of encouragement. Hospitals are colourless, featureless places – but my corner of the ward was brightened up with pictures of yarn and textiles, owls and sheep, landscapes and gardens. Your words and images were not just cheering, but have genuinely helped me through the most difficult time in my life thus far.

During the very early phase of my recovery, the care of family and friends was at least as important to me as the medical care that I received. Mel kept turning up with craft supplies, and when I described the particular difficulties that I was experiencing with my hand, devised impromptu tools to help me. She patiently used her hands to demonstrate what I needed to be doing with mine. I attribute my improvements in dexterity, and the fact that I was able to learn to knit and plait again to her.

(Frame, canvas, yarn, pins, plait. From Melanie.)

From further afield, Felix and Liz and Meiko and Harriet reminded me of their friendship with tokens that were both meaningful and heartening. Felix sent me many amazing things, but perhaps the most moving was a cd containing audio recordings of our walks in 2009. I lay in bed unable to move my left side, dreaming of walking, and listening to the sounds of the actual walks I had shared with a friend. It was a deeply emotional experience. Felix wrote a letter to accompany her recordings:

“I have found our walk at Dymchurch. There is a lot of wind & it isn’t a ‘pristine’ recording, but it has the sea & it makes me remember the slightly desolate quality of that beach. It was for me a very happy afternoon. . . I loved sharing quiet with you & walking so peacefully by the sea — you taking your photos & me obsessing on my sounds & the crunchy sand that eventually inspired these socks.”

(photograph of Felix on the beach at Dymchurch)

I am particularly fond of correspondence. Handling and reading eighteenth-century manuscripts is one of the great pleasures of my academic work. Apart from when I am out on the hills with Tom, I am probably at my happiest in an archive among the private and the public worlds that are brought to life in eighteenth-century letters. I love – in a way that is almost certainly fetishistic- the thing-ness of correspondence: the particular way that particular women wrote their letters, the paper they chose, the way they folded up their words into neat self-closing envelopes, the wax seals, the signs of postage or delivery by hand. I also love the stuff that letters contained: seeds and shells sent from one woman to another half-way across the world; a clipping from a magazine; a hand drawn pattern for a collar or embroidered bloom. It is no coincidence to me that my long standing interests in textiles and materiality assumed the level of obsessions after I began spending time with the manuscript collections of the women of eighteenth-century Philadelphia.

(front and back of late eighteenth-century pocket book. Silk embroidery on silk)

I have read many sets of eighteenth-century correspondence between friends who never met. It has always intrigued me how powerful these connections were; how they were established and maintained often over many decades across distances of many thousands of miles. But eighteenth-century friends were brought together in a manner that is really not all that different from the contemporary blogosphere: through shared tastes or interests; through the exchange of skills or information; through debate; through simply speaking to one another. I often find myself thinking about the similarities of eighteenth century paper and contemporary digital networks, but this is perhaps a topic for another time. In any case, the particular way I feel about the materiality of eighteenth century letters made your correspondence especially important and meaningful to me.

(letter from Helena with photographs of a walk at Tynemouth).

Each lunchtime, after a hard morning’s physiotherapy, Morag would turn up at my bedside with an armful of envelopes. Opening your letters and cards, reading and absorbing their contents, and then arranging them around my pinboards, was the singular pleasure and highlight of my hospital day. I was of course sustained by the comments and messages you were leaving here, but there is something particularly satisfying about looking at a stamp or postmark, seeing an address written in someone else’s hand, opening an envelope, and then enjoying a distant friend’s personal choice of words or images. While he lay in bed, Proust famously enjoyed reading the names of stations in the train timetable, and I can understand the particular pleasure of the imaginary journeys he must have taken, the hypnotic effect of the names of unknown towns. A card from Madeleine came with a clear, well-stamped postmark from “White River Junction,” which I found incredibly pleasing. I loved the individually evocative qualities of postcards from Stockholm or Brussels, Zeeland or Albuquerque. You wrote to me about your experiences of the places that you knew I loved (the island of Harris; the English Lakes) or about the spaces and landscapes that were dear to you. You told me of walks you had taken and enjoyed, accompanying your words with pictures of the mountains and trails that your feet and bodies moved along.

(photograph from Valerie of snow-covered trails near Kelowa, British Columbia. Sent with “seeds of encouragement” from the Black Spruce Tree).

Many of you sent me images of plants, vegetables and flowers, or pictures of your own gardens. I loved to read your stories of growth and renewal in landscapes that often seemed impossibly exotic. From Australia, Lydia wrote a marvelous letter about a garden reclaimed from the surrounding desert, with tales of the kangaroos and pigs that were it’s (sometimes unwelcome) night-time visitors.

(Lydia’s garden)

Through your letters and cards, you shared your own interests and obsessions, your identities and characters. When a small envelope turned up from Suzanne, it carried the sender’s personality – her particularly graphic materiality – with it. Everything about that package felt precious to me: a personally stamped postmark (a winged Pegasus) on the outside of the envelope;her neat and distinctive artist’s handwriting; a carefully wrapped and thoughtfully selected group of postcards from her own collection; two tiny hand folded paper cranes in patterned paper; and a hand-made paper-cut card that took my breath away.

(hand made card. from Suzanne).

This was a package fashioned entirely from paper — Suzanne’s envelope contained little of actual material value, but it’s hand-made and deeply personal materiality made its contents of inestimable worth to me. Given that so many of you are talented craftspeople, it was inevitable that some of you would send me hand-made things.

(wolf in sheep’s clothing. from Mary-Jo.)

Some of these things – like Mary-Jo’s wolf in sheep’s clothing – just about killed me and the sheer number of handmade things arranged about my bedside became a talking point among my medical team and the staff on the ward. Despite the fact that I asked you not to send me stuff, I also received chocolates, delicious biscuits, packets of tea (hurrah!), fabric in bolts and fat quarters, amazing skeins of yarn, vintage buttons, tiny plaits, owls of many shapes and sizes, books, magazines, newspaper clippings, necklaces, brooches, and bracelets, handknitted shawls and socks. Under Patricia’s supervision, the nuns of Kersal Hill convent in Salford knitted me an entire nativity scene, complete with donkey, shepherds, wise men, and a tiny Jesus in a knitted crib. Ella sent me Scottish and Northumbrian gansey patterns; Jeanette posted a wee porcupine from New Mexico; Stacy provided me with the trashy crime novels which she knows I like to read. These things were so damned heartening – so full of love and hope – that it was hard for me to feel too low about my own grim situation. You were all thinking of me, all believing that I would be well again. You were bothered enough to put pen to paper, to make or send me things that meant something to you; to share with me your own experiences of sickness and of loss; telling me how you had got through your own difficult times. I drew, and still draw, tremendous strength from all of this.

(small pillow. Hand sewn and embroidered by Helen).

Though my correspondence is longer pinned to a hospital wall, I still want to look at it and enjoy it. I also want to be reminded of how important it was and is to me, and to express my collective thanks to all of you. To this end, I have begun a virtual archive of my post-stroke correspondence, to which I shall upload an image of everything you have sent me (with the exception, of course, of the things that I have eaten). The archive currently contains 92 entries, and I have barely begun uploading. You can search for things by keyword (for example, entering ‘octodog’ into the search form will yield a magazine clipping from Kate K that had me hooting with laughter for quite some time); explore the different classifications of objects by clicking on the words in the category cloud; search for items by the name of the sender or maker; or simply browse through the entire archive in turn by clicking on each image as it appears. I have also written a brief introduction to, and explanation of, the archive which you can read here. I hope you enjoy looking at these things just as I enjoyed receiving them. I also hope that the archive, gathered together as a whole, goes some way towards conveying the tremendous power and encouragement I have drawn from your collective friendship over the past few weeks. Thankyou.

(hand drawn and coloured card from kowajy)

handy

February 21, 2010 By Kate in memory, recovery, stroke Tags: gesture, learning, memory, movement, physio, recovery, rehab, stroke 383 Comments

Hello, dear friends,

here I am, checking in with an update on my progress.

I am doing really well, and throwing myself into the physio with gusto, but it is fair to say that what I am now engaged upon is the strangest and most difficult task I have ever undertaken. When I wrote a couple of weeks ago that movement was beginning to “return” to my left hand, I had no sense of what the stroke had done to my motor function. I thought that all that was required for my limbs’ recovery was for the movement to “come back.” But movement does not “come back” at all: rather, what returns – inching slowly, by degrees-, is the basic capability of movement. The stroke has completely wiped the memory map of my left side from my brain and it now has to learn the simplest actions from scratch. Thirty-six years of walking, waving, eating, washing, and all other unconscious gestures were erased from my limbs in an instant when I fell over on the way to work three weeks ago. So while the arm and hand are moving again in a halting sort of fashion, they have entirely “forgotten” their everyday movements. The hand finds it difficult to lie naturally at my side, and either balls itself up into an annoying claw, or rises up into the air in a disturbing, spontaneous gesture that resembles a fascist salute. Sometimes my brain will “tell” the hand to move, and it obliges, but moments later I find it floating uselessly in the air awaiting further instruction. The most mundane of tasks have become completely mystifying. It took me days to be able to successfully instruct the hand to just drop a piece of rubbish in the bin. And, after several defeated attempts, I had to watch Tom’s two hands working together to ball up a pair of socks before this sequence of deft movements made any sense to me at all.

At times, it really is as if my arm and hand are someone else’s. Emptied of a lifetime’s experience of familiar movement, they no longer seem like mine. And it is really, really hard making them seem like mine again. Because there is no muscule tone or oomph on the left side, my body is uncomfortable pretty much constantly. It requires a ludicrous amount of effort for me simply to sit upright and maintain my balance. But I am focusing all the energy I possess on making that effort. Basically, all of my time is spent attempting to throw shapes, and eating and sleeping enough inbetween times to throw those shapes again. I sleep and eat an awful lot, and I throw an awful lot of shapes. My physios are brilliant, and so (of course) is Tom, who, every evening, runs through my full exercise gamut, encouraging and helping me, and making me laugh. It is amusing to us that it is the most “fun” (and possibly the most useless) arm and hand shapes that are proving impossible to execute. For example, despite repeated daily attempts, I cannot master the simple bilateral movement that would make my elbows flap up and down like a chicken (think birdy dance) or make both arms go round and round as if imitating a train.

I have put an unbelievable amount of effort this week into teaching myself some basic fine finger movements and here I am finally typing – very slowly and stutteringly, but typing nonetheless – with both hands. And even better (O joy of joys!) I have actually managed to cast on and knit a little. If you knit “English” as I do, you probably think that your right hand does all the throwing work, and that the left does nothing but steady the needles. But this is not the case. To execute a single stitch successfully, the left hand must play its part with its own series of tiny but crucial accompanying movements. Working 8 rows of messy bramble stitch almost made my head explode and required a cake and a revivifying nap. I shall never think of “P3tog” in the same way again. But I have cracked it now, and am determined to be churning out colourwork in no time.

One thing I am finding very frustrating is not being able to plait my own hair. For me, this is a singularly identity-reconfirming task. At the moment, I have to ask a nurse or care worker to do it for me every day. Now I can wash and dress myself sucessfully (albeit very slowly), my hair is one of my last traces of physical dependency, and it is very annoying. I hate having to ask, and I hate not being able to do it myself. A few days ago a care worker who was plaiting my hair said to me that perhaps I should think about wearing it in a different, less labour-intensive manner. Now, it may seem ridiculous, but those plaits are integral to my sense of self. Regaining control over my hair, in precisely the way I like to wear it, is an important stage toward being me again, and I shall not change the way my hair is styled simply because a part of my body currently finds it difficult to style it. (None of this, by the way, is meant as a criticism of this particular individual or of any of the staff on ward 31, who are tremendously encouraging, supportive and enlivening presences. But I’m sure you realise that some of the interactions between the giving and the receiving of care are quite complex and difficult, and that things are sometimes seen differently from a patient’s point of view). I’ve tried plaiting every day this week, using a mirror, watching other people, working with these strands of wool, and yet styling my hair myself is still, at the moment, weirdly impossible. I think there are a few reasons for this: first, unlike knitting, it is something I do entirely unconsciously without thinking about technique; second, one doesn’t usually watch one’s own hands when plaiting, which makes it harder to learn again; and finally, because the process requires a heavy arm to be held aloft, the elbow to be bent up next to the head, and the wrist and hands to be moving all the while, it is something that is really very difficult to accomplish. This combination of actions just seems too tricky at the moment for an unruly limb with little strength or co-ordination. But , I am practising hard, as you can see.

Despite inevitable impediments and setbacks, beginning to learn these basic things is interesting and rewarding. I am focusing on actions not as discrete things, but as processes and combinations of movements. The realisation of the mutual reliance of my two hands upon one another for the smallest thing is a startling, eye opening one. One appreciates and understands the use of a fork, the ease of a buckle, in a totally new way. And each day there is some small improvement, some thing that I can do that I could not do before. Three days ago, I put on a pair of tights for the first time. Two days ago, I managed to force my unwilling foot in it’s brace into a shoe. And now I have learnt to knit again. I can’t tell you how excited and overwhelmed and moved I am by the process of teaching myself these things. It is quite ridiculous how thrilling it can be to simply pull up a zip again. Despite the intense difficulty and frustration, then, there is something amazingly reconfirming about finally figuring something out, and doing it slightly better each time. In a very basic way, it really makes one feel as if anything is possible or within reach. And it is very thought provoking, as I say. These small actions and processes are parts of a complex physical language. A gesture integrates itself into one’s physical vocabulary in just the same way as a word works its way into one’s everyday lexicon. And, just like a word, once a movement has become part of that vocabulary, one forgets about its subtle inferences and meanings. One just starts to move again, without thinking. And then today’s small miracle becomes tomorrow’s unconscious gesture.

You have no idea how very heartening it has been for me to read your encouraging and caring comments. It really has made a tremendous difference to my energy and focus to know that you are thinking of me and willing me on. When I reach the bottom of the emotional roller coaster (which happens more than you might think) I see another comment which raises my spirits. Some of you have kindly asked if you might send me a a card. Next week I hope to be moved from ward 31 to a residential rehab place (the sort of place where all one does is physio and OT– brilliant!) so I will certainly let you know where I am when I get there.
cheers, everyone. Onward and upward. x

sticks

January 21, 2010 By Kate in History, memory, the life of things Tags: BBC, History, history of the world in 100 objects, Kate Davies, knitting, knitting belt, knitting sheath, knitting stick, material history, outdoor knitting, Rowan 47, wisp, women's history 41 Comments

If you stood the course through my radio burblings the other day, you might have heard me mention the thing that I’d like to contribute to the BBC / British Museum’s History of the World in 100 objects. I thought you might be interested to see it. While I was researching my piece for the current Rowan Magazine, I became very interested in the different tools that enabled women to knit while standing up, outdoors, or on the move. Circular needles now mean that our knitting is easy to carry about, but in earlier centuries, there were many different devices to enhance the craft’s portability. Shetland islanders used wisps:

(Shetland wisp. Rope and straw. Late Nineteenth Century).

. . . and later, leather belts . . .

. . . like this one (bought from Jamieson and Smith and demonstrated by Ysolda. ‘Goose-wing’ or ‘Gulls-wing’ knitting sticks, shaped to be tucked easily into skirt or apron top, were common in the Scottish Borders, the Yorkshire Dales, and Wales :

(“goose-wing” knitting stick. Late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. This example was previously painted, and scraps of green are still visible on the carved leaves)

. . . and all over the country, there are examples of straight or slightly curved knitting sticks, hand-carved, machine turned, and sometimes inlaid with shell or bone, dating from the seventeenth- through the early twentieth centuries. Here’s a simple eighteenth-century turned one:

As these photos might suggest, I’ve now amassed a small personal hoard of these things, but they feature in local museum collections all over the country: I’ve seen some great examples in the V&A, and National Museum of Scotland as well as at Dent, Whitby, and Beamish. (If you click on the Beamish link you’ll see a gallery of many interesting examples)

Here’s another view of my favourite knitting stick:

It is a small oak object, less than 15 cm long. The top of the stick has been reinforced with a cage of carefully soldered lead, which provides a secure and durable holder for the knitter’s needles:

Carved into the wood is a name (Jane Brown), and the date:

There are a number of reasons why I like this particular knitting stick. First, of course, it is a personal object — an object with a private connection, a name, and a story to tell. These sticks were frequently given as love tokens, and this one was probably carved for Jane Brown by her feller. This is, then, an object with private and sentimental meanings, and which may carry other intimate connotations too. Jane’s stick is very like a busk — small wooden or whale-bone objects that were worn by Georgian and Victorian women under their clothing to stiffen and enhance the effect of their stays. Wooden busks were similarly formed, similarly carved, and similarly given as love tokens (to be worn next to the heart). Indeed, from its particular tapered shape, and its resemblance to other busks that I have seen, I would speculate that Jane’s knitting stick was first intended as a busk, but then adapted to another purpose by the addition of the soldered top. I like the idea that an object designed to maintain the stasis of a woman’s body might be put to more practical use as a device enabling her to knit-on-the-move. I also like Jane’s knitting stick because it is an ordinary thing. The carving is neatly, but not professionally done, and unlike some sticks of the same era whose condition is pristine, Jane’s shows evident signs of wear. Her stick is a sentimental object, a decorative object, an intimate object, and most importantly, a functional one as well. It is an unpretentious, everyday tool, used by a woman who was clearly practised in her craft.

While the things that Jane Brown knitted are almost certainly long-gone, the object that enabled her to create them has survived. For me, Jane’s knitting stick, — ornament, tool, love token — illustrates how historically rich everyday things can be, how they can tell us so much about the connection of people in the past to the material culture that surrounded them. That, to me, is what is so great about the BBC’s / British Museum new project. I’ve added Jane’s knitting stick to their online gallery, and encourage you to upload a photograph and story of your own object here. (I have a strong desire to fill that gallery with lots of knitting and sewing related things . . . but I shall resist)

ETA: Jane Brown’s knitting stick is here in the BBC’s online gallery.

a local habitation and a name

January 17, 2010 By Kate in Fylde, landscape, memory, walking, writing Tags: cartography, Felicity Ford, landscape, maps, memory, Nigel Peake, space, trees, walking 18 Comments

(A familiar walk between St Annes and Lytham).

I have written before about walking in familiar places. As I think about last year’s walking project, I realise just how important the familiar is to the particular pleasures I find in walking. Stomping the same ground is an important way of connecting with a landscape, allowing you to create a personal map of a particular space, and to lend that map your own meanings. And familiar walks map time as well as space: the landscape changes daily with the seasons, and each walk contains the memory of all previous walks along the same trajectory. Last year, I enjoyed walking in some truly spectacular unfamiliar places — the Clisham Ridge, the Black Cuillin — and these walks were thrilling precisely because their spaces were unknown to me and because (in the case of Skye particularly) I felt myself to be far too small and insignificant to impose meaning on a landscape that sublime (There’s a certain kind of excess to the landscape of Skye that I find incredibly compelling, and impossible to articulate).

(Am Bastair).

These unfamiliar walks were challenging, exhilarating, and tremendously awe inspiring. But I think that, on reflection, the most significant walks of 2009 were those where the only map I needed was the one in my head.

(The Pentlands: a chilly walk on familiar ground)

For example, I have walked the same 10 mile circuit of the Pentlands innumerable times. This is a walk I never tire of, always look forward to, and often dream about. If you asked me, I could draw or narrate the trajectory of this walk in precise detail. There is nothing exotic or wild about the Pentlands: they are a small range of small-ish hills a few miles away from where I live. Managed as a regional park, and combining a variety of working landscapes, the Pentlands are very much a public space, used by all the folk of Edinburgh for many different kinds of recreation. They incorporate a fine rollercoaster of tops and valleys, and, on a bright day, afford a prospect of the city and its environs that is pretty much unbeatable. I love the Pentlands because I am close to them, both geographically and emotionally. The way I feel about the familiar ground of these hills has a certain something in it that is proprietorial — but (to me) this impulse is neither acquisitive or selfish because it involves spaces whose pleasures are explicitly public ones.

(a familiar path in the Pentlands)

I think that my proprietorial feelings about the Pentlands are perhaps similar to those that I find suggested in Nigel Peake’s maps. Peake’s maps are idiosyncratic, personal documents of spatial experience. Looking at one of his maps is like being party to a landscape that is coming into being inside someone’s head: these are spaces to which his pen and his perspective have given a local habitation and a name.

(Nigel Peake, Maps, xviii and xix, one mile right and one mile left. © Peake, 2008.)

All maps, of course, are proprietorial — they all represent a claim, in one way or another, to a landscape. Peake’s maps are no different, and they articulate his own particular set of claims (as cyclist, artist, architect, itinerant, inhabitant). But while the abstract and purportedly objective nature of some forms of cartography can alienate the viewer (or walker), Peake’s maps draw us into a landscape by making it seem both intimate (knowable) and enigmatic (unknowable). Looking at one of Peake’s maps is like being let in on something: but then he isn’t giving the whole game away, either. And when any of us walk through our own familiar landscape, when we traverse our own familiar paths, all of us create emotive, mental maps a bit like Peake’s: maps full of meanings, signs and portents that are unreadable to anyone else but us. So I think I like Peake’s maps precisely because they are so personal, intimate, and subjective: because they allow us a glimpse of the innumerable private landscapes that inhabit all public spaces.

(Nigel Peake, Maps, v, Guide to Fields. © Peake, 2008)

Peake’s maps are also records of a time that is prior to the time of his drawing: his maps transform the past into the present by documenting not just space, but the memory of of space. In her own inimitable creative practice, Felix uses sound to explore and excavate this very territory of spatial experience and private memory, and I love the way that she writes about the landscapes and noises of her own familiar paths. And perhaps, to one extent or another, we all feel this impulse to document, map, memorialise, or creatively transform the spaces that are close to us. As I look back over a year of walking, I know that photographs fulfil this function for me — and I have been surprised to discover patterns in photographs of my walks that have remained pretty much unconscious until now. For example, all of my pictures of familiar places and walks seem to share a common focus on a tree or group of trees.

These particular trees are situated in a small copse between the dunes and the road that connects Lytham and St Annes. I walk the same 8 mile circuit every time we visit the Fylde coast, and I always look forward to seeing these trees. They are an unusual sight in a wind-blasted landscape of salt and starr grass, and their twisted forms seem stoic and defiant.

Now, I was aware of my fascination with this particular group of trees, but, as I looked through my photographs, I realised that there was another tree in the Pentlands that I felt similarly about, and which I also looked forward to seeing again and again. . .

. . . and there is a recently planted rowan in the Eildons that I look for every time we walk there. . .

In fact, as I looked through my archives, I found pictures of many other trees with one common feature: they all inhabit the places that are familiar, frequently visited, and very well-loved by Tom and I. Here is one at Kilchoman, on the Isle of Islay:

and here is another near the Bridge of Orchy:

Now, clearly I have a thing about windswept, isolated trees, but I think there’s something more to it than that. All of these trees are the inhabitants of the places that I love, and that I love to walk in. In their different seasonal forms, they bear witness to the changes that occur in these familiar landscapes over the course of the year — changes that I cannot see when absent. Each photograph of a tree fixes my memory of the landscape, and perhaps also stakes my future claim on it: I have to go back again, to see that tree again. This is what I mean when I say that the familiar walk is a proprietorial one: each tree is my claim, as a walker in the landscape, to a space I cannot possess, nor wish to own. But while I am a transient figure passing through a familiar place, the trees are its permanent residents. Perhaps it is the permanence of their connection that I am attempting to fix, or document in my photographs. Either way, these images reveal a take on my fond and familiar walking places that I hadn’t thought about or articulated to myself until now.

More of Nigel Peake’s work is available here as well as from the fantastic Analogue Books.

walking in Philadelphia: 2

October 10, 2009 By Kate in History, landscape, memory, walking Tags: Benjamin Franklin, Christ Church Burial Ground, City Tavern, Diana Spencer, Elfreth's Alley, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Fifty Days at Iliam, Fourth and Arch friend's meeting house, National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia walk, Twombly, walking 22 Comments

(William Birch, Views of Philadelphia, 1800).

This is an account of a walk covering eight miles over one day in Philadelphia. Warning! This post is long, and chock-full of personal nostalgia and eighteenth-century references!

I started by strolling up Broad Street, past City Hall, and turned East on Arch, where I stopped at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, which I had not previously visited. In their ‘New American Voices’ exhibition, I was singularly underwhelmed by the work of Robert Chambers (large egg, swirling ribbons, John Deere Tractor) but enjoyed Bill Smith’s pieces a little more — felt that he evidently had a scientist’s feel for the aesthetic, and thought that his work had a sort of internal mobility to it which rendered its interactive bells and whistles a bit superfluous — not to mention potentially self-destructive (while I was there, one of his “metamorphic complex interaction models” threatened to set fire to itself.) In the museum shop, I bought myself one of these brooches, left, and continued along Arch Street.

Further along Arch, I was completely baffled to see the focus of the new exhibition at the National Constitution Centre: Diana, A Celebration. Di’s giant, winsome phizog smiled down from every lampost on a three block radius. The irony of celebrating an icon of British aristocratic privilege in the birthplace of American democracy had clearly been lost on the show’s curators. I did not go inside.

I went to visit some old friends in Christ Church burial ground. The worn grave of Francis Hopkinson is deeply moving. Those of Deborah Reed and Ben Franklin are close to the churchyard entrance, and the street. Passers-by throw coins through the churchyard railings at Franklin’s grave, in the manner of a wishing well.

This act of coin-throwing (for luck?) seems to me symptomatic of the almost universal warmth with which Franklin is popularly regarded. It is noticeable that, while the plaques one sees about Philadelphia of Franklin’s face are worn smooth and shiny by the weight of many children’s hands, those of William Penn are not.

In an eighteenth-century mood, I continued to the Friends meeting house at Fourth and Arch . This is the home of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and the largest Quaker meeting house in the world. It is an early nineteenth-century building, and Charles Brockden Brown is buried in its grounds. Now, I am a person of no faith at all, but the space which once held the separate women’s meeting draws from me profound affection and respect. Among these bare boards and benches, with the good smell of wood and the sunlight flickering in through the windows, sat many wonderful Quaker women writers, intellectuals, philanthropists.

I like the graffiti, too.

While I was sitting there having my moment, a woman came in looking for Franklin’s pew. The mild octogenarian at the entrance reminded her of Ben’s religious affiliations. Discovering that she had mistakenly wandered into a Quaker meeting house, the woman started up a rabid harangue about the death penalty, that “turn the other cheek crap” and how America had “gone too soft.” I rose to leave and, on my way out, couldn’t resist saying that I found her comments rather disrespectful, “I can say what I like where I like,” she shouted after me, “this is America. We’re free here . . unlike other countries.”

A Union Jack flew proudly from one of the houses on Elfreth’s Alley. This amused me, but not as much as the lone coat hanger I found swinging from a holly bush. Had someone hung something there to air? In the past, I’ve found Elfreth’s Alley a discomfiting kind of place — a tiny, tourist-packed thoroughfare sandwiched stoically between the Delaware Expressway and several parking garages — but today it seemed a haven. There was no one about but me, and I spent a happy half hour examining the brickwork and the fire-insurance marks.

On Second Street, I stopped at a picket line to chat to some carpenters who were protesting about their contracts which had been summarily cancelled. Then, with some excitement, I turned onto Market Street, and walked West for a block: to the location of Hannah Griffitts’ apocalyptic dream (which formed the focus of my lecture at PSU). Appropriately, at the intersection, I found a man in eighteenth-century costume. He seemed a little lost.

But he could count himself lucky he wasn’t a figure in Hannah Griffitt’s subconscious on 18th April, 1775. “There appear’d a most extraordinary phenomenon—a ball of fire in ye air, ye houses all ready to take fire in flames, & ye people fainting & dying in ye streets. . . ” No fireball today, thankfully. In fact, the only thing vaguely apocalyptic about the intersection of Third and Market was SUIT CORNER at its South and East.

(compare the south / east corner of third and market to William Birch’s depiction of 1800, at the top left of this post).

Thinking about Hannah Griffitts, I continued down Second to the place where her small house had once stood. It was Norris Alley then. Now it is Sansom Street. Her house was located where the blue car is parked.

By now I was thirsty and a little overwrought, so I popped into the famous revolutionary drinking hole on Second — the city tavern. There were no radicals there now, however: indeed in the tavern foyer, I spotted a framed copy of the Princess Diana commemorative issue of Hello! magazine. Had Di somehow taken possession of the soul of Philadelphia?

Against my better judgment (and certainly my eighteenth-century political inclinations) I tried a glass of Alexander Hamilton’s federalist ale. The chap in breeches behind the bar insisted that I also have a small taste of the George Washington Porter (very good) and Ben Franklin’s Spruce Ale (not so good. I like my hops). I didn’t realise quite how strong these ales were (over 8%, apparently), and confess that they left me feeling a little worse for wear. I departed swiftly when a bloke of Irish extraction joined me at the bar, and, upon hearing my accent, seemed desperate to establish some sort of connection with the old country. As I left, I may have also stolen a beer mat bearing the (to me) appealing slogan: “Ales of the Revolution.” On leaving the tavern, I had a sudden desire to see the face of Elbridge Gerry (perhaps as a corrective to the federalist ale) so I popped up to the Second Bank of the United States to say hello.

This impressive building now houses some great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits. But like Susan Stabile, when I see the Bank, I think of the childhood home of Deborah Norris Logan that once stood here. South, on Walnut Street, there is a small “eighteenth-century garden”. I am fond of box, but confess my my taste in eighteenth-century gardening is a little wilder than this.

I bought a bottle of water, walked past Washington Square, and turned South on Ninth Street, West on South Street, then North on eleventh, and loitered around Spruce and Pine. This was my old neighborhood.

I recalled a lovely evening, eating supper with a friend in the garden room at Effies, with the snow falling quietly outside. By now I was hungry. I walked up Quince, turned West on Locust, North on Broad, and West again on Walnut Street. I popped into a bakery off Rittenhouse square to buy myself a couple of snacks. Then I walked past Anthropologie, and up Nineteenth Street (no, I did not enter the hallowed mammon-temple of Anthropologie. Rather, I muttered darkly as I passed its open door, holding my breath to avoid the migraine-inducing fug of scented candles. That’s right, ladies: I do not like Anthropologie. One day I may elaborate further . . . ).

Moving at my top walking pace, I strode up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (bah), heading for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. By this point I was on a personal pilgrimage: to see Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam. The first time I stood before the Achilles canvases, I felt faint and had to sit down. It is a work I often think about. I wanted to see it again.

I sat with the Fifty Days for a while, and then some ten year olds appeared in the antechamber, in which is displayed the Shield of Achilles (which prefaces the nine giant canvases of the Fifty Days). I listened in on their class discussion and they were truly brilliant — not only did they seem to know an awful lot about the Trojan War, but they got the rage, energy, intellect, and emotion of Twombly right away. I left them to it. Outside, it was Autumn.

. . . and it was time to go home.

mead magic

May 25, 2009 By Kate in brewing, Camping, Jura, landscape, memory, Scotland, walking Tags: brewing, drink, food, food and drink, Hebrides, hill walking, home brew, home brewing, Jura, mead, Scotland, walking 20 Comments

Last summer, when we were walking on Jura, we buried some home-brewed mead above the gulf of corryvreckan. Yesterday we retraced our steps, and returned to find it.

I heart Jura.

Seven miles and a very enjoyable walk later, we climbed up a cliffside on the remote and empty north-west of the island and wondered if we would be able to find our bottle. Last August, we had dug a hole near the heather line, covered up the mead, and placed a large stone to mark the spot. Since then, the heather appeared to have receded, and other visitors had added other stones to ours.

The site now resembled a small burial cairn — which I suppose is exactly what it was. Underneath the stones was a bare patch of ground, and what seemed to be solid peat. Tom began to dig. Was the mead still there?

Of course it was!

It is hard to convey just how excited we were to see this bottle again. It had spent three seasons in the ground of Carraig Mhór, above the swirling, whirling, myth-infused waters of Corryvreckan. Our mead had lain there, quietly wintering with with Cailleach Bheur above the whirlpool in which Orwell had almost drowned. As a friend of ours said after a few in the bar of the Jura hotel on Saturday night, “that bottle is bigger than both of you.”

It tasted damn fine, anyway.

I can also confirm that the returning foot miles seemed to pass by rather quickly in a sort of warm, meady fug. Which was good, since we were walking into a headwind. Slainte!

unpicking

May 15, 2009 By Kate in craft, embroidery, History, memory, textiles, the life of things Tags: cloth, craft, death, embroidery, making, memory, poem, poetry, reading, sewing, stitching, textiles, The Emperor of Ice Cream, unpicking, Wallace Stevens 18 Comments

When thinking about process, there is nothing more instructive than unpicking someone else’s stitches.

I found a beautiful hand-embroidered cloth on ebay. I have plans for it. The plans involve deconstructing and transforming it into something else. I began by undoing the slip stitches of its heavy, worn cord edging.

Then I started to unpick the tiny stitches which attach the embroidered front to the cloth’s very fine silk back. The silk is faded but luminous, alive with copper and green.

The secrets written in the cloth began to reveal themselves. Neatly folded hems. Pale green silk thread that moved through the cloth like clockwork. An outer layer of heavy cotton satteen. An inner layer of lining satteen, fresh and bright because unseen for decades. Embroidery worked through both layers. Each thread end carefully woven and hidden. The back of the work faultless in its steady execution.

. . .and just as mesmerising as the front.

It was then that my fascination with the little mysteries of this cloth changed into a something else. I felt a sense of privilege and respect — in unpicking the stitches I was re-living the work of their making, admiring the skill of a talented needlewoman. But my act was also one of trespass: me and my snipping embroidery scissors were destroying a once-whole thing. And as I, blithe, curious, surgeon-like, began to examine the cloth’s insides, I uncovered the truth of its age: the satteen was of a certain kind, and a little older than I’d imagined. I was an historical vandal, cutting through the threads of time.

In cutting someone else’s threads, as in wearing someone else’s clothes, there is the frisson of encounter. We don’t know and will never know the person who made or wore the thing, but they are speaking to us nonethless, in the movement of their hand through the stitches, or in the the shape of their body left in the garment. There is something deeply uncanny in the silence of cloth and clothes: the trace of an unknown and never-to-be-known physical presence. (One does not buy second hand shoes, because one shies away from the ghost of the foot inside.) As I unpicked the stitches, then, a simple encounter between me and the cloth changed into a more complex one between me and its maker. Because I was un-making a made thing my act seemed an intimate one, but it was an empty intimacy, an intimacy with no content. The embroidered cloth was both speaking and not speaking: of a someone living in those stitches and of the silence of the grave.

Wallace Stevens’ brilliant poem, The Emperor of Ice Cream, (1922) has much to say about the dumb intimacy of embroidery — and of death. Stevens describes the covering of a woman’s corpse with a cloth she embroidered when alive.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam
(lines 9 – 15)

Here the corpse is, like the cloth she embroidered, an everyday material object. She reminds us of death’s easy finality. Yet she also suggests the mute compassion of the world of things. We feel the weight of her hands on the lost knobs of the well-worn dresser; her fingers quick movement through the stitches of the cloth that decorates her dead countenance. She does not speak, all we can know is her corpse and her cloth. And it is in the relationship between these two material objects that the essence of the poem (perhaps another object in itself) lies. Gaudy embroidered fantails will never cover death, but each small act of making is an end in itself, capturing the (perhaps pointless) vitality of the human. Now get back in the kitchen (says Stevens) and enjoy your ice-cream.

Having unpicked my thoughts I will get on with the uncanny work of unpicking.

Kate Davies Designs

Category Archives: memory