with my hands.

Things I’ve either made or written over the years.

a book is a book is a book. or is it?

| Betsy



Ever since I can remember, books have always been my frequent companions. As a kid, books would tuck me in bed late at night and I would devour their pages until I couldn’t hold my eyes open…many times I would wake up in the middle of the night with a book on my chest having fallen asleep while trying to finish a chapter. As a matter of fact, this is one ritual I’ve never ceased, even when camping and I have to share the light with any and every moth in a three-mile radius.

Even now, I always have a book on hand in case I have a few spare minutes and my hands are tired from needlework. Some people escape in books and forget about the rest of the beat of the world, but I always have seen books as a way to obtain closer intimacy with others. By understanding the words of someone else you’re subtly asked to think as someone else, and it forever allows for new points of understanding and questioning and deepens our compassion for when we close the book and come back to the so-called “real world.”

When I was little I figured I would either work with animals or write, falling in love early with the life of James Herriot. As I got older and the sciences turned out to be my academic nemesis, I wondered what I was to do.

Decades later, I’m still not entirely sure…having at one time or another called myself a sign painter, barista, consultant, secretary, knitter for hire, feeder of sheep, housesitter, bookseller, cake deliverer….and that’s just the highly abridged list. I guess I never really stopped asking questions once I picked my nose out of a book after all.

As I look at turning 33 in two months, I wonder what’s to become of us seekers and searchers and travelers in this world of taxes and health insurance and mortgages. Maybe we’re a dying breed, maybe we just need to unionize, maybe we’re meant to ask and seek and create each day anew looking for others who see the world the same. I’m sure you know the type, or maybe you even are the type….if you are, do
let me know what you think the best course of action for us searchers is…

Above is the cover of my first book, Knitting for Good!, to be out later on this year. Many thanks to the good people at Shambhala, who helped edit and tease out the words when I was too close to them. Using knitting as both an example and as a metaphor, the book was written to help people engage with their creativity in different and new ways by using their creative interests to better themselves, their community and this world.

It is my greatest hope that some night, maybe some night soon, someone reads my own words and uses them to help better figure out how to navigate their days or rethink their own sense of compassion or just read them and understand. Whether at bedtime, or by flashlight in the wilderness, or for a few minutes on the bus, or sitting with a cup of tea, it is my greatest hope that you, too, will find wisdom in books… and then use them as a guide instead of escape.


Currently on my bedside table (there is always a massive stack which I pull from depending…):

Kiss and Tell
Creating a Life Worth Living
Regarding the Pain of Others
Mindfulness in Plain English
The Corporate Rebel’s Productivity Guide
Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper- Case Closed

Here’s to happy reading, and hoping my cat doesn’t decide to knock my tower of books over on me as I sleep.

on fear.

| Betsy

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The theme for last week’s Whiplash competition over at Whipup was “no fear.”

Looking at the entries this morning, I was reminded how often I personally feel fear and always think that it is an emotion I am going through alone. The entries were all gorgeous and striking, the antidote to anti-fear, if you will.

Browsing through them made me wonder why we feel that fear should be something we are ashamed of or bewildered by or trapped in. Because we are all scared that what we do will bring about a negative response or that we aren’t enough to some degree or that we will never reach our potential or never find love or that we are too old to become truly good at something or a million other things that we could choose from the ether.

Because knowing that I am not alone in my myriad fears makes them seem less powerful. More like shadows behind the hedge instead of monsters. Knowing that these fears are normal makes me less timid and more curious. Realizing that they are not just my own wakes me to the fact that everytime we listen to fear we are reconstructing walls born from our own fallacies about this thing called life.

Perhaps by beginning to release this well of fear within us, we will be okay with our best efforts instead of constantly doubting what could have been.

on remembering…

| Betsy

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Lately, all my thoughts have come back to this photograph. Not just at the actual image, but also the way the top seems to fade into nothing. I’ve been trying to dry a delicate felt rug that I made in the bathtub for days now. It’s made of fleece and due to some thinner spots, I don’t want to hang it up before I can mend it with a felting needle. The beginning of southern humidity is doing little to expedite the drying process.

Sunday night I gathered the fleece on the rug before me, stacked in fuzzy piles of various color and breed. Once I was done assembling the fiber, I took the lot to the bathtub to begin the felting process. As the hot water hit the fleece, the room smelled like sheep and flooded my mind with memories of the farm in Sussex, rural North Carolina flocks and even the land deep in Georgia my grandfather owned when I was a child.

The ridiculous juxtaposition of natural fiber and mod cons was laugh-inducing as I sang along to The Reindeer Section while stomping to mesh the fiber just like that old “I Love Lucy” episode with the grapes.

Already somewhat mawkish at this point, I thought of why I was making this particular piece- in order to find ways to recycle fiber that has become almost surplus in some areas of the United Kingdom due to a steadying decline in market price. I remembered an afternoon spent hiking in the North Carolina mountains where we came over a rise to find the entire landscape before us clearcut. One of those moments where you just feel a stomach-dropping sadness for what could have been.

Seeing the photo above gives me that exact same feeling I had that day in the mountains. Where you feel like you stumbled on the scene too late, unable to do anything truly useful. Despite my recent article getting nice remarks from friends and colleagues across the world, I’m still getting sad news from England regarding farmer’s incomes.

And as I do things like look at photos and stomp wool in the bathtub, I can’t help being struck by the fear that maybe it is too late for the English wool industry. But simultaneously being enlivened by the idea that perhaps in time, we will start to reclaim our cultural legacies instead of eschewing them for more, more and more.

Spinning?

| Betsy

Last week I took a spinning class. Excitedly, I told a few people about it, most of whom thought I was going to go ride bicycles in a little room with a screamy instructor. I paused for a moment when someone asked, ‘do you mean like telling stories?’

Because in a way, learning to spin fiber is a story. It’s a story that extends way beyond us, into our genes, tapping a part of us that may very well have been dormant beforehand.

In telling a story, we ‘spin’ tales with our mouths (or hands in the case of deafness), casting them as loud as our voice will carry. Making sure the plot weaves in and out, with various twists and turns in character development. Sometimes we don’t always know where a story that we are telling us is taken, we just run with it. Then the story takes on a life of its own, allowing the listeners to create a whole new world, eager to hear what’s going to happen and (if you’re good) not just waiting for the end.

The same thing happens when we spin yarn. Currently I’ve changed from a bottom-whirl spindle to a top-whirl spindle and have been reminded how mesmerizing it is to watch a bit of fluff turn into yarn. The joy in the knowledge that this yarn you are creating can be as long as you desire, in the colours and textures you choose. It can be whatever you want it to be.

And I can’t help but get a little giddy in this creation of something new and alive, whether it’s yarn to work with or a story to mull over. They each speak of new possibilities, directions and concepts, which may weave together over time or simply just float by.

Each time I work with fibre or tell tales, I wholeheartedly enjoy the way that something deep in my genetic makeup sparks. It’s a feeling of familiarity, of welcome, and of a happy reunion.

knitting is nerdy. honest.

| Betsy

Ever since I started studying crafty stuff (history, trends, activists involvement, etc), many of you have asked to read my final dissertation. Below is the so-called ‘zine version’ of my dissertation, which I wrote in September, it’s pretty stripped down, but was the original ethnographic base for a much longer piece. As many of you know, I’ve been having crafty issues lately and trying to study this sort of stuff more but having a hard time finding funding/programmes. So for now, I’ve decided to update this site on Mondays with longer pieces about The State of the Craft’ and on Thursdays with shorter bits that are activist/political related. I know this is really long, but…

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We all have our channels/waves of resistance. It’s just that some of us are more aware of them than others. It came from altruism/It started out as altruistic.

My interest in knitting came out of wanting to volunteer at nursing homes. I figured that somewhere in New York City there would be one little old lady that could use the company to ease the boredom, tedium and would get a kick out of showing me how to do a dying craft. Maybe it was all the stereotypes getting to me of the old woman in the rocking chair clicking away with her needles, but I was curious. No one I knew knit, so I figured I would try and go straight to the source: old people.

Waiting for a staff meeting to begin at the publishing house, I asked my co-workers if they knew of any nursing homes in the area (as I was still relatively new to NYC) where I could volunteer my time and in the process learn to knit. Out of eleven co-workers (10 female, 1 male, all under 40), 9 responded, “I knit.” They all kind of eyed each other for a minute as if they were thinking, “You, too?” One of the non-knitters said she had a friend in a knitting circle and that I could learn at one of their fortnightly meetings.

The next week, I headed to the Lower East Side with a curious friend complete with size 9 bamboo needles and 4 skeins of kelly green yarn from my friend procured for me because at the point of agreeing to learn I suddenly feared yarn shops. Irrational, but true.

As we entered the apartment, I was gobsmacked. It was like a secret society, women ranging from their teens to their 80s, speaking a variety of languages were in little circles scattered throughout the flat, some busy knitting while either learning or chatting while others were gossiping over a glass of wine of nibbling away at the vast array of hors d’ouevres everyone had brought individually.

I don’t remember much from that evening as I spent most of it whispering swear words under my breath as I tried not to drop either the needles or the yarn- trying to will my fingers to grasp a concept they seemed to fight with every motion. But I do remember overhearing one woman tearfully tell another about her marriage that was falling apart. From their conversation it was obvious that the listener had been hearing bi-weekly installments of the story via the knitting circle. It amazed me how once people started knitting, their conversation deepened.

I only went back to the knitting circle one other time as I was ashamed of my misshapen thing masquerading as a scarf complete with myriad holes and dropped stitches. I continued to knit until I had acquired a horrendous looking scarf over the course of the next few months. All of the election 2000 furore was still continuing. TV was boring. I was crap at the NY Times crossword. It just seemed like a more productive activity way to watch TV while listening to the continuing debate over what constituted as a “pregnant chad.”

I moved back to North Carolina and had no TV, but I did have a computer. I was bored, so in an effort not to become boring went online and looked for various online publications to send some work to. As you do- I ended up on a girl’s personal site about her life and her personal efforts which included rehoming abandoned rabbits. On the links page, I clicked around a bit until I came across a site called Getcrafty. All these creative ideas that mixed art and punk and craft. I was overblown. I started making marble magnets. I made them all winter. I would go to friends houses and leave one or two behind on their fridge. I found a photo of a friend in a magazine and made a magnet of her head. I was marble magnet mad.

My search for ways to make better marble magnets took me to the local craft shop. There was a whole wall of acrylic yarn at the back. I remembered the kelly green yarn nightmare (still not completed) stashed in the closet, but faced with a whole new world of colour before me, bought some yarn. There was only so far I could go with the marble magnets, and I felt I had reached my peak performance.

After 9/11, my brother arrived at my house with an old TV my mother insisted I have, lest anymore national disasters struck. She considered NPR a lesser news source than CBS, and I was secretly happy that as well as being informed of our nation’s security efforts, I could also watch “Oprah.” With the TV, I began to knit more. All useless and full of holes and acrylic, but I was knitting.

And still continued to check Getcrafty, where again, like in NYC, I was amazed at how all these women were talking about personal issues, struggles and joys on a site about craft. Didn’t these people have friends IRL?

As I hadn’t knitted in awhile, I needed some technical help. None of my friends knew how and my grandmother was into needlepoint now, so I was screwed. Until I asked for help online. As they say, “ask and ye shall receive.” The response was unparalleled- along with various online links for more information, and words upon words of inspiration.

I continued plodding along until one day, someone from my area posted, who also knit, and suggested we meet up. We finally got together and continued to meet at a local coffeeshop. We got flashed by a creepy guy while knitting and were told too many stories than I can count that started with “my mom/grandmom/aunt/insert random elderly female relative here used to knit” by older men. But mostly, we got weird looks.

I was beginning to pine for the group in NYC. The one that I only met with twice.
So I sent out an email to my friends. We had all been crafting in secret. I tried to install a monthly craft night but there was much protest and we made it weekly. On Tuesdays, because there was a rival group that met on Wednesdays. We ruled. We drank beer instead of tea and listened to cooler music.

So at this point, I knitted, met with friends each week, got new ideas on crafts online and read crafty magazines like Bust and ReadyMade. I kept hearing about a group of knitters who called themselves Cast Off in London. As I was recently accepted to graduate school in London, I was determined to find them.

So I moved to London. And called about lots of places to live- I only went to see one. Imagine my surprise when I got there and the owner of the house was one of the founders of Cast Off. We talked about crafts and how I once had coffee with Ian MacKaye and even rode in his car. We hit it off. I moved in.

Eventually my flatmate organized an event at the V+A. The press went crazy. Because my flatmate is only one person, I agreed to do some of the press. I did a TV thing for Sky News at the Museum of Natural History- knitting under a dinosaur. I made a dork out of myself attempting to come up with a “knitting is like a dog” analogy. I was also on the radio, live, which freaked me out. I still think I’m the only person ever to talk about “punk rock” and “knitting” on either BBC Shropshire or BBC Berkshire. I’m sure I rocked about five peoples world, as those radio stations are tiny. But, still, yahoo.

My friends started introducing me as “the knitter” to everyone. Was embarrassing, except when a boy I thought was cute told me I was “rock” for knitting. I like rock. I went to Paris and had a hard time trying to teach French people to knit at Palais de Tokyo. I knit a boy (a different one) a hat. He turned into a “jerk” so that’s what I embroidered on the hat in big red letters. Craft rocks because you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Like take out your frustrations, anger, etc. I ended up unravelling “JERK” and giving the hat to my best friend because it gets cold in Philadelphia and the hat ruled, even though that boy didn’t.

In August 2004, I go to a wedding in Wisconsin. I eat cheese and meet with my uncle’s “knitting friend.” We talk about knitting. Suddenly all the women in my family (most of whom don’t knit) were listening. Am amazed they were all silent for so long. And amazed at their interest and their age range and that we were all talking about something other than the weather or food. The whole time in Wisconsin, my Aunt Gene talks to me about knitting. Before this trip I have never really talked to Aunt Gene. We talk more in 72 hours that we have in 29 years. Am stoked.

And here I am surrounded by so much history and hope for the future, trying to carve out my own niche where I can teach, write, learn and research about all of this. Because it does branch out into the ‘outside world,’ because in the end it’s about something of necessity that turned into something of passion over time. Some days it feels super academic (well, when I use ‘academically sanctioned’ words), and other days just like a pipedream. At any rate, I’m up for seeing where this takes me nonetheless.

It’s all so nerdily exciting to me because, all of this IS revolution and following the evolution of a craft. Communicating, sharing, learning, growing, talking, loving, caring, creating. Revolution is about more than just fighting against, it’s about change and passion, too. And evolution is about more than making new strides and taking on new challenges, it’s about honouring the past and becoming familiar with the long and winding path that led to the present.

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