This Golden Fleece

Women who spin, knit and weave are legend, from Homer’s Penelope, unravelling and reweaving a shroud as she waits for Odysseus’s return, to mythic Ariadne, saving Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth with her ball of yarn. In Greek mythology, the three Fates, the Moirai, hold the mother thread of life – Clotho spins it, her sister Lachesis measures it, and Atropos clips it short. In Norse mythology, the Norns, goddesses wielding shears and spindles, do likewise. Women with their spinning wheels have long been agents for change and enchantment.

It’s not only the tales we tell, but how we tell them. Wool has left its mark on our speech. When we want to recount a story, we spin a yarn. If we deceive, we pull the wool over people’s eyes. For centuries, female spinsters (the masculine form is ‘spinner’) spun wool to earn their livelihood, and the word gradually became synonvmous with ‘unmarried woman’, one not dependent on a husband for her keep. We weave narratives as we weave cloth, and our words for them are bound together: ‘text’ and ‘textile’ share the same Latin root, texere, to weave. Our terms for working wool and words intertwine.

Felix prowls the streets of her home town to break it into patterns and colours, to see the familiar with fresh eyes. She uses the Victorian terraces and abandoned factories of Reading, the rolling tarmac of the A4074, the plants in her suburban street and the fruitcake made by her aunt to inspire her knitting. It is the antithesis of didactic pattern design. Instead, her method comes closer to an artistic vision, a crafting flâneurism that makes the knitter the authoring observer of their world. Like Harris Tweed, its yarn mixed to mirror the Hebridean heather and moss, bog and crotal, sea and sky, colourwork designs inspired by the KnitSonik svstem hold up a glass to the world of their inventors.

Many knitting patterns and textile traditions seem to come from places often viewed as remote and rural. From Harris Tweed to Shetland lace, Jersey grey-bellies to Dentdale gloves, almost all have been preserved thanks in part to their geographic isolation from the busy worlds of cities, suburbs and factories. But Felix’s call to arms is that one’s daily life is not something to be escaped from; the suburban should not be seen only in disdainful contrast to the pureness of the rural. She resists the siren call of the abstract idyll, and uses knitting as a way to overcome her sense of alienation within urban spaces.

As Felix talked to me at the end of her knitting class, enthusiasm warmed her voice, rich with estuary vowels and glottal stops, and spilled into her gestures. ‘I hate this idea that we live for the specialness of weekends, holidays and art galleries, that we think all the rest of our time and environment is a bit crap.’ Knitting can help us connect, add meaning, deepen our understanding. I realize that what I am trying to do with my sample scarf is to fix the experience of being in Shetland, creating a garment that I can use like a magic charm to take me back here with one flick of its colourful end.

Knitting welcomes new life, the stitches in these garments trapping tiny pockets of air to warm, comfort, and protect. Friends and relatives pick up their needles as soon as a pregnancy is announced, and in hospitals babies are welcomed with minute hats made by hands they’ll never know. Each inch of yarn passes through the knitter’s hands, and the final raiment will later lie against the skin of a brand-new person, warming their small body. It’s as close as you can get to touch. For those of us who show affection through our making, knitting is an act of love.