Crafting creatively with the more than human world
By Beccy Whittle & Ann Brookes
Recently we’ve found ourselves reflecting on the process of crafting and how this can connect us to some of the questions we’ve been asking about how we can live in a way that’s more in tune with the natural world.
“I joined TCC as a knitter, thinking that my role would be a simple one: to produce garments from the patterns created by our designer, Victoria Frausin, after the hand spinning and natural dyeing teams had worked their magic. However, like many knitters, I’d learnt my craft using machine spun yarn and following commercial patterns. Doing so had taught me important technical skills and showed me how to appreciate different properties of colour and texture. But it didn’t prepare me for what to do when the materials I had to hand didn’t match up with the pattern that I had in front of me, as was the case when I was trying to figure out a way to recreate our sleeveless top design with the handspun and naturally dyed skeins that were given to me.
“Working with these yarns is challenging for someone like me who is used to following patterns, since they are not standardised and predictable in the same way as yarn that’s been produced in a factory. Instead, it is much easier to see how their unique nature is itself a product of the fact that I’m just the latest in a long series of lives that have shaped this yarn - the sheep, the landscape in which they live, the hands of the spinners, the plants that produced the dye etc.
“At first I found this situation frustrating and a little scary. I’d sat down to knit a top thinking I could have an easy ride; that I could follow the (simple) pattern without too much thought, the perfect activity for Zoom meetings. Instead, I found that, if I wanted to make a nice-looking top, I’d have to figure out how to adapt my knitting to the yarn, using the pattern as a guide rather than a blueprint.”
Discussing this experience with Ann, we reflected on how the steps I went through are precisely the opposite of what typical 21st century Global North construction processes do: once we have some kind of goal or prototype, we seek to make the production process as easy, quick and efficient as possible, so we fix our design and force the raw materials to fit it. This co-evolution of design, machinery and human competence in a context where energy and resources are plentiful means that, if you want to build a house (for example) it’s easier to knock down any existing buildings, use machinery to level the site and start from scratch with standardised materials available from a builder’s merchant. By erasing what is already there you give yourself a blank slate and can be pretty confident in your ability to follow your original plan through to completion with the minimum of nasty surprises. Much harder is to figure out how to adapt your house plans to the buildings, materials and site topography that’s already there since, as anyone who has attempted even a modicum of DIY will testify, buildings also talk back: that plaster that looked solid from behind the wallpaper is in worse condition than you thought and that joist that seemed fine isn’t tied into the wall properly. So you need to pause, to survey, to reconsider, to ask for advice, to adapt your plans and learn more about the techniques that will best suit your building’s unique circumstances. Thinking and doing thus become intertwined in the specific context you’re confronting and your actions become more subtle and reciprocal.
This is what happens when energy and resources aren’t plentiful and you have to compromise and collaborate with the other people, places and materials involved in the process, rather than simply overriding them and carrying out your plan through force. We might perceive this as a situation of constraint but we prefer to think of it as an invitation to creativity, mutual aid and understanding. So, in the case of my knitting, I still need that pattern as it’s a valuable guide to where I want to get to. It’s just that it becomes a guide rather than a blueprint and that it is only one of many voices involved in the process: yes I’m trying to make a top and I am starting from an idea for how to go about it but the yarn may have different opinions and, pretty soon, my head and hands are giving me some useful feedback that I need to respond to. In this way, the top becomes a work of collaboration rather than a solo project. This is hard work but it is also deeply rewarding and the result is a better garment that has real integrity.
Is it possible that the kind of approaches we’ve described here also have the potential to be a way of practicing decolonisation? Colonialism relies on technology and force to erase the history of a place and the other lives that have shaped it so that we can exert our will on it. Our job is to use our heads, hearts and hands to unpick the places and cultures we’ve inherited and craft our way, with others, to a kinder, fairer world.
