The first Knit and Matter workshop was led by Sarah Wheatley of Weaveknitit. Sarah is based at Cromford Mills, part of the iconic Derwent Valley, Derbyshire, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in recognition of its role in the industrial revolution. This connects the Knit and Matter workshops at the Framework Knitters Museum to another important part of textile history, both in the East Midlands of England and further afield.
For many Knit and Matter participants, myself included, fibre crafts are a thread back through our own histories. Our encounters at the workshop with the first stages of wool becoming yarn also led to reflections on our current and future practice.
After all, this wonderful material shapes not only the choices we make in our craft, but also many other aspects of our everyday lives. In her book, A Secret History of the World According to Sheep, Sally Coulthard, says that ‘of any animal that has lived on this planet, sheep have shaped the course of human history’ (p.3). The molecular biologist William Astbury was fascinated by wool. In a lecture in 1955, he described the proteins that constitute wool as ‘the chosen instruments on which nature has played so many incomparable themes, and countless variations and harmonies’. As ‘yarn heads’ (as we were described by one participant), we are not strangers to working with wool and winding its many wonders into our craft. However, many of us were about to get up close and personal with this amazing material in its raw form for the first time.
This blog does not extend to smell-o-vision, unfortunately, but one of the first things we noticed was the aroma that was released along with the Bluefaced Leicester fleece. Fields. Fresh air. And for some, familiarity: it took them back to childhoods in the countryside. At this point, it was hard to resist a closer look, so once Sarah had told us a bit more about the way fleece is sheared and what we can expect to find in it, we got stuck in, feeling its twists and knots, its softer and rougher parts, picking out evidence of its previous life in the field. Sarah told us how fleece varies across different breeds of sheep, such as the darker Jacob fleece with its sun-bleached streaks.
Sarah took us through what the next steps would involve, including washing and carding. Then we were each presented with some pre-prepared Corriedale fleece and a drop spindle. With a few steps to follow, and only a short pause to ‘smoosh and sniff’ what was now in our hands, as one participant described it, we were spinning!
Sarah wasn’t joking when she said it was like simultaneously tapping your head and rubbing your belly! But she also reassured us that the important thing was to play. To try things out and learn as we go. Some of us felt frustrated at first, confronted with this challenge to our usual competence. We experimented with gravity, stood up and sat down, used arms and legs, double and triple checked what was clockwise and anticlockwise. People were lending each other extra pairs of hands and moral support.
And slowly, aside from the odd thud of a dropped spindle, a focused silence fell. By the end, people were comfortably chatting and spinning at the same time.
In her history of British knitting, This Golden Fleece, Esther Rutter reminds us that knitting is inherently about connections: ‘not only binding wool to wool, but wool to sheep and sheep to place’ (p. 26). The experience of working with fleece took many of us back to our relationship with what we make and why. At the same time many of us were starting to think about the place of material in our next steps with our craft.
So what might matter when we work with fleece?
The workshop was a great way to start thinking about what matters when we make with yarn. Here are some of the things I noticed, and that I’m sure I’ll return to in later posts. It would be great to know what you think too.
- Re-learning to learn, and in a way which involves our whole bodies. If you’ve tried spinning, have you experienced this? Or have you experienced this in your knitting or crochet?
- Time: how long it takes to spin yarn, especially as a beginner. Time is a common theme in craft – how we choose to spend it, how it is valued (or not) by others. We might feel guilty about the time we spend on our crafts; at the same time, the amount of time we spend making for others is often a sign of love and care. Have you thought about what time means to you in your craft?
- Related to time, rhythm: spinning, pulling, trapping, winding; the rhythms we each found in our own work and together as a group. The focused silence that emerged suggested a state of flow, described by psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi as a state of intense concentration, often experienced during creative activity, where time may feel like it passes in a different way to normal. Kate Lampitt Adey has researched how knitters experience flow. Is this something you recognise?
- Imperfection: the raw fleece was irregular and it bore the marks of life – the earth, the farm, its role in keeping an animal warm and dry. Although carded and washed by the time we got to play with it, the Corriedale fleece we span into yarn also ended up wearing the experience of each individual spinner – tension and frustration, twists and turns, the nobbles and bobbles that our hands produced. Often, the material we use in our everyday knitting and crochet has all of this mechanically removed. How do you feel about imperfections in your work? Do you try to avoid them or do you celebrate them?
- How we shape material and how it shapes us: Tim Ingold is an anthropologist with a particular interest in making (I’ll say more about his work in later posts). The experience of the first workshop made me think in particular about his concept of correspondence. The relationship between maker and material is not a one-way street; rather, both respond to each other during the process of making. The ways in which we adapted to the material we were working with, how we held it, how we asked it to behave, how we moved our bodies in response, how we gave in to it and followed what it was doing to us. How would you describe your relationship with the material you work with?
Comments
2 responses to “Workshop 1: Working with fleece”
I had never worked with fleece before and the closest I had come to it was either on barbed wire fences and wooden stiles walking across mountains and fields in North Wales. My own children used to collect the little bits that sheep had left on the fences and liked to make things with them. I had seen sheep being sheared on TV but never seen a real fleece without the sheep attached. The smell was incredible and I was strangely drawn to it. I found it had a comforting smell, a bit buttery . Learning to spin with a drop spindle required so much concentration at first but later on as we chatted and then later still when I was at home watching TV, I found just letting my hands get on with it without thinking about it too much, made it a lot easier. I was chuffed to be able to take the remainer of the corridale and a small skein of blue faced Leicester home to spin. The blue faced Leicester is softer and has more lanolin on the fibres and worked and spun more easily, but was this because I was learning how to spin more efficiently?
Once home , I began to think about my family’s history with wool and fleece. My grandfather was a sheep farmer at some point. On asking my dad it appears he. Was only ever a sheep farmer. The farms were mostly in South West Wales, a few of them beyond the back of beyond to the point it’s hard to find the roads they were on using the earth view of Google maps! At blaen cennan near the river by cennan castle grandad farmed Welsh mountain sheep. The sheep were sheared and the fleece all sold to the wool marketing board…way back in the 1950s I believe. Later on Suffolk sheep were farmed. If you read up on these it seems that Suffolk are considered better for meat but still the fleeces were sold for wool to the wool marketing board. I found an article online from spinoff magazine.. Suffolk Tunis Dorset: a spinners ode to meat sheep by Devin Helen (30/11/22) which was an interesting read and said that the wool from suffolk sheep was underated . I am not sure where it falls on the coarse to soft spectrum of wool fibres but it’s good to know that all sorts of fleece can be used for wool fibres for clothes, even if some are better suited to making carpets than cardigans!
Had I not started this project and series of workshops I would never have thought to ask about the actual farming and types of sheep that grandad farmed. Sheep were sheep until this workshop. I have to say I am a.little bit hooked now and want to try lots more different types of sheep fleeces to get a contrast.
Thank you for sharing your reflection on working with fleece, Andrea, and it’s wonderful to hear about its connections to your family history too!