Tilting the Void

I've posted about this before, and if you've been reading my blog long you'll know I've been knitting for about ten years or more and spinning for six. When inevitably asked "Why?", I can only answer truthfully, "Because I like it." I don't do it for the economy (since I end up buying yarn anyway); I do it for fun. There's no doubt it's a luxury--of time, if nothing else, and there are days when projects go unworked because of a shortage of time to work them. Color and texture are two things that intrigue me. I could mumble about how spinning connects me to the past, etc. etc., but it doesn't really; none of my needlework is done out of necessity. No one in my family will go cold or hungry because I haven't finished my quota of mittens or socks (thank heaven). It is, at the moment, an activity I enjoy, but not one I could not live without, unlike people in pre-Industrial times, who often depended on someone's ability to turn yarn into sweaters and gloves.

This came home to me early on in my spinning education. I was demonstrating at a fair with some spinning friends and we had a (mostly) good time meeting the public. People are usually interested to see how fleece becomes yarn, especially if the animals responsible for fiber production are close at hand. It's been said before that in the past hundred years America has gone from a primarily rural country to a largely urban one, and it never fails to give me pause when I realize most of the people passing our demonstration booth have never seen a live sheep, much less given thought about where the wool for their L.L. Bean sweater came from. Anyway, at this particular demo, an elderly man stopped by to watch for a while. I thought he might be curious as to how the wheel worked--men generally find the mechanics of the process to be the most fascinating, if only to speculate how one might spin faster and with higher yield.

"I know what you're doing," he said, pleasantly enough, when I started to explain. "Back home in Holland during the war I helped my mother scour the fleece. I carded it and she spun it and knitted it up into socks for the war effort."

"Would you like to try it again?" I asked, being the young, naive fool that I was.

"Good Lord, no," he said, horrified. "I hated it. I swore I'd never do it again."

He honestly couldn't believe we were doing it for fun. I wonder now, thinking back on the brief interaction, if he didn't think the bunch of us looked like a lot of nostalgic idiots or poseurs, treadling away there in the sun. Maybe he was thinking back to some dark, shell-shocked day in the old country, to some harassed, hopeless boy up to his elbows in tubs full of stinking wool and endless mounds of unwashed fleece yet to go, and how much he'd rather be reading his latest Tintin.

I don't think my interest is of the nostalgic variety. The moment spinning or knitting becomes actual work--say, if I've been contracted to knit a pair of socks, for instance--it immediately loses charm. I know that's not the case with everyone; some folks have warmed to the idea and started their own cottage industries--though nine times out of ten they farm it out to cheap labor the minute it gets going. Knitting for money pays practically nothing when one considers all the time and effort going into one finished piece. The sweaters you see in boutiques, the ones with labels reading 'Handknit in Peru' or 'Nepal'--they represent an enormous amount of handwork for a pittance. It would be naive--even stupid-- to say they're knitted by oppressed, impoverished people for large multi-national corporations and sold to upscale retailers who in turn sell at a fantastically inflated price to wealthy Western consumers to be worn once or twice and then given to Goodwill--I don't know that such is the case at all, although I sometimes wonder. There are a few co-op situations (I'm thinking about Manos of Uruguay, for instance), but overall, what do you think the average handknitter (any pieceworker, really) makes?

But all that thinking is far too serious when I just want to sit down and put a pair of socks together. I'm lucky enough to live and work in a country where (like it or not) most people have a television and the worst health problem is caused by having easy access to fattening food. Some people have to work extremely hard to get a little bit of comfort and happiness in this world, and I hope I'm never smug or self-satisfied while I'm playing at what some people still consider their livelihoods. Add to that an appreciation for handmade things--as opposed to mass-produced, thoughtless mass quantities of things--and you'll have some idea why I and a lot of my friends still bother with needles and string.