• • Icelandic-style jumpers • • • Cardigans & other jumpers• • • Dresses, vests & other knitwear • • •
• • Mittens • • • Knitted accessories • • • Crochet • • • Other textile handicrafts • •
• • • Wood, clay & plant crafts • • • Writings about crafting • •
I like working with my hands.
The feeling of spending hours on something, seeing it come into being between my fingers, and when I am done: Something that can be worn, keep me warm, make me feel beautiful. So different from the day to day of being an academic, hours spent on writing or analyzing or teaching, and I know I am contributing, but it is abstract and acknowledgements are rarely closely connected in time to when the effort was made. Anti-climactic. That very basic, instantaneous feeling of contentment after a job well done is rare in research. So I turned to the skills I was taught by my grandmothers as a child: Anna-Liisa, who knit beautiful socks that would keep you warm even in the coldest Finnish winter, and Lilian, who knit and crocheted deliciously colorful jumpers, vests and quilts. Building on this long, proud tradition of Finnish and Swedish farmers and housewives, I knit.
When I was thirteen, I read a book. It was about a girl who gets kidnapped by a darkangel and is made to care for his thirteen ghost wives in his castle. She is given a magical spindle with which she can spin thread from her emotions. In the beginning, she spinns out of self-pity and loneliness, and the thread becomes brittle and rough. With time, though, she learns to care for the ghost wives, and eventually love them, and the thread she spins becomes immensely fine, but strong and golden. From this, she weaves a fabric so strong and light that when the time comes, she can escape the castle and fly across the sea with the ghost wives and the no-longer-darkangel, whose heart she’s freed from the dark curse that was put on it when he was a little boy. Acts of heroism made possible by thread spun from love.
It is a story that has stayed with me through the years, and something that I like to think about when I knit. I imagine that the mittens and the cardigans I make are not only made up of the patterns and wool that I have pieced together, but also interwoven with the tenderness and appreciation that I feel for the person I am making them for. I like to think this makes the pieces stronger, keeps the bearer warmer, makes them feel encouraged when things seem cold and bleak. I weave myself into everything I make, and I like to believe that the care I feel while knitting becomes infused in the yarn, just as with the magical thread from the story.
In 2019, Natalia Salazar, professional prop maker, nurse and my long-time co-adventurer in both real and imaginary worlds, joined me in a little project: Coming up with imaginative ways to photograph some of the pieces I have made. It is a game we play, having fun with textiles, make-up and a lot of steel wire. Among trees, flowers and concrete.
Katja Malmborg 