This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter

Author:Esther Rutter [Esther Rutter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783784370
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Viking yarn and needle in hand, I’m ready to consult a pattern for instructions. Here I am wrong-footed. Whereas knitting’s abbreviated code – k2, p2, k2tog – is familiar to me, nålebinding patterns look like alien calls echoing from space. UU/OOO, UOU/OUOO, UUOOUU/OOUUOO – U standing for under, O for over, the slash for a turn or change in needle direction. Devised by Danish textile historian Egon Hansen in 1987, this shorthand is one of many systems used to notate nålebinding. The stitch used for the Coppergate Sock, named as Coppergate or York stitch by American craft expert Larry Schmitt, is written as UU/OOO in Hansen’s notation. But in the 1950s, Margarethe Hald, textile curator of the National Museum of Denmark, called it ‘Stitch Type IIa’ and illustrated it with hand-drawn diagrams; ‘II’ refers to the number of loops from the same row through which each new stitch runs.

Eager to understand more, I consult YouTube, essential tool of the twenty-first-century crafter. Disembodied voices and deft hands talk me through the stitches. Oslo, Darby, York or Coppergate: many of the stitches are named after the location of archaeological digs where early nålebound garments have been found. I discover that the Coppergate is not really a beginner’s stitch, because it determinedly twists around itself. I find myself dangling the yarn towards the floor to untwist it, encouraging gravity to work out the coils my hands have added.

Needle in my right hand and yarn in my left, I measure out two arm-spans of yarn, tearing, not cutting, it from the ball. Knotting it under my thumbnail, I pass the end of my needle under and over the yarn. All I have to show for my efforts is a fankle. I try again, with similar results. Frustrated, I tear off another length of yarn and start again under YouTube’s disembodied guidance. After half an hour of fierce concentration, I produce a rough circle of twelve stitches, misshapen, loose and wobbly.

Learning to nålebind transports me to my eight-year-old self, first struggling with needles and yarn. I cannot clearly remember the tussle of learning to knit, and my hands now slip automatically through the motions. The how-to part of my brain seems to function at an unconscious level, working so quickly that I cannot catch its individual instructions to my hands. With nålebinding, I am a novice, reverting to those fumbling struggles of childhood. This new craft’s necessary discipline shows up my impatient, anxious brain for what it is: quick to take on new ideas, sluggish to learn new ways of doing.

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