Author makes an argument for slow knitting
By Dale Woodard on March 16, 2021.
LETHBRIDGE HERALDsports@lethbridgeherald.com
Knitting and needles was woven into the main topic of discussion as the Lethbridge Public Library held a Zoom conference Saturday afternoon for needlepoint enthusiasts.
In fact, it was a very specific style of knitting.
Joining the Zoom conference as guest speaker was Hannah Thiessen, a noted knitter and author of two books, Slow Knitting and Seasonal Slow Knitting, speaking of her passion of creating slow knitting tenets and why she encourages others to create diverse crafting community.
Reading passages from both her books, Thiessen spoke of her history with slow knitting and how it led her to become an author as well as fielding questions from those attending the online conference.
Thiessen was introduced to knitting through a neighbour who wanted to teach her on Sunday afternoons.
What started as a fun hobby turned into something Thiessen delved deeper into.
“As I moved through the rest of my life – middle school, high school, college – I carried knitting with me. It was always something I knew how to do, but I didn’t really dive into it or make any deep projects,” said Thiessen. “I did a couple of hats and maybe one or two sweaters and scarves.”
In 2010, Thiessen started with Ravelry, a social networking service that functions as a organizational tool for a variety of fiber arts including knitting, crocheting, spinning and weaving.
“I really fell in love with the community, getting to know other people who knit who were my age or a bit older,” said Thiessen. “They were online and excited to share what they were making and getting other people excited about that and interested and hooked about all of the community that surrounded making a craft. I lived somewhere where I didn’t feel like there was anyone doing what I wanted to do and I didn’t have too many people to talk to about it outside of my mom.”
Through Ravelry, Thiessen was able to make connections to different yarn companies and brands.
“So as a student in fashion school, I then turned that fashion school work into working on merchandising, product development and anything and everything to do with yarn, selling yarn or making yarn. I learned a lot along the way and part of what I learned along the way was what I liked about knitting and what I didn’t like about knitting.”
In 2015 Thiessen was writing a blog post for a yarn store.
“It was right before Christmas and they asked me to write about holiday knitting for a Jan. 1 delivery date for the blog and I was writing it pre-Christmas,” she said. “If you knit, craft or make things for people at any time, you already know your crafting time for pretty much the whole year has the potential to become crafting time for other people. It’s very easy for crafters to make a lot of things they love and then feel saturated and want to make things for everybody else.”
Thiessen said she has never been “super-prolific” and kept trying to knit things for other people and coming up short, not hitting the deadline.
“It was a week before Christmas and I was sitting in my bedroom and I’m re-seaming sleeves for my dad’s Christmas sweater because I put them in backwards,” she said. “I asked ‘Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I so stressed out about a craft that’s supposed to bring me joy?'”
Those struggles inspired the topic for Thiessen’s blog.
“What I determined was what I really wanted to do was slow down,” she said. “I just wanted to step back and really appreciate the part I loved, that magic that happens between needles, materials and pattern and stop thinking about who I’m knitting for and how fast I can make it and how many I can crank out. It just felt like too much all the time.”
Thiessen titled her essay “An Argument For Slow Knitting”.
“It was the first time I had written about slow knitting and I compared the concept to food concepts,” she said. “If we want to taste what a carrot really is, the essence of what a carrot is, you would plant the carrot and take care of the carrot and you would care about the soil the carrot is sitting in. When the carrot is removed from the soil we care about how the carrot is cleaned and how the carrot is cooked to honour that ingredient.”
Thiessen took that mindset and applied it to wool.
“I want to know who is making the yarn. I want to know the sheep or other animals are cared for. I want to know the steps it goes through from the time that sheep or alpaca is shorn to the time it reaches my yarn shop shelf. I want to know how far that distance is. I want to know if it had to travel all the way around the world to get to me or if it was in my backyard. Then once I know all of those things I feel informed and empowered and capable of making those next step decisions.”
Thiessen knew she needed to pursue her idea with more than a blog project, reaching out to a publisher in New York.
“The proposal was the blog post, a little explanation of what it was and a move-forward,” she said. “I read online it was two or three months before you even get a ‘no’ I certainly didn’t expect for them to get back to me very quickly and say ‘We’d love for you to write this book.'”
Thiessen began writing the book in 2015 and identified the practices of other knitters she felt she could incoroporate, including knitters who only knit one sweater a year.
“They picked a garment they know they need in their wardrobe,” she said. “They picked a garment in which they’re going to enjoy every stitch of the process. They picked a material they’re very excited to work with and then they just let it take the time it takes. They don’t feel rushed through the process and for me that was a foreign concept,” she said.
Thiessen also met other knitters who save up all their yarn and stash money for one purchase a year at a yarn festival.
“They save it all up and then they go one time a year and they buy all their yarn for the year,” she said. “I asked how when knew what yarn they needed for the year. So these questions kind of drove me to answer those questions with slow knitting answers, answers I had to write for myself and that I hoped I could share with other people.”
The first book, Slow Knitting, is a series of essays combined with pattens and projects and a few essays from other people.
Thiessen said Slow Knitting didn’t have patterns designed by her or a lot of ideas for how to take the slow knitting practices and incorporate them. Those are incorporated into Seasonal Slow Knitting
“So they really do go together in the sense that one is the building block and the next one is the expansion,” she said. “But they each contain different pieces of who I am as an author and as a knitter, pieces of my soul that I can share through words on a page.”
Fore more information on Thiessen visit http://www.HannahThiessen.com.
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