STITCH BY STITCH
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How crochet connected me to my grandmother and the long line of feminists before me
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By Lauren Kaminski
Time would completely slow down. Every time I looked at my phone, hours had gone by and the wool that rested on my lap continued to grow. With a single string, my hands moved like they were part of a machine. Insert hook into the second chain, yarn over, pull through and repeat. Crocheting is so repetitive that it’s easy to let yourself fall into a meditative state — the switch between yellow to orange, like clockwork, while I fastened hundreds of sunflower granny squares for an afghan throw blanket. These colourful creations painted colour on the dull, grey skies of early March. In 2002, my grandmother Audrey passed away in her sleep the morning after her 65th birthday. She was a life-long knitter, and all over my childhood home my mother displays her lace doilies, pillows and granny-square afghans. I was only two years old when she passed and despite hardly knowing her, I’ve always had a strange connection to her in my mind. I longed to be close to her, to have the connection of a grandmother. So in elementary school I taught myself how to knit using YouTube. As I grew older, I would only knit seasonally to make the odd scarf or pair of socks as a present. Without the knitter’s eye of my grandmother to appreciate the detail of my projects, I grew to rarely pick up the needles. Knitting and crochet are often stereotyped as elder domesticity. Admittedly, for most of my life and into my teenage years, I believed this too. It wasn’t until I scoured social media for inspiration and saw that the yarnwork community is far from the cisgendered white grandmother often envisioned. My Instagram feed was flooded with psychedelic matching sets, bohemian-style crochet homegoods and inclusive communities like Black Girl Knit Club that are committed to empowering knitters of colour. These limiting domestic narratives are being flipped on their heads by many creators using this traditional work to empower and rebrand the craft as something for all to wear, enjoy and make.
40
Amongst the sense of worry at the start of a pandemic, I was fortunately able to find comfort in the slow pace of life. I was no longer working three jobs while commuting from the GTA to Toronto for full-time classes. I had time to myself, moments in the day where boredom was a possibility and I didn’t have a responsibility or deadline to meet. As an adult, I’ve never succeeded in developing healthy habits. I bite my nails so far down that it’s impossible to even fit a presson nail. I drink wine in the bath while watching HGTV shows whenever life gets a little too hard. Some may assume an outlet like journaling my thoughts would universally fit my needs as a writer, but frankly, I find it tedious to write my thoughts down when I can just think them. I’ve failed at every positive outlet that self-help books recommend — that is, until both boredom and a sense of nostalgia from being stuck in my childhood home prompted me to google “crochet for beginners.”
