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March 30, 2006

Loose Transcript of a Speech Given by Rebecca Axby, Head of the Amherst, MA Yarn Circle, on the Subject of “Recent, Unfortunate Knitting Choices”

Hi everyone, thanks for coming. It’s great to see you all. Now, I know that we want to get started but some members have come to me over the past few weeks and asked me to address an issue that has been causing a stir in our community. And no, who I’m not going to name names, but it has been more- considerably more- than one person.

It’s a delicate subject because we all do great work here and we are all in a big (and growing) family and the support has been great, but a quite a few of the members have been bothered by what they see as unfortunate or divisive knitting choices. In response, I’ve spoken with a few of you privately and, after our conversations, I’ve decided to bring these matters to the attention of the group as a whole. I hope that we can talk through this and then, if it comes to it, vote on knitting guidelines

But I want to say at the start- and I know that we are supposed to discuss this- that I don’t like this idea of guidelines. We have always been very free and supportive here and I would like to see us form a community based on mutual understanding and respect rather than hard rules over patterns and stitching. We all know about the two rival knitting groups in Northampton, how they developed a great deal of animosity toward each other and how someone threw a flaming ball of yarn into the passenger seat of Ms. Sterne’s car. That was all started over some rules. Rules exclude people, and I don’t want that to happen to us.

I also want to give a bit of history and background before we have a discussion. We started, as most of you know, back in 1988— a long time ago in knitting terms. All of the founders are still involved in this organization even though some of them are not here tonight. At the time, the Yarn Circle was half community activity and half knitting promotion. Knitting was coming back. The founders were learning as they knitted together and turned out scarves and hats and then began turning out shirts and larger projects such as the ten person quilt in 1995. We grew too. I joined in 1992 and can tell you that we are at least five times the size of any knitting group in the early 90’s. Some people became bored with knitting and dropped off and I’m sad to say that some of our members have passed away over the years as well.

Some of our members also advanced past pattern work in the late 1990’s and we became known, for a while, as a little bit of an avant garde knitting organization. Cheryl’s table cozy was the first example, I think, and Ms. Reid’s cozy for her dead husband attracted lots of attention and got a mention in the Union News down in Springfield and the Hampshire Gazette over in Northampton. I should also mention Ms. Mark’s knitted interpretation of the Claes Oldenburg Soft Pay Telephone sculpture. That was in 2000, I guess. We needed a van and pallet to move it but it looked great hanging off of the side of the UMass library until the police took it down.

I bring this up because Ms. Marks, you know, left our yarn circle two years ago. Apparently, she did not have time for our group any more; not in her quest to become the Robert Mapplethorpe of American knitting. Some of her friends are still here and I thank you for staying with us. At the same time, Ms. Mark’s move to her own knitting studio shows that there may be some unspoken limits to our knitting club.

In fact, many members have always been perfectly happy knitting scarves and hats and they have made some really great pieces. At the same time, some feel a bit of tension when Kyle, to give an example, brings out the hand-knit death threat that he is working on. Not that the knitting is at all bad— it’s really good— but it’s becoming clear that his piece is intended as a gift to one of our members and I’m sure that nobody really wants to sit for two hours twice a week while someone knits a bloody, three dimensional knife carving up her name. The knitted kidnap lettering is a nice touch, though.

And so, that brings me to my point. We encourage creative knitting but we need projects that are respectful both to our group and to the larger Amherst community. The knitted handcuff cozies were great. On the other hand, our neighbors have protested about the kitted remake of Damien Hirst’s Bisected Cow that is sitting out, right now, in a vat of formaldehyde on the lawn. The same goes for Mr. Lefferts and his performance art knitting. I happen to like your performances but other circle members have mentioned that they find it distracting to see a grown man in writhing and moaning in a mass of tangled yarn on the floor, stabbing at the air with knitting needles and cursing in Dutch.

But this really isn’t meant to highlight or shame any of our members here. We all have different tastes. Cheryl, who has left our group, used to knit socks out of partially tanned cat skin. That was her thing and we understood that. It was nice to have the windows open in the spring, anyway. I just want to open the floor for discussion here, in order to see whether we can develop some guidelines, or at least find a way to make everyone as comfortable and creative as possible.

Okay, any questions? Good. Let’s begin.

Makin Stuff Up | By jb | 10:14 AM

Comments

Posted by: funke at April 8, 2006 07:39 PM

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