Empowerment from Textile Crafts

Why I feel star strucked by textile crafts.

I started knitting when I was a kid and then the making of cloth was not an exciting thing. It was. It just was something I made with my hands, nothing extraordinday about it.

When growing older I often marvel at the fact that my hands can make fabric and I don’t really know when the feeling shifted. If I have access to wool, a spindle and a simple loom I could make cloth. From the wispy wool that comes from a sheep who has grazed the land, eating grass and basking in the sun, drinking water and simultaneously growing this amazing fiber that we can’t replicate, in any way, but is unparallelled by other fibers.

I started learning to spin in my late teens. I stood on our porch and held a spindle given to me from my grandmother with some wool that she’d found at a local shop. The spindle she had gotten from my grandfather from one of his travels, but that’s a story for another time. The art of spinning is something learned over time, and with practice. It’s fairly easy to make a yarn and learn the craft, but it takes time to hone that skill, as with all crafts. Now I spin on a spindle or a spinning wheel and make a yarn that pleases me, that I long to work with my knitting needles or in my loom.

For me knitting comes very natural and it’s always with me somehow. I tried weaving for the first time in my twenties and it was like I did level up in my craft. I understand yet another piece of the process of clothing yourself. I can make a cloth to sew with. It’s like being star strucked by the process!

In my late twenties I started to learn more about textile history by reading the book “Women’s Work” by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Yet another insight in the power of women and textile craft. The work of the hands that shaped the world, clothed the world. The saying goes “Clothes make the man” but everyone forgets that women makes the clothes.