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Once considered a mumsy pastime for wild-haired old women with too many cats, knitting has suddenly
become hip. Sarah Newstead joins Carlisle's stitch and bitch session at the Cecil Street Project to find out
what's just so darned addictive about stocking stitch
T
he phrase "hand knitted garment"
would once have sent any style
conscious woman reaching for the
brylon amid nightmarish visions of
lumpy Christmas sweaters, moulting
pom poms and bed jackets trimmed
with faux fur.
But times have changed. As capricious as lady
fashion can be, crafts are back in a big way and
bright young things are click-clacking with their
needles and two ply.
A knitting club has sprung up at the Cecil
Street Project (CSP), a not-for-profit community
arts collective. The club joins hundreds of
thousands nationwide formed in the last couple of
years in the wake of a reinvention of home crafts
as cool and kooky.
The group meet every Tuesday in the renovated
19th Century church that is home to the CSP. It's a
charming little Dickensian labyrinth of crooked
shop fronts and whitewashed art spaces � a heady
montage of past meets present meets future.
Tucked away at the back of the building, the
knitting club are clustered on a battered leather
sofa and cushioned pews. There's a pile of yarn
on the coffee table, also reassuringly strewn with
biscuits and tea cups.
"Welcome," says Jennifer Brooks, 23-year-old
founder of the CSP and knitting club host. "Would
you like a cup of tea?"
Introductions follow. There's Di Clay, director of
the CSP and driving force
behind Matrix Art
Projects, a community
organisation that delivers
outreach art projects in
Cumbria and abroad.
She's a very stylish
woman who wears her
clothes with a Parisian
sort of chic.
There's Jane Shaw, 44, a
chatty former Austin
Friars teaching assistant
who was made redundant
and now has her own
jewellery design business.
Toni Rutherford, a 27-
year-old artist and co-
director of CSP, is tucked
away in a corner and octogenarian Elizabeth
Love, an author, makes up the quintet.
There's an air of quiet industry as needles click
and the women chat. Far from being woolly
wafflers, the knitting club regulars are a bunch of
erudite women with plenty to talk about.
Conversation turns from poetry to Carlisle
Renaissance and then the hot topic de jour,
Carlisle's bid to become the next city of culture.
It's a stimulating exchange, interrupted only
when someone drops a stitch and it's all eyes on
deck to save a burgeoning scarf from being
consigned to the recycle bag.
There's a palpable sense of female solidarity
and when a shuffling man appears at the door
looking for Jennifer, the mood shifts ever so
slightly. Jennifer urges him to join in but he
mumbles about men not having dexterous hands
and heads away.
Jane says: "When you think about it, in
Victorian times it was the females that sat
together and did the patchwork. And in the war,
when the men were away, women would sit
together and knit socks for the soldiers."
Di adds: "It's transportable and practical � the
social aspect is really important. Women are so
good at getting together and telling stories and
connecting. There must be so many reasons why
it's connected with the feminine."
But it wasn't always this way. "It was a male
pastime in medieval times, "says Jennifer. "Men
mended the clothes and even with tapestries it
was considered a male job. It was only later that it
became a more female construct."
"I learned to knit from my mother," says
Elizabeth, a fascinating woman who grew up a
farmer's daughter near Shap and has made the
Cumbrian way of life the subject of her writing.
"And I remember my grandmother always kept a
needle in her belt that helped her knit socks."
Elizabeth has an altogether exotic air and I'm
riveted as she tells me how she became a
published author four years ago following a life as
a typist in Cumbria. I can't imagine any of the
eclectic members of the knitting club gathering
dust and as we stitch and chatter, I ask how
knitting managed to shrug off it's fusty image. "I
think perhaps part of it is to do with the
recession," says Jane. "And if you go to any shop
on the high street, all of the clothes are the same.
People don't want to be identikit any more."
Jennifer has pledged to make all of her
Christmas presents this year. And several will be
knitted. "I've made some hats and I'm determined
to knit a jumper for someone. I think it makes a
big difference when you get a gift that has taken
time to create."
I add that I have recently begun to knit in a
vain bid to stop my hands straying into the
biscuit jar or reaching for a cigarette. The women
nod in agreement. But I learn there is a far-
reaching physical and emotional salve to be found
at the end of a knitting needle. For Jane, who
damaged the tendons in her hand after a car
accident, knitting has helped keep her joints
mobile to ease any seizing.
For Di, there's deep symbolism woven into each
and every stitch. She tells me she is planning to
recreate her life's narrative from wool for her
next artistic endeavour. She's here to practice her
knit-one-purl-one before she begins a project titled
All the Wool My Mother Never Knitted. "When my
mother died, she left behind all of this wool she
had never got round to using. I'm going to knit it
up in all of the different places I've ever lived. It's
like knitting a journey."
The finished piece of knitting and Di's record of
the homage to her own personal past will feature
as part of Carlisle Arts Festival.
Perhaps the appeal of knitting stems from a
female need for simple creative industry or a
nostalgia for our fore-mothers' firesides. The slow
unfurling of a knitted garment offering a potent
antidote to a humdrum fast-paced world buzzing
with instant technologies. Or maybe it's a fad,
exhuming and re-dressing the past as the trend
machine is wont to do? Either way, as I walk from
the building onto a chilly autumn street, I am
definitely a little warmer for my afternoon with
the knitting club.
The knitting club meet on Tuesdays at the
Cecil Street Project, Carlisle, from 1pm until 3pm.
Stitchand bitch
Stitchand bitch
Pulling the wool: The Tuesday Knitting club that
meet in the Cecil Street Project. Left to right:
Toni Rutherford, Di Clay, Jane Shaw, Jen nifer
Brooks, Elizabeth Love and Me's Sarah Newstead
Stitch and the city:
Sex and the City star
Kristin Davis relaxes

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