Strung Together

It’s nice to find a strand of hair on one of your handknits, or a golden curlicue between the pages of a book. A remembrance of the moment a (beloved?) human or pet came near. Or maybe it was just you, a few hours or years younger. Then there’s the superstition that knitting a strand of a person’s hair into your stitches will bind them to you. If you’ve ever done this by mistake, you’ll know how difficult it is to unbind that hair! I imagine these objects must be covered in the Dust of human consciousness (or “the ply of human life” as Woolf called it).

Not forgetting, of course, that the fibers we work were themselves once hairs on a creature. And those hairs are probably made up of strings and loops. And that each loop is a solid memory, and knitting is a bit like a time machine: it’s larger on the inside, and in a few minutes you can undo a whole day. It’s like loosening the fabric of space & time… It’s brilliant!