WWW: Time and how it passes – history, tradition and the clock

From the original 2011 performance of the work.

There are knitting circles, and knitting circles. This is a Knitting Circle. In that it’s a giant circle of 80 people, all knitting, together, at the same time, on the same piece. This past weekend, a group gathered in Quebec to participate in the latest iteration of artist Kerstin Lindstrom’s work “Own Our Own Time”. Initially performed in 2011 with 83 knitters in the Faroe Islands, the work aims to explore our individual and group relationships to time… “In this activity the one who knits the slowest controls the pace of the whole work.”

Fascinating, if not strictly knitting: about MYB Textiles, a lacemaker in Scotland that is the last to use traditional punch-card coded looms. Watch the video, it’s wonderful.

I was excited to read about the latest issue of Donna Druchunas, Susan Santos and Ava Coleman’s Stories in Stitches book series. This issue, ‘Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose’, focuses on the era of the US Civil War, and how knitters approached with scarcity of resources.

During the Civil War era, knitters were frugal and used what was on hand. Tobacco twine was used to make bedspreads, tents were unraveled and the string knit into socks, rugs were knit from cut-up shirts and dresses, and old fisherman’s sweater from Europe became arm winter wear for Americans on both side of the Mason-Dixon line.

The books in this series always feature a mix of history and knitting patterns, and this volume includes four gansey sweaters, one sontag-style shawl, one rag rug, and three pairs of socks – some inspired by period projects, and others are directly from period patterns with modernized instructions.

More woolly art: Ballarat Museum in Australia is mounting a large scale exhibition around the piece “WARM”. Featuring hundreds of handknit pieces, the work speaks to questions about dependency on fossil fuels for heating and power, and aims to offer an alternative solution that is fun and community driven.

Knitted pieces including gum trees, native flowers and wind turbines to create an enormous collage which shows a landscape reclaimed from the devastating effects of environmental degradation.