Knitting and handicrafts are enjoying a resurgence in popularity – as evidenced by last week's successful Knitting and
Stitching Show in Dublin's RDS.
ROSITA BOLANDvisited with her mother Catherine, a lifelong knitter and stitcher
AT ONE of the dozens of stands at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Dublin’s RDS, there is a vintage handle-operated black Singer sewing machine. My mother Catherine examines it carefully and tells me that she learned to sew on an earlier model than this one.
“How do you know it was an earlier model?” I ask, fascinated.
“Because the earlier model had a shuttle and a long bobbin, and this one has a round bobbin, which succeeded it,” is her assured answer.
Each of the manually-operated Singer sewing machines carries a little metal plate with a letter and a series of numbers. They relate to the year they were made. I enter the serial numbers into Google on my phone. The date that comes up is 1915.
Which means my mother learned to sew on a machine that predated 1915. I’m not sure which of us is more astonished to discover this.
On the day we visit the Knitting and Stitching Show, which ran for the past four days, the place is jammed. There are stands selling products relating to wool, fabric, embroidery, tapestry, patchwork, lace-making, quilting, felting, and cross-stitch. In addition, there are interactive stands where you can test sewing machines or try out various crafts, as well as those where you can see beautiful pieces of finished work, such as those on show by the Irish Patchwork Society.
Both my mother and I note that every visitor appears to be female, although she notes with delight that their attendance is inter-generational. The only men we see are those who are operating some of the stands. There must be some Irishmen who knit and stitch, but not one was to be seen in the RDS on the day we visited.
Call me biased, but there is not much about knitting or stitching that my mother is not an expert in. She has a lifetime’s experience behind her. I grew up in a house where I took it for granted that virtually all my clothing — socks, coats, dresses, shorts, jumpers, scarves, skirts, hats and blouses – were made by my mother.
She also dressed the house, by making curtains, rugs, tablecloths, napkins, cushion covers and patchwork bedspreads. She volunteered for the local Apostolic Society, embroidering vestments and altar cloths. For fun, she made toys: teddies, dolls’ clothes, rag dolls, stuffed owls, mice, cats.
She designed and made her own wedding dress, and when my sister Cáitríona got married, she also made Cáitríona’s wedding dress. Naturally, she also made her own dress for that occasion, as well as my aunt’s, and the two bridesmaids’ dresses. (And she made the wedding cake and did most of the flowers for the bridal party.)
The sound of the whirr of a sewing machine and the image of my mother bent over mysterious jigsaws of paper patterns, cutting fabric, is watermarked into my memory of childhood.
WE ARE HARDLY five minutes in the RDS when my mother stops beside the Black Sheep wool stand, and starts happily rummaging through the wool on sale there. The thrill of sourcing new materials never fades. She’s already observed that most people in the crowd are “on pilgrimage to stock up”. She picks up an eight-ball pack of Japanese yarn, wool mixed with silk, and examines it closely. The woman beside her, Maura Lohan, who has taken the train from Galway for the day, is doing the same. Within a minute, they are companionably deep in a conversation I cannot understand.
“Does it knit double?”
“I’m just looking to see how many grams in a ball. Can you see if it’s 50 or 100?”
“This one would knit up much faster, don’t you think?”
My mother buys a 10-pack of multicoloured viscose, linen and acrylic yarn for €25, saying she’ll make a cardigan from it. As it happens, she has also made the russet-coloured Harris tweed suit she is wearing, which a woman passing by stops to compliment her on. There are few things certain in life, but I can declare with confidence nobody will ever compliment me on the woollen suit I have made myself: my entire stitching output to date consists of a red gingham blouse I took so long over in my domestic science class that I had outgrown it by the time it was finished.
Many modern sewing machines now have computerised elements to them. We stand silently in front of a €6,299 Brother machine that is, unaided by human hand, busily embroidering a complex design of flowers onto a piece of white linen. There is a screen the size of my netbook incorporated into the machine, featuring an image of the design currently being made. There is also information telling us how many minutes each different coloured thread will be stitching before the piece is finished.
Just looking at this machine make my head throb. I want to lie down on one of the many piles of wool around me. Who buys sewing machines that cost more than the car I bought two years ago? And these are not industrial machines; they are marketed at individuals. Apparently some buyers are people who run small businesses, and embroider logos onto garments, and some are bought by people who want to embroider their own items with the many hundreds of patterns programmed into the machine.
“The creativity is gone out of it if you use one of these,” is my mother’s opinion. “And the more complicated machines are, the more difficult they must be to fix.”
In addition to the stands selling bolts of fabric, racks of thread, buttons, trimmings, and packs of wool, several stalls have ready-to-make kits on offer. Among them are kits for making cushions, tapestries, felting, quilts and wall-hangings. I’m not sure how the hierarchy of knitting and stitching works, but I would vaguely have thought that purists would probably want to do everything themselves. I’m wrong.
What about kits, I ask my mother, whom I know has used tapestry kits in the past. Are they cheating? She shakes her head. “No, they’re often very good. You might just want to make something small, but if you had to buy all the materials for it, it would end up very expensive because you’d be buying far more than you needed. In a kit, you have everything you need.”
As part of the show, there is a stunning exhibition of ecclesiastical embroidery by the late English craftswoman Beryl Dean. Two nuns from the order of the Sisters of St Clare at Harold’s Cross have also been in to see the Dean exhibition. Sr Rosaleen McCabe and Sr Carmela Farrelly entered in 1954 and 1952 respectively. They have a particular interest in Dean’s work, because Sr McCabe has also embroidered a number of liturgical pieces over several decades. “I made a mitre for John Paul II after his visit to Ireland,” she says. “It had Celtic designs on it.”
Did he ever wear it?” I inquire.
“Indeed he did,” says Sr Farrelly with pride. “I saw him once on television wearing it, but by the time I had called Sr Rosaleen, wasn’t he gone off the screen again.”
We have already been in the RDS for several hours, but my mother is reluctant to leave, or even to stop for a coffee. She asks if we can stay another hour, so she can have “a proper look”. What she really means is, she wants to go around on her own without me distracting her. She is in her element. This is her world.
“It’s part of my life. I love making things with my hands. I’ll always be at it,” she says simply, and disappears happily into the stands.
