Rebellious knitting

By: Jimini Hignett

Odd that knitting has such a persistent association with staidness and primness. For me it’s always been something to associate with rebellion. But I notice that if you’re obviously not one of those prim, staid knitters, then people tend to react as if it’s some sort of threat. To their dignity if nothing else.

My mother knitted in the car – this way she didn’t have to get wound up if there was a red light. Whoever sat next to her had the job of warning her just before the light turned green. Other drivers always looked on in disgust and irritation, presuming that she was going to hold up the traffic, so we made a sport of shooting off the minute the light changed – neah neah!

At school we got knitting – with pink wool – yuk, girls’ colour! An oven-cloth. An oven-cloth for Chris sake, we were 7 years old - ridiculous. An oven-cloth from wool. I sabotaged as much as I could, and despite being a perfectly good knitter I managed to produce the lumpiest, squintest, least attractive oven-cloth of the whole class. At home, I made sure it was used to pick up a too-hot pan so that it scorched and the wool turned brown and slowly unravelled.

At secondary school we had uniforms, awful, even your socks had to be regulation colour – grey, fawn, navy-blue, white or maroon. I hated it. And it was dead boring, so I knitted socks, under my desk. But I’d get caught all the time and my knitting would be confiscated. At one point every teacher had a half-finished sock of mine in their drawer. But still I finished them – striped, in the colours grey, fawn, navy-blue, white and maroon. The English teacher sent me out to the corridor – for being an eyesore.

Knitting was a way to take control of your own appearance, to escape from the dreadful fashion of the time – I knitted jumpers from pictures of everything I loved.

Once in New York, in that famous jazz café where Woody Allen was said to play, I was knitting a plate of macaroni with sauce for the owner of an Italian restaurant whose birthday it was. The maître d’ told me I had to stop – no knitting at the bar. But the jazz singer whose band it was, lied to him that I was Britain’s foremost soft sculptress, so I got to keep knitting – neah neah!