Skip to main content

What I'm really watching: instructional knitting videos

Continuing our series on viewing habits in self-isolation, one writer has a ball getting lost in cabling and colourwork

It was 2015 and having just quit smoking, my last regular vice, I walked into a department store in Norwich in search of gym equipment. But instead of buying trainers or weights, I fell in love with the wall of yarn in the haberdashery department across the floor. In some primal, urgent way, I needed to have those balls and skeins of colour and texture in my life, variously fluffy or smooth, shiny mercerised cotton, variegated, solid in rich tonal hues, stippled with flecks of dye. Something about looking at those unwound packets of potential took me back to my childhood, to hours spent with my mom in suburban fabric stores choosing material for homemade clothes she made for me. Some of our happiest times were spent together weighing whether to buy, say, lemon- or saffron-coloured polycotton, the one with the daisies or the one with the Bridget Riley-style op-art pattern (it was the 70s), and contemplating which rickrack would coordinate best with our choice.

Tragically, I didn’t learn to sew from her, a terrible shame because she really knew her stuff having once worked in costume design on Broadway in the 1950s, but I must have picked some maker’s genes from her. She hated cooking so, autodidact that I am, I taught myself how to make a decent dinner by reading cookbooks myself from the age of 10 onwards.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Uugrbi
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more