This piece is based on a talk I gave at unravel festival at Farnham Maltings in February of this year. It’s the first of a series of posts that will cover the same ideas covered in that talk. It’s probably useful to say here that before I became an avid crafter I did an MA in Linguistics, and I have been entertaining myself comparing languages and crafts ever since I fell in love with crochet the way I had previously fallen in love with linguistics - Lydia
I came up with the idea of ‘craft code-switching’ when I was trying to think of a talk that could cover all three of the crafts that I have been most active in over the years; knitting, crochet, and quilt-making. At the time I was finishing up writing our How to Make a Quilt zine, and just a year or so earlier had finished writing Crochet How and Knit How (2.0) with Meghan. Breaking each craft down for a complete beginner had forced me think more closely and carefully about the mechanics and techniques that are most basic, as well as what might be most practical for a modern maker to learn. It was a lot of fun, and sometimes very frustrating, especially when I was working on the illustrated tutorials. Trying to describe a fluid 3D motion in 2D steps isn’t easy, but I’ve always found the process so useful in picking apart what exactly has to happen and in what order, and why the resulting stitch looks the way it does and works the way it does. It’s a great lesson in appreciating the feats of engineering we execute when we make things, and has also been instrumental in the way I see these crafts.
When we were writing Crochet How it really came home to me how very different crochet is from knitting. Both crafts use yarns, they are both portable, and you can make a lot of the same sorts of things, but the steps involved in making the fabric you want, and the fabrics themselves, are very different!
But of course as a maker I can also see their similarities; knitting and crochet undeniably have a lot in common. And although quilt-making isn’t yarn based there are ways that I think about making quilts that are very much in line with ways I think about making things with yarn. There is plenty that unites all three (in addition to all being textile-based, and being things that I happen to do). There are some techniques, constructions, and ways of working that are absolutely useful and used for all three. I also love that each craft lends itself to particular things, and so the craft I choose for a particular project depends on what I want to make and how I want it to look.
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