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Reading: This Golden Fleece
Jan. 26th, 2020 02:02 pmThere was a lot of buzz on knitting Twitter when Esther Rutter's This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain's Knitted History was published in the autumn. I thought the book, chronicling a year spent researching various aspects of the history of knitting in Britain and knitting projects to match, sounded interesting enough for me to put it on my wish list for Christmas, and to get round to reading it a lot quicker than often happens for books on my TBR pile.
I found myself rather underwhelmed. First and foremost, just as my measure of a good walking boot is whether or not it reminds me why I love walking, I expected a book about knitting to remind me of the pleasure of using yarn and needles to create something, and this didn't; Rutter doesn't actually devote much space to talking about her own knitting, and when she does it's all about the technicalities (needle types and sizes, stitch patterns, techniques) and not about the actual experience of knitting.
I also felt that the historical aspects of the book were often rather shallow; while I enjoyed Rutter's descriptions of her visits to archives and museums, and her conversations with people who are still using traditional machinery and techniques, a lot of the historical content felt like paraphrased secondary material, and much of it covered areas that have already been extensively written about by knitters such as Susan Crawford and Kate Davies. Rutter's approach to the history of textile production also feels extremely uncritical; where Crawford and particularly Davies look critically at the working conditions of the people, particularly women, employed in the textile industries of Britain, and the economic factors that drove the rise of mass-production and decline in hand-made clothing, these are much less a feature of Rutter's narrative. I would also really have liked her to have looked at the ways knitting traditions are being adapted and carried forward into the 21st century; despite mentions of Ravelry and yarn festivals, I didn't get any sense of knitting as the vibrant, living craft I know it to be, rather than a historical curiosity.
Rutter's decision to structure the book as a series of journeys, one per month, each with a linked project, also doesn't do the book any favours; the result is a rather saggy narrative, where similar themes recur again and again across different chapters without being clearly linked; so there are many similiarities between the ganseys of the East Coast, in February's chapter, and the guernseys, jerseys and knit-frocks of the Channel Islands and Cornwall, in August; socks first appear in the form of Highland stockings in April, then are returned to in July with both machine-knitted stockings (which links to frame knitting in the Borders, in May) and the nålbinded Coppergate sock from Viking York and then again in October with Welsh funeral stockings. With some exceptions (particularly the chapter on Shetland and Rutter's visit to Shetland Wool Week), there isn't enough differentiation between the knitting traditions of most of the places Rutter visits to really make the structure work (and in some chapters the geographical link is almost non-existent; March's chapter, 'Revolutionary Knitting', combines a visit to Edinburgh Yarn Festival with a trip to London, Madame Defarge and Virginia Woolf, and the distinctly non-traditional project of a pussyhat).
Although the book is illustrated, the choice of illustrations seems rather random (and the illustrations aren't captioned or referenced in the text, so you have to flip to the list of illustrations at the front to check what you're looking at). In particular, Rutter specifically mentions a sampler scarf she was inspired by when visting the Shetland Museum, but although there are pictures of other items in the museum there are no pictures of the scarf, and the chapter on Monmouth caps only includes a close-up plate of Rutter's own replica; I had to google to find out what a Monmouth cap actually looked like.
This Golden Fleece has its moments of interest; I particularly liked the chapter on Shetland, I think because Shetland does have such a distinctive knitwear tradition, and Rutter's visit, for Shetland Wool Week, also taps in to modern knitting culture in a way most of her other trips don't. Overall, though, I found it a real curate's egg of a book, and despite all of the marketing being aimed at knitters I suspect it might work better for non-knitters, or perhaps people who used to knit; as a serious knitter myself, and someone who is steeped in the knitting world, I couldn't help thinking that so much of what Rutter writes about has been done already, and done better, by other knitters.
I found myself rather underwhelmed. First and foremost, just as my measure of a good walking boot is whether or not it reminds me why I love walking, I expected a book about knitting to remind me of the pleasure of using yarn and needles to create something, and this didn't; Rutter doesn't actually devote much space to talking about her own knitting, and when she does it's all about the technicalities (needle types and sizes, stitch patterns, techniques) and not about the actual experience of knitting.
I also felt that the historical aspects of the book were often rather shallow; while I enjoyed Rutter's descriptions of her visits to archives and museums, and her conversations with people who are still using traditional machinery and techniques, a lot of the historical content felt like paraphrased secondary material, and much of it covered areas that have already been extensively written about by knitters such as Susan Crawford and Kate Davies. Rutter's approach to the history of textile production also feels extremely uncritical; where Crawford and particularly Davies look critically at the working conditions of the people, particularly women, employed in the textile industries of Britain, and the economic factors that drove the rise of mass-production and decline in hand-made clothing, these are much less a feature of Rutter's narrative. I would also really have liked her to have looked at the ways knitting traditions are being adapted and carried forward into the 21st century; despite mentions of Ravelry and yarn festivals, I didn't get any sense of knitting as the vibrant, living craft I know it to be, rather than a historical curiosity.
Rutter's decision to structure the book as a series of journeys, one per month, each with a linked project, also doesn't do the book any favours; the result is a rather saggy narrative, where similar themes recur again and again across different chapters without being clearly linked; so there are many similiarities between the ganseys of the East Coast, in February's chapter, and the guernseys, jerseys and knit-frocks of the Channel Islands and Cornwall, in August; socks first appear in the form of Highland stockings in April, then are returned to in July with both machine-knitted stockings (which links to frame knitting in the Borders, in May) and the nålbinded Coppergate sock from Viking York and then again in October with Welsh funeral stockings. With some exceptions (particularly the chapter on Shetland and Rutter's visit to Shetland Wool Week), there isn't enough differentiation between the knitting traditions of most of the places Rutter visits to really make the structure work (and in some chapters the geographical link is almost non-existent; March's chapter, 'Revolutionary Knitting', combines a visit to Edinburgh Yarn Festival with a trip to London, Madame Defarge and Virginia Woolf, and the distinctly non-traditional project of a pussyhat).
Although the book is illustrated, the choice of illustrations seems rather random (and the illustrations aren't captioned or referenced in the text, so you have to flip to the list of illustrations at the front to check what you're looking at). In particular, Rutter specifically mentions a sampler scarf she was inspired by when visting the Shetland Museum, but although there are pictures of other items in the museum there are no pictures of the scarf, and the chapter on Monmouth caps only includes a close-up plate of Rutter's own replica; I had to google to find out what a Monmouth cap actually looked like.
This Golden Fleece has its moments of interest; I particularly liked the chapter on Shetland, I think because Shetland does have such a distinctive knitwear tradition, and Rutter's visit, for Shetland Wool Week, also taps in to modern knitting culture in a way most of her other trips don't. Overall, though, I found it a real curate's egg of a book, and despite all of the marketing being aimed at knitters I suspect it might work better for non-knitters, or perhaps people who used to knit; as a serious knitter myself, and someone who is steeped in the knitting world, I couldn't help thinking that so much of what Rutter writes about has been done already, and done better, by other knitters.
