March 24, 2004
Reportage

Guerrilla knitters unite
By Hugo Rifkind

Needles and skeins in hand, this writer - who once made a cactus from a sock - goes underground with the male warrior knitters to discover whether truly woolly thinking can save the world

IN THE flickering candlelight of the Dove pub in London Fields, the artist and guerrilla knitter Shane Waltener is simultaneously smoking, talking and performing some complicated back-stitching on what looks like a spidery doily. I consider myself to be made of pretty stern stuff, but I’m finding the latent risk of fire rather upsetting.

Not that Shane is using highly flammable wool. No, this bearded 35-year-old Belgian is knitting with strands of knicker elastic. “It was a revelation for me,” he says, not, apparently, joking. “You can stretch it, distort it, manipulate it. It is all very exciting.”

Isn’t it just? Shane is one of four members — three men and a woman — of the Cast Off knitting club to have joined me in the Dove this evening. There were meant to be four men, but the fourth hasn’t made it out of bed today, allegedly as a result of taking “too many drugs” at the weekend. The others are preparing for an event this Friday at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, where they will knit, chat and display their handiwork. As venues go, the V&A is a rather tame one for Cast Off. But more of this later.

Rachel Matthews, the founder of Cast Off, is 29, and looks a bit like the singer Courtney Love. Because she hasn’t brought her own knitting tonight, she is eager to help me with mine. “Look at this!” she wails, distraught. “You haven’t wound the skein into a ball at all! You’re going to have a terrible tangle!” This is very probably true. I’m not much of a knitter. The last time I wielded a pair of needles was in primary school, when, for reasons lost in the mists of time, I knitted a cactus. “That’s pretty cool,” interjects Joe Zeitlin, 20, who is studying cello at the Royal Academy of Music.

It was basically just a green sock, I confess. I sewed up the end, stuffed it and put it in a pot. But Joe remains impressed: “Socks are hard, man.” He once knitted a bowl of porridge, but it was “kind of abstract”. At the moment he’s working on a knit-O. A what? A knit-O, a garment Joe invented himself. It’s a bit like a scarf, but goes around the neck only once. “It has buttons and it’s small so you can put it in your pocket.”

Fiendish. But one person is crafting a more recognisable item. Arthur Swindells, a 25-year-old sound engineer from Canada, is working on an unremarkable scarf. Despite this conventionality, shaven-headed, nose-ringed Arthur is what you might call your more militant guerrilla knitter. He does most of his knitting at night (he suffers from insomnia), but rarely misses a Cast Off event. “It’s all about doing usual things in unusual places,” he says. “It makes public what is normally private, and challenges people’s preconceptions about what they ought to be doing where.”

Arthur is using pencils instead of knitting needles. Is this a statement? A challenge? A PostModern attempt to highlight the inherent parallels between creating with a needle and creating with a pen? “No, I just flew back from Canada and couldn’t take my needles on the plane.”

Shame. Arthur is also involved with the Space Hijackers, who consider themselves Anarchitects and aim to subvert the hierarchies that exist in our everyday space. Like the other men, he came across Cast Off at a Circle Line party, when the groups teamed up to throw an impromptu party in a carriage on the Circle Line, complete with dancers and sound system. And knitting.

“We used to try never to knit in the same place twice but we started to run out of places,” says Rachel. “We'll go anywhere, though — except in people's homes. That’s cliquey and exclusive, and exactly why people have always been frightened of knitting circles.”

The ultimate venue for a Cast Off meeting, she reckons, would be the floor in the centre of the European Parliament. Shane, who possibly hasn’t been listening, thinks a disused Lido. Arthur is more ambitious; he reckons the Moon. Thus far, Cast Off venues have included pubs, clubs, Tube trains, an exhibition at Tate Modern and the American Bar at the Savoy.

The Cast Off club, then numbering about 30, was evicted from the Savoy just under a year ago. “That was a great night,” chuckles Arthur, and points at a bulge near the side of his scarf. “I did that. I got very drunk and picked up an awful lot of stitches. We were all smartly dressed, and we had vouchers for cocktails that we’d cut out of Time Out, but the manager decided that he didn't want people knitting in his bar. He told the women they should be knitting at home, and told the men they should be sent off to war. I’m not kidding.”

There is something about all this, I suggest, slightly redolent of flash mobs, last year's craze for groups of pranksters to meet at prearranged times and do bizarre things, such as walking into TV shops waving fish, or running around laundrettes counting in German. Is that fair? “Yes!” beams Rachel.

“No!” thunders Arthur. Cripes. Dissent in the woolly ranks. “Flash mobs are the complete opposite of what we are about,” he fumes. “They are apolitical, without skills and devoid of any desire to improve either their participants or their audience in any way. They are pointless. At least we leave something behind.”

“We try not to,” says Rachel hastily, “though there can be bits of wool and packaging.”

“We leave behind,” corrects Arthur, a little testily, “an idea. An impression. We remind people that they can make their own clothes. That’s important.”

Help me to understand this, I say, because I’m struggling. Are you against machine-made clothing? Because you all seem to be wearing it.

“No,” says Arthur. “It’s just not practical to be against machine-made clothing. There simply aren’t enough knitters in the world to clothe everybody.”

“Machine-made knitting, though,” growls Joe. The group glowers. Tsk. Machine-made knitting. Grrr.

There is an ideology here, and while I’m not quite sure I understand it, it is passionately held. But it’s getting late. I need to crack this before closing time. Can knitting save the world? Is that the point? Would the world be a better place if everyone learnt to cast off and purl? “Of course,” says Rachel. “If you knit something instead of paying 20 quid for it, you value it in a whole different way.”

“Heroin addicts could get addicted to that instead of heroin,” muses Joe.

“It certainly makes you more productive,” says Shane, who once knitted a 4m by 3m knicker elastic web for an installation in a cemetery.

“Actually,” says Arthur, “I’m experimenting with being less productive at the moment.”

“That’s fascinating,” breathes Rachel.

“Mmm,” says Arthur, and looks slightly wistful. “Although it, like, makes it kinda hard to get stuff done.”

Knitting is certainly very now — its hip credentials have been trumpeted increasingly for the past couple of years. Scarlett Johansson even does it in Lost in Translation. What do we think about celebrities who knit for real? Are they a good thing? Famous knitters reportedly include Julia Roberts, Goldie Hawn, Hilary Swank, Cameron Diaz, Winona Ryder, Madonna, Russell Crowe, Kate Moss . . .

“Stop that!” says Rachel, and nearly stamps her foot. “Yes, it’s great that Scarlett Johansson does that, but every time anybody writes about us, there’s this roll call of celebrities, and that’s not what we’re about at all. They’re all Hollywood and glitzy, and we’re earthy, London and street. And it’s rubbish anyway. My mum met Kate Moss’s personal assistant on the train, and she doesn’t do any knitting at all.”

Arthur is aghast. “Not even crochet?” “No,” says Rachel, then thinks for a moment. “Maybe she does cross-stitching. I forget. But she'd certainly be welcome to come to one of our meetings. They'd all be welcome. Everybody is welcome. That's the whole point."

Craft Rocks is at the V&A on March 26, from 6.30pm to 10pm, admission free. The event will feature a DJ, a knitting bar with free needles and wool, and volunteers from Cast Off will be on hand to provide lessons. Visit the museum’s website at www.vam.ac.uk, or Cast Off’s site, www.castoff.info.