(National Post, 8 October 2005)
by Liz Clayton
Knitting is something
that grandmas do by the fireside, preferably with cats at their feet, right?
Not something people do standing on a corner waiting
for a streetcar, not over lunch at a busy picnic table in Kensington Market — and
certainly not as a swarming mass filling the entire back of a TTC streetcar,
needles furiously clicking away — right? If you happened to bump into
the Great TTC Knit-A-Long last Saturday, you’d already know times have
changed.
The Knit-a-Long concept was brought to life by Beryl Tsang and Vivienne Suen,
Toronto knitters who met through an email list. The joint organizers see
the event as a way to “reclaim public space by knitting on the TTC”.
It’s all part of a greater theme of “knitting in public”,
or “KIP”, as Tsang, a boisterous woman who works as a sales rep
for a US yarn company, likes to call it. She and Suen — who have had
people actually move away from them while knitting in restaurants —believe
that by taking knitting out of the living room and onto the streets, they
might just raise a little consciousness while working on one of their favourite
hobbies.
“
I think that if you actually go to all the effort of making a garment, you
actually start to realize what the true cost of making anything is,” said
Suen, who sees hand-knitting her own clothes as a grassroots effort — as
well as a fibre fetish.
“
It’s really hard for anyone who’s a dedicated knitter to support,
say, sweatshop clothing,” said Suen. “I find that a lot of the
people you meet at Stitch’n’Bitch sessions around Toronto are
the same people that are going to care about organic food and free trade
coffee and local charities and disparity of wealth and things like that,” Suen
pauses, “And it’s just nice not to be a consumer.”
Tsang, too, has applied a humanitarian slant to her knitting projects. She
is busily knitting another in her series of stylish pink prosthetic breasts
for breast cancer survivors as she waits for a gang of knitters — she’s
marshalling the West Team — at Vienna Home Bakery on Queen West. She
and her group will dawdle over ginger muffins with lemon curd for awhile,
then proceed to nearby Romni Wools to paw through their overwhelming selection
of artisanal yarns. After all, knitting in public can be as much about fun
as about making a political statement.
By lunchtime, the West Team will have streetcar-knitted their way to Kensington
Market, where they’ll meet with the North Team, who Suen is marshalling
down from Knit-O-Matic on Bathurst. More than than a dozen women — all
of diverse ages and backgrounds — have turned up for the crosstown
yarn crawl, which was primarily publicized on mailing lists and Toronto knitting
blogs. All told, the seven-hour trek will see the knitters through nearly
twelve kilometers of streetcar knitting and purling — with a prize
awarded to the woman who completes the first project that day.
By the time their streetcar lurches over the river towards a yarn store called
the Naked Sheep in the Beaches in late afternoon, the crowd of knitters is
eager to reach their final destination — where it is rumoured that
sparkling wine and home-baked cookies will appear. Tsang delivers an animated
commentary on the passing landscape — she loudly insists one East End
park is a great place to “KIP” because a lot of its male patrons
hang out with their shirts off — but despite this, the group still
manages to blow right by the Naked Sheep.
“
The one problem with knitting on the TTC is you get so involved you miss
your stop,” sighs knitter Jen Hendriks.
As the group files into the tidy shop, those who still have money left in
their wallets walk around touching soft, colourful yarns. A prize — more
yarn — is awarded to a knitter who has completed a pair of handsomely
patterned socks, and the TTC Knit-a-Long’s inaugural outing is declared
a success.
Suen and Tsang plan to make the mobile knit-ins a regular event, getting
more local shops involved as well as exploring further reaches of the TTC
system — to allow for longer stretches to work on their knitting, of
course. They are planning a second, larger event for the spring. And how
will you know them?
“
Look for hordes of knitters on a streetcar near you,” laughs Suen.
The Great TTC Knit-A-Long can be found on the web at:
http://ttcknit.blogspot.com/