From the past two weeks write-ups, I would like to further explore the interview with my mom on knitting and self-representation. When my mom initially told me that she was interested in having me interview her about knitting, I was not overly surprised. My mother has just retired, and we often joke that knitting is her retirement plan and that her growing yarn stash will be my inheritance. Knitting has been a part of my life since I can remember and in actuality, I have been knitting for 23 years with my mom. Since my first experiences knitting with my mom were social – we had a knitting group with ladies in the community that met in the evenings with tea, baked goods, and the weather channel as background noise – I assumed that we would talk about knitting as a social space. Our conversation meandered its way touching on her grandmother’s crocheting, the crafting kits she was gifted (while her brother was a truly gifted crafter), the fact that Ravelry (a fabric artist social media site) banned pro Trump postings and the changed name of one of our favorite bloggers after the BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd. These are all points I can see expanding on. I could share the posts and news articles from these sites changes and efforts towards inclusivity as well as our family story and how to videos for knitting methods that we discussed. One of the most poignant parts of the conversation with my mother though for me, was the conversation about what it was to be a “knitter” and how one is or isn’t a knitter. My mom suggested that as the author of articles, book chapters and her own book, she does not see herself as a writer… asking herself what she did enough to consider herself a ___-er, she offered breather. This was presented in a joking, perhaps even self-depricating way, but I find it interesting in relation to the conversations around inclusivity and some of the last words of George Floyd plastered on protestors signs and murals and social media hashtags – “I can’t breath”. I want to explore the personal and political aspects of knitting for my mom and the knitting communities she is a part of.

To explore these aspects of knitting with my mom as the nexus, I will draw on the audio from our interview, research more about the political reactions of the knitting communities my mom mentioned, and attempt to bring to life some of the thing she described, such as the picker and throw methods and the different type of fabrics for knitted vs crocheted pieces. I have chosen to use WordPress for this project and create different pages for different topics: introduction, crafting family, knitting in Minnesota, socially knitting and Making a stand. For the introduction I will introduce my mother and I and our relationship through the frame of knitting. In the crafting family section, I will explore my mom’s relationship with crafting more generally from her family crafters and the way gender played a role in her encouragement to craft while her brother was not encouraged. Knitting in Minnesota is really about my mom choosing to learn to knit with the goal of making sweaters, how she was “taught” to knit, and how knitting was not initially social. Socially knitting will talk about the knitting groups/relationships my mom has been a part of and making a stand will look at news articles and more archival background on the ways knitting communities responded to calls for social responsibility. Initially my WordPress experience has been a bit frustrating, so I am hesitant to go too grand with my imaginations of the way I can overlay sounds and insert self-produced videos. I hope to be able to do the introduction to my mom and me in my own voice and have a “read to me” option as well as little interview snippets of my mom and my conversation, potentially some follow up audio and/or visual material with her or elicited photos. The final editing pass, I will invite my mom in for her commentary, suggestions, and consent to publish to the class.

Here is a rough outline of my WordPress page (password accessible VE2020): https://knitterorbreather.wordpress.com/