I’ve been knitting off and on for 20+ years, but really got back into it 7-8 years ago after 2-3 years of a little bit more off-and-on. This past November I took the leap and jumped into the knitting/fiber podcasting/vlogging world and haven’t looked back.
After one of my episodes the author, Joe Wilcox of QueerJoe fame reached out about his recently self-published book The Fabric We Make.* QueerJoe is one of the OG knitting blogs and I had recently been there reading about linen stitch and a project bag I was mulling over self-drafting (Instagram preview of the bag). I was like okay it’s a sign I should read this and so Joe kindly sent me a copy. Add in that I’m always looking to expand my nonfiction reading and it was double awesome.
The Fabric We Make is part blog, part memoir of a gay male knitter, part overview of the evolution of software and knitting technology, part intro to knitting, and part how-to-guide, all with a little bit of LGBT history thrown in. I find it very hard to classify thinking back on it a week or so after completing it. What I can say that he did extremely well is try to capture the sense of community he sought for years and then successfully built and saw recreated numerous times with the Men’s Knitting Retreats (website). There were other parts he did well and other parts that he got lost with or felt wedged into the book.
When non-knitters find out that I knit, they often remark how much patience I must have. They often confuse patience and perseverance. I don’t consider myself very patient as I push myself to get to the next row, or the next color stripe in a project. But it’s almost inconceivable to me that I’d give up on a project that I care about. There’s rarely any question as to whether I will continue working on a project until it’s completed. Even a project that might take years. (59)
As I read Joe’s musings and interactions as he was learning to knit, it felt a lot like many others. I first learned from a library book and then the early days of Youtube—shout out to the grannies who put videos up super early; I still use a few of them—but didn’t visit a dedicated yarn store until maybe 8-10 years ago. I stuck to the big box stores because it was affordable and accessible.
I wasn’t 100% sure how his experiences as a male knitter would speak to me and whether they were truly universal or with the proliferation of the internet and YouTube podcasts and vlogs, if it would feel different having jumped back into the fiber community, but they definitely rang true. These two in particular:
If you’re a man who’s been into a number of yarn stores over the last few decades, you’ll probably know that this is an all-too-common experience. You’ll also probably understand this feeling of being snubbed in a yarn store if you’re a customer that doesn’t look like you could afford nice yarn. (24)
The experience of many men who participate in fiber arts was that they were treated in one of two ways by others in the crafting world. They were either treated as outsiders who were not fully welcome into a women’s enclave. Or they were fawned over as if they were some special, sparkling unicorn with magical qualities because they were audacious enough to take up knitting. (60)
I will say the latter hasn’t been as big of an impact as the former, as both my career and my advanced degree have been predominantly female spaces and so I’ve found comfort in them and been able to exist without feeling too out of place. That being said I have 100% experienced being treated with contempt, if not downright hostility, and also fawned over as a male knitter. Some of that I think also has to do with my age and the environment (i.e. a younger than the average age of cruise ship man knitting), and some of it has to do with the space that I take up as a large person who uses bright colors often.
Where the book shone was when Joe talked about the retreats and the men involved. Joe’s writing did an excellent job of pulling me in with the excitement and frantic nervousness leading up to the first retreat, the calm energy alternating with the anxious leading of the retreat, and the sheer emotional relief after it was successful. He did a great job of talking about who was there and what happened without going into too many details most of the time. His personification of the attendees and the major players was so well done when he mentioned two of them passing, I teared up because he’d done such a good job capturing their essence.
I want to preface this next part by stating as a self-published work, this was incredibly well written and proofread. I’ve read the gamut from horribly written but well proofread to well written but horribly proofread and everything in between.
The Fabric We Make was incredibly well proofread and I don’t recall noticing any major errors, and you know I love to highlight those. Where it didn’t quite work was the overall narrative flow. Overall, the story chronologically flows from the mid-1980s to present day and that makes sense, but it could’ve been tighter and better woven (see what I did there—as a total aside there could’ve been a lot more weaving puns). I think the primary audience was a bit of a mystery for Joe and for me as I read the book. It seemed like his answer was yes to everyone and that muddled things for me because this book could easily have leaned into any one with more fleshing out and more detail and still been incredibly well written and engaging.
I may have been a better fit than most, because I’m also a gay male knitter who happens to be interested in the evolution of communities (oh hey ANTH degree) and technology in work and personal life, but that’s a VERY narrow audience. But even that being said every time Joe defined a knitting term I was like OMG waste of words, so even within the knitting community there’s a huge range of abilities and preferences. I would’ve preferred a dictionary of common terms at the end that could’ve been referenced rather than every word being defined on the page.
Recommendation: This is worth the read, Joe’s writing is incredibly approachable and the stories he twines together and the community he’s woven together over four decades is very moving and inspiring. Legit though, he made me want to sign up for one of these retreats and that is saying something, because I do not like interacting with people I don’t know. I mean I’ll do it for work, but that’s a finite amount of time and I can always escape, but yeah. The audience of the work is a bit nebulous to me, because this reads as a combination of long form blog posts/essays and various histories filtered together through Joe’s lens. You’ve got 4-5 different competing things that do tie together, but I think more could’ve been done to elevate their connections and improve the flow of the work overall. That being said, I can’t fault the writing and proofreading. It’s an incredibly well proofed work that is readable and easily digestible.
*I received a copy of The Fabric We Make from the author in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.
Opening Line: “A corporate performance review of my work once stated that ‘Joe gravitates toward the more enjoyable aspects of his job.’
Closing Line: “I’m grateful every time I get to participate in these groups, as it reminds me of the wandering journey that brought me here, and all the exceptional people who helped make it happen.” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)
Additional Quotes from The Fabric We Make
“Designing and creating a knitted garment for the first time can take considerable amounts of time, creativity and effort. So, when it is a success, we make sure to write up a pattern for this new and beautiful design. At the beginning of this journey, I had no way of knowing that I would be presented with an extraordinary group of like-minded people and a design idea to create a community. I didn’t realize yet that I yearned to be among others who felt the same way I did.” (12)
“If you’re not a knitter, I can tell you there are extremely strong opinions about the right way of doing certain things in knitting. How to hold and tension the yarn. How to wrap/pick the yarn onto the needle point. Honestly, I’m glad I was able to get to a certain level of basic knitting and even have finished a few projects on my own before I ever showed my efforts to another knitter. I think the disapproval of a real knitter might have made me feel less excited about the newfound identity.” (17)
“For instance, a regular feature in the blog was a critique of knitting magazines. One designer in particular received much of my criticism. The comments about her work were really mean-spirited and unnecessary. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that my platform could have been used to encourage and support the knit-designer community that I valued, rather than tear down those I didn’t care for. But sometimes the fabric of community didn’t work out quite as I’d hoped, and I had to rip back a little and rework a section.” (55)
“I feel like somewhat of a whiner complaining about this treatment. Women have long been dismissed in typically male-dominated fields for years and they know exactly what my experience was like. But for me, it was a new experience that opened my eyes to a broad range of understanding about how ignorant and short-sighted gender stereotypes and biases can be.” (61)
“For a fiber-artist, there is no greater praise than having someone cherish something you’ve made for them so much that they pass it down to future generations.” (124)