[Music] I think fiber work is important because it um it brings it brings people together hi I’m Hannah and I’m an our therapist my my dad was from St kits and in the January of 201 18 um my mom said that he had um mot neuron disease which is ALS I landed back in England I’d done some of the knitting i’ done some of the setup and um as my dad deteriorated as he was in hospice um I just kn a lot the Sha I was knitting when when my dad was sick so this is this is her work and then this is the piece that I hid I had made when I was in the UK but there’s also these these uh differences in Stitch tension um and the Stitch tension is how tight the the stitches are on the needle and so the looser they are the more gaps you have between between your stitches and so there are literal kind of grooves and lines of different people’s tension everybody knits differently um so not only is it their tension and their stories but there’s also just the the tension I was feeling at the time after my dad passed away I decided to go back to school and do art therapy and when I did the research I wanted to replicate as much as possible um The Experience I’d had with my dad with the knitting next to the bedside and the family members all around so I started documenting the times I was knitting along and then I started to ALS also set up Zoom calls with people just just focus on my knitting my knitting it’s nice and ordered it’s in row it makes sense recently I read there’s an Irish tradition that they put a mistake in knitting so that your soul can escape no way um so you don’t get stuck cuz every time you hand make something a piece of you is Left Behind so I mean there wouldn’t be a lot of us left if we did that well this one’s definitely free flowing yeah for for the soul hi I’m Cindy and I’m an art therapist and when Hannah started doing her thesis on this knitting and knitting through her grief and through um I just thought it what amazing story and it just felt so special to be asked to be part of that um and when I was 36 I got a breast cancer diagnosis something really magical happened for me the weekend that um my diagnosis for breast cancer was in August and my husband’s baseball team it’s a big part of our social life and in the summer let them all know and they had done sort of a fundraiser to to get me some yarn cuz they figured that I might need something to do while I’m going through treatment and um so I decided to pay it forward pay it back carry on that thread and I went to the yarn store and I got yarn in the ball team colors and then during treatment I would sit in the chemo suite and I would knit little beer cozies and then my husband also started to knit another really beautiful thing that happened when I was going through treatment is the day we found out I needed a masectomy he knit me my first prosthetic we got home that day he looked up there’s a pattern it’s called knitted knockers and it’s just so great as a way of showing that you know he’s in it with me being able to have those knitting projects on hand when I was going through my breast cancer treatment meant that I was able to focus on this beautiful yarn in my hands that friends had been thoughtful enough to gift me and it gave me something positive and something wonderful to think about rather than the IV in my arm or the side effects that were incoming and I realize that art and the creative and the being is what made what helped me heal mentally there are things that happen to us and we don’t have the ability we don’t necessarily always have the words either um and when we can tell a story when we can create something and reflect on the meaning afterwards I think it allows us to find meaning that we kind of missed internally so when I do look at the scarf that’s kind of what I get from it this weaving of a story of multiple relationships at once um that I’m able to sit with but also it is just a scarf so it gets stuffed into my bag and it gets used as like an umbrella sometimes I mean this one’s got a lot of holes in it it’s not the best umbrella but it’s what I have to hand and I think that it just continues to be a metaphor [Music]
Hannah Taylor-Johnson, who started knitting to cope with her grief over her dad’s death, gathered women’s stories of loss and how fibre arts helped them weave a different story.
Read more: cbc.ca/1.7218224
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