Continuing our series on viewing habits in self-isolation, one writer has a ball getting lost in cabling and colourwork
It was 2015 and having just quit smoking, my last regular vice, I walked into a department store in Norwich in search of gym equipment. But instead of buying trainers or weights, I fell in love with the wall of yarn in the haberdashery department across the floor. In some primal, urgent way, I needed to have those balls and skeins of colour and texture in my life, variously fluffy or smooth, shiny mercerised cotton, variegated, solid in rich tonal hues, stippled with flecks of dye. Something about looking at those unwound packets of potential took me back to my childhood, to hours spent with my mom in suburban fabric stores choosing material for homemade clothes she made for me. Some of our happiest times were spent together weighing whether to buy, say, lemon- or saffron-coloured polycotton, the one with the daisies or the one with the Bridget Riley-style op-art pattern (it was the 70s), and contemplating which rickrack would coordinate best with our choice.
Tragically, I didn’t learn to sew from her, a terrible shame because she really knew her stuff having once worked in costume design on Broadway in the 1950s, but I must have picked some maker’s genes from her. She hated cooking so, autodidact that I am, I taught myself how to make a decent dinner by reading cookbooks myself from the age of 10 onwards.