One night, just before the start of the 2020 remote fall semester, Ruby Lowery ’21 thought “I’m going to create a blanket.”
This idea would become the Smith Covid-19 blanket, a year-long undertaking by Smith Stitchers, the knitting club that Lowery founded with Natalie Mosher ’21 in 2018.
“It happened very fast,” says Lowery of the club’s formation. Their sophomore year, she walked into the Office of Student Engagement, and was told that another knitting club, the Fiber Folk, had existed and become inactive. They were still within the two-year period in which another student could pick it up. All they needed to start the club was a president, a treasurer and a single member.
So, like adding rows of stitches to a half-finished scarf, Lowery and Mosher picked up where the last person had left off. Lowery became President, Mosher became Treasurer and they changed the group’s name to that of an alumni Facebook page, hoping that it would make the purpose of the club a little more obvious.
At first, their meetings were small knitting circles in the basement of Helen Hills Hills Chapel. Membership grew when they reserved a room in the Campus Center, when students stopping for an evening mudslide or leaving the Red Room after studying would pass by and see them knitting through the glass windows.
By Lowery and Mosher’s junior year, tens of students were meeting every week, sitting in small groups in the room in the CC, chatting and knitting. Some students were experienced knitters with complicated projects; others were new, looking mystified as their yarn tangled in their hands. When that happened, one of them would make their way over to offer assistance.
They’re seniors now, and the club no longer attracts passers-by, although around 20 dedicated knitters still show up week-to-week. “We have to be a lot more intentional with how we engage with people,” says Lowery. “It’s harder to join a Zoom meeting.”
Over the remote semester, Smith Stitchers has had to navigate changing dynamics of the collective and the personal. Gone are the days of self-selecting groups to sit in. The meetings, says Lowery, “have to be something that people can participate in collectively, or people aren’t going to show up.” Likely in response to this, people reach out to Lowery individually more often than ever before, usually over the Smith Stitchers Instagram, where she keeps the story feature filled with inspiration in the form of other fiber artists’ work.
But even with Zoom, Instagram, Discord and Smith Stitchers’ other efforts at keeping its knitters connected, the work itself has still become more individual. “Usually,” says Lowery, “there’s a sense of community that is different from other clubs. There’s a very… almost intimate connection that you have with people that is completely lost over Zoom, because suddenly you can’t reach and hold the same material that someone is using.”
She and Mosher have still managed to teach some students to knit, although it has been more difficult. It is mostly frustrating not to be able to see the other person’s hands. “In person,” she explains, “I would just be able to catch it and be like, ‘Oh, it’s this way. Not that way.’”
It was this loss, this inability to connect physically, that was motivating Lowery when she thought of the blanket, “a project that everyone can feel like they’re equally contributing to.” Until the end of December, everyone in the Smith community – students, alumni, faculty, staff – is invited to mail Lowery a square. The only requirement is that it be smaller than 10 inches by 10 inches.
When the quilt is finished – hopefully by the time the class of 2021 is graduating – it will be donated to the college. Lowery is still debating on where, exactly. She says, “I feel conflicted about it because I’m an Archives concentrator. I want to donate to the Archives because it’s part of the college’s history. But at the same time, I want to make sure that it’s displayed.”
It is important to Lowery that the blanket is visible on campus. “We didn’t all get to be on campus,” she explains. “Likely, we won’t next semester, or at least not all of us. […] I’m a senior, so that means that my time on campus is sort of over. So where’s my impact?”
If this year’s students weren’t able to be on campus, then someday their squares of the blanket will be, telling the story of why.
To Lowery, knitting is a perfect vessel for the recording of history. “There’s such a large history of women making quilts together,” she says. “Fiber art has to do with how we think about women’s history and remembering certain events that are hard to talk about. This blanket is going to give lots of information indirectly about what people were doing during the pandemic.”
Lowery thinks back to how she really began to knit. Though she grew up around knitters, she didn’t become a serious knitter until her freshman year at Smith. It hadn’t seemed important; her mother and her grandmother made things for her. Then, her grandmother got sick. “She couldn’t knit anymore. She had Parkinson’s, so her hands shook and she had a very hard time accessing her memory. All of a sudden, this person who was so important to me was losing something that brought her so much joy, which was painful to watch. It became very important to me that I learned.”
“I’ve had this conversation with members of Stitchers so often,” she goes on. “The story of how people learned to knit and who taught them can be a very emotional one. It is often people’s mothers or grandmothers. It’s common for people to have complicated relationships with those who taught them how to knit. But it brings joy and love. I think there’s something so feminist about it. [Knitting] is so overlooked and underappreciated. People don’t think it’s an art form you can get anything out of, but it’s been connecting women to each other for so long.”
Smith Stitchers has certainly connected its members. At an event in October, a mix of over 30 current students and alumni met through Zoom to knit together. The meeting ran well over its normal hour-long time as multiple generations of Smithies bonded through knitting.
Years from now, maybe, someone else will run Smith Stitchers, or if not, a student will walk into the OSE and ask about re-starting the knitting club. Years from now, somewhere on campus, a student will stop and look at a blanket that is telling a story about something that happened to somebody else. Years from now, someone will be telling the story of how they learned to knit, and they will describe sitting in their bedroom, or at the family computer, as someone else talked to them through a screen, patiently explaining the motions, even though she couldn’t see their hands.
