When the makkin’s mostly in the sprettin: unravelling form in words and wool

Unwriting’s ‘deliberate act of unravelling’ is familiar to any knitter, along with the pain and promise it can hold. As well as a textile-making process of interlocking loops, the English verb ‘to knit’ means ‘to link firmly or closely’ or ‘to cause to grow together’ (Merriam-Webster 2024). In Shetland, a knitter unravelling her ‘makkin’ (knitting) is ‘sprettin’, meaning ‘to burst or rip open; tear asunder’ (Christie-Johnson 2014: 85; Velupillai, forthcoming). In English we ‘tink’, or knit backwards. Whether it is a violent ripping into fragments or a methodical undoing into one spiralling thread (Alison 2019: 161), un-knitting, like unwriting, opens up both the form and surface design of the work at once. Writing about the multifaceted experience of cognition, Jean Lave (1988: 98-99) observes ‘it is probably never the case that only one thing is going on at a time…I can read and knit at the same time…Knitting is a structuring resource for the process of reading and reading provides structuring resources that give shape and punctuation to the process of knitting. They shape each other’. This paper explores the use of knitting and writing as ‘structuring resources’ for each other, taking the moment of ‘sprettin’ as one of potential rather than correction, part of an improvisational process of making (Carden 2022) that finished work (whether textile or ethnographic text) often sets out to obscure.