The language of women

Writers’ lives, reading history, social commentary, knitting, handmade adornments, women who challenge convention: I love them all. The best work arrives out of the blue, aligning these favorite endeavors into one design project. Like this hand knit wrap I designed, currently published as a pattern in Interweave’s inaugural issue of Jane Austen Knits 2011.

About this time last year, my friend Figen, owner and designer of KB Knitting, and I were discussing adaptations of vintage clothing into contemporary knitwear. An editor at Interweave, a quality publisher of fiber art and craft magazines, posted a request for knitwear designers to submit hand knit items inspired by her favorite writer, Jane Austen.

No one really knows if Ms Austen was a knitter, but then in the days of Regency England (1795 – 1830) most females had probably been taught and were expected to knit, sew, embroider – some type of handwork to display their talent and wile away the hours. We were to imagine the characters of Jane’s novels and bring to life garments imagined from intricate tales of human interaction, family intrigue and romantic encounters in that rigid social structure.

I immediately thought of Turkish oya, the needle lace that women in Turkish villages created as a colorful, visual way to silently communicate with each other in a ‘language’ that only they understood. Like their Regency sisters, Anatolian women were expected to excel in weaving, crochet and needle lace in addition to their home and farm chores. I thought of the connections between the two cultures, at first glance very different, yet both with women who must learn to read social cues to survive in these insular worlds.

I chose Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey not just for the main character’s name Catherine, but because it’s a tale of missed cues, of non-verbal communication between Catherine, an elder daughter raised in a straightforward, huge rural family, and the confusing world of double-talking inhabitants in the much larger English town of Bath. She faces peer pressure fraught with body language and innuendo, and ends up expressing quite the wrong sentiments. If she’d been in a Turkish village, the oya she chose to wear could have signaled her mood, or whether she was even intent on marriage without ever opening her mouth.

Though I would have preferred to use KB Knitting’s richly colored cotton tweed yarns, this silk and wool lace wrap was inspired by the romantic appeal of Regency-era clothing: high-waisted, draped shapes that would not be out of place in Ottoman times. Both cultures used simple decorative inspiration from nature. Jane Austen’s characters used a torrent of verbal language in tangled stories of emotion and etiquette. Adding autumnal oya flowers to the body at the hood, itself a flirtatious way of covering the head, was my nod to the subtle language these needle lace floral trims conveyed about convoluted village life in my adopted Turkish homeland

It’s obvious that the designers represented in this issue, the first of many to come based on its sold-out status before it even reached newsstands, truly do love the work of Jane Austen. We’ve worked not just to present lovely garments, but to use fiber arts to bridge worlds, drawn from another era yet relevant to our own.

 All garment photos Interweave Knits

Digital and print copies are available here; be sure to check out the Table of Contents page! And if you’d like to add oya, you may buy it here.