I Crocheted Before It Was Cool.

Like most Soviet children, I was raised by my grandmother. She was born before the World Wars, grew up in a village, knew how to do anything by hand. Crocheting, knitting, sewing, cross-stitching, embroidering, weaving, glueing, mending socks — anything there was to keep my small hands busy, I did. Even then, I already had a profound appreciation for the long, peaceful hours of crafting in silence.

I picked up my crochet hook again decades later, in 2017, while living in Vancouver, BC. Muscle memory is a hell of a thing — “and for everything else, there is YouTube”, my friend Katharina encouraged. I soon discovered my cosy corner of the internet called #crochetersofinstagram. And not just crocheters: all granny-grade handy crafts were experiencing a massive renaissance, this time with the help of social media and a GenZ perspective. Fresh colours, themes, and styles inhabited the same old crochet stitches, macrame knots and embroidery techniques while becoming a lot more daring, experimental, and age-gender inclusive.

In 2024, crochet fashion has walked the Fashion Week catwalks for most major brands all around the world.

I have the deepest respect for the traditional, the manual, the tedious, the complicated, the highly technical, the physically draining, the irreplaceable and innumerable crafts that women have been perfecting and passing from generation to generation for tens of thousands of years. It is thanks to them — and now us, the fibre artists of today — that these skills continue to thrive, and through that define the visual history of our time in no small way.

The crafts transcend. The hands remember. This is my tiny contribution to the eternal yarn our ancestors had been spinning — and our descendants will continue to spin, for the rest of time.