Sally Pointer, Experimental Archaeologist

Anne Merrow (0:04)

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I'm your host, Long Thread Media co-founder, Anne Merrow.

Sally Pointer is an archaeologist and textile artisan. She has a recent book called Nullbinding, It's Not Just Knitting, which presents the ancient yarn craft for contemporary crafters. Sally, thank you so much for joining me.

Sally Pointer (1:08)

My absolute pleasure.

Anne Merrow (1:10)

So I happen to be looking at what's called the red list, the list of heritage craft in the UK that are considered to be in danger of not being around too much longer. And while I was looking at it, I actually saw your name on there as a practitioner twice.

I saw you on there for both nullbending and also for processing bast fibers.

Sally Pointer (1:33)

Yes, that sounds right. Yes.

Anne Merrow (1:35)

So that's just remarkable to be on this list of preservationists of craft for two separate endeavors. Do they work together for you? Are they two separate passions or skills?

Sally Pointer (1:49)

Crafts tend to overlap.

If you ask anybody who's interested in crafts today, you'll find that people tend to be serial collectors of crafts. It's really quite rare to find somebody who only has one particular area that they focus on and those that do are often amazing practitioners. But most of us have interests in quite a lot of different things. When it comes to the heritage crafts, if we want to understand where crafts are going particularly in a sustainable fashion, it's really very valuable for us to have a sense of where they've originated over the more recent past, but over the distant past as well.

Lists like the Red List can help us focus on areas that are worthy of a little more attention. Things that used to be incredibly widespread, but are now at risk of becoming almost novelties because so few people are working on them. And I think that is one of the real strengths of working with things like the Heritage Craft Association and the Red List of Endangered Crafts, but also with wider heritage practitioners, because we can learn from each other, but we can find out where those overlaps are. And those overlaps are often inspiring and exciting, and they tempt us to go and try all sorts of other things out.

Anne Merrow (3:17)

It's so interesting that you talk about how heritage crafts inform the present and even the future. One of the things I notice about your book, Nullbinding, is how contemporary a lot of the crafts in their look. And when I think of Nullbinding, I often think of this sort of almost a Viking craft.

And yet some of the projects that you have in this book are just something that I would use every day. Can you tell me about what it is about Nullbinding that sort of calls to you?

Sally Pointer (3:44)

I love that it's so low tech.

You don't need anything more than, in most cases, a needle and some yarn. Sometimes you don't even need a needle, and sometimes you can even make the yarn as you go along, depending on what you want to work on. And because it's got such a long history, and in some parts of the world has remained a living craft through into the modern day, it allows us to interpret techniques that we can trace back over, in some cases, thousands of years.

Into objects that are still relevant in our incredibly fast-paced, incredibly disposable world today.

Anne Merrow (4:25)

You know, the subtitle of your book is It's Not Knitting, Nullbinding, It's Not Knitting. And I think for a lot of us, the first time that we come across nullbinding is the history of a particular Egyptian sock. A lot of people saw that as the first knitting, and it turns out that it's nullbinding. So there's been this kind of connection between nullbinding as resembling knitting and not being knitting for the whole time that I've known about it.

Sally Pointer (4:48)

Yes, you're absolutely right. Frequently, when people are trying to describe what nullbinding is to people who've never come across it before, they'll say things like, well, well, it's a bit like knitting, but it isn't. And it's a bit like crochet, but it isn't. Or they might say, well, it's a precursor to knitting and crochet, which sort of implies that it becomes knitting and crochet. And it doesn't. It's a standalone craft in its own right, probably with more connections to knots and knotted structures than it is to the loop through loop structures that we see within knitting and crochet. But it has in some areas been referred to as things like Viking knitting, which it's a shorthand and it's an understandable shorthand, but it doesn't really describe the incredible breadth.