Four years ago, it was The Master, Amy Hungerford, a new master at the time, who hired
Martindale as a knitting teacher and manager. Everyday at Yale, Martindale can use her
own creativity and appreciate the creativity of others. And if she wasn’t working at Yale
as a knitting teacher, she would learn to become an architect. She would make bigger,
chunkier pieces fit together as she does with chunky yarn.
Martindale is both a student and teacher in her own knitting studio. Students.
They get all excited, they work and then come the midterms and they drift away and then
they come back again. They will come back and they will say their project is in a big ball
in the corner of their room collecting dust and its all tangled and sometimes they just
need to shake it off, rip out the whole thing, and just start over with Martindale’s help.
But it’s the students who push Martindale. They have a relationship of mutual respect.
One student unexpectedly came to her studio to learn how to knit. He, David, thought that
he could find a faster way of knitting. He came back to class and taught Martindale
combined continental, an unusual technique of knitting he found online, and he went
from knitting a scarf to making gloves, hats, and more just over Christmas break. He
made a sweater with his own pattern so complicated that Martindale had trouble figuring
it out. The two send pictures of their creations to each other.
“Physics majors love weaving,” said Martindale. They come to the weaving
studio to make something creative and colorful, to do something different from their
everyday interaction with the scientific community. And using physics, they are able to
build and create woven cloths that stand out. Sometimes they build the actual machinery
for weaving. In addition to being a knitting teacher, Martindale is also a student at the
weaving studio in Morse-Stiles College. Master Hungerford played an influential role in
swaying Martindale to the weaving side. Master Hungerford’s grandfather had been an
expert weaver and had even made some of the looms in the weaving studio that’s existed
forever. Martindale and Master Hungerford both decided they wanted to get involved in
the weaving studio, and both had daughters that wanted to learn as well.
Spinning
—
the art of making string
—
was what fully captured Martindale’s
interests in weaving. While her expertise lies in knitting and spinning, spinning furthered
her appreciation for yarn. While pursuing a knitting project, Martindale realized that the
characteristics of art yarn, or decorative string, get lost in the making of the stitch. It’s
lumpy and hard, chunky but beautiful, and you can’t knit a sweater with it, but it has
other uses. And weaving, weaving is complicated.
