The craft gene

The idea that ‘craft’ is overwhelmingly a female preoccupation must be almost culturally hardwired, I think – sometimes even in feminists like me. My mother knitted and sewed well, and made most of my clothes when I was a child, but she never did ‘fancy work’, as she called embroidery and the like. Her mother had been partial to a spot of fancy work, though, and for ages I assumed I must have got my love of craft from this grandmother I never met. It was only a few years ago that I realised that my own craft gene comes much more strongly from my father than anyone.

Mum was only really interested in practical, wearable craft rather than decorative, and she stuck to knitting and sewing alone. Dad, on the other hand, was creative, imaginative and experimental. Things he designed, built and made for family and friends over the years included at least three houses, innumerable pieces of furniture, wood carvings, dozens of examples of wood turning, two intricate spinning wheels and a nine-metre yacht. He once made about a dozen boxes of decorative edging tiles for garden beds, packing the clay into a mould he’d carved himself, then firing it god knows where or how. When he decided our roof needed a skylight, he replaced some of the terracotta tiles with fibreglass ones that he’d made. I still use the five different-sized chopping boards he made for me twenty years ago, and the dining table he made me has been my most treasured possession since he unexpectedly arrived one weekend with it tied to the top of his car.

He was always pottering in his workshop, fiddling about with new projects, usually to do with wood and/or boats. He encouraged Mum’s and my interest in textile crafts, and even though he jokingly referred to our evening craft sessions as ‘the sheltered workshop’, I knew that his interest was genuine.

Some of his ideas were interesting variations on the standard – when I was little he made me a rocking duck rather than a rocking horse. Others looked better than they performed – such as his wooden wine goblets, which were appealingly rustic but made any wine taste like savagely overoaked chardonnay. Some of his other ideas were just off the wall. Soon after I learnt to crochet he decided it would be amusing to get me to make crocheted booties for the family corgi, to prevent her claws from damaging the decks of our boat. I thought it had to be a joke, but he persisted in suggesting it, and even bought some sturdy leather from which I could make the soles of the booties. Even at the age of twelve and in the first flush of my love affair with craft, I knew the whole plan was ineffably naff. In the end the dog solved the dilemma for us by dying (possibly of embarrassment).

Occasionally his lack of taste and fashion sense came in handy. It meant he was happy to sport such things as a tie that I made him when I was about twelve. For years he wore it to what passed for formal occasions in our family (of which, mercifully, there were few, given that the tie was crocheted in gold-flecked olive wool).

So it's to my dad that I owe my craftiness and my occasional bouts of dubious taste. He also passed on his procrastination gene – but that's another story.