Have you ever heard of human knitting?
It’s a knitting technique where you use people instead of needles.
We thought it would be a lot of fun to do this as our first workshop in the Elpida camp.
So we started with gathering donated clothes from the warehouse that were ripped, stained or otherwise unusable. From these inappropriate clothes we started cutting string, together with the kids.
It’s quite the scene.
Seeing the small children with huge scissors, obviously still needing to figure out how to properly use them, is fantastic. You sense that they all love to work with tools for “grown ups”. They all get a good hour training their hand-eye coordination. We get perfectly cut rows, or rows with a messy character. All is good.
From the rows we start making balls of string. Some kids just like to cut, others challenge themselves to make the biggest ball, others like to unwind balls that have already been made. We end up with footballs, volleyballs, jumping ropes.
We try to make the big knit, and the diversity of size makes us all laugh, as we go from 1,85m and huge hands, to 1m and tiny hands, the knit gets an interesting structure, not to mention some kids running out and other wanting to join. Once finished, the knit serves as a robe, a hammock and even a train.
The kids run around like cats, chasing balls of string. After finishing up we realize how big the world can be when playing with just a piece of fabric. And we imagine how string theory may well have been inspired by chaotic cat games.
We want to thank Guillaume Lopez for the wonderful pictures!