Keep calm and carry on crafting

A black-and-white photo of seven women knitting in a London bomb shelter during World War II recently found its way onto my social media feed. It made me realise that when we can take control of something – even if it is just the stitches on our knitting needles – as everything around us is falling apart, our broken world feels like a much better place.

If that photograph had come with a soundtrack, it would have been a cacophony of screaming sirens and roaring fighter planes. But in the absence of the background noise, it’s the happy smiles of six of the women that are most memorable. And the seventh woman? She’s neither knitting nor smiling. She’s laughing with her head thrown back; she must have dropped a stitch or three.

There are many reasons why we turn to crafts in times of crisis, flooding Instagram with hashtags such as #coronacrafts, #isolationcreation and #quarantinecrafts. Apart from providing us with a distraction, crafts that involve repetitive motions, like