Days, not hours

A friend once asked me, casually, how long it takes to make one of our cardigans. I hesitated. The honest answer was longer than she expected, and I worried it might sound like a complaint, or a boast, when it was neither.

It takes days.

A small top, the kind a baby might wear for a season before it grows into the next size, can hold many days of one woman's hands. The yarn is wound, the gauge checked, the pattern read again and again. The first row is set. Then the next. Stitches are counted, undone, counted again. There is no machine doing the difficult part. There is no shortcut at the end.

Some of our pieces are hand-knitted, some hand-crocheted. The two are not the same craft, and the women who do each have spent years, often decades, training their hands toward one or the other. A hand-knitted raglan with a ribbed neck might take a maker most of a week, worked in the rhythm of her own day — between meals, between grandchildren, between the kettle going on and off. A hand-crocheted romper, with its closer, denser stitch, will often take longer still.

And then there is the embroidery. Ours is never small, and it is never flat. A single motif — a sprig of berries, a leaf, the little wave that runs along the Black Sea pieces — is built up by hand, stitch over stitch, until it sits proud of the cloth. You can feel it under a fingertip. A child can find it in the dark. This kind of embroidery takes hours on its own, often worked separately from the knitting, by a different pair of hands trained for it. It is the slowest part of a slow thing, and the part that, years from now, when the garment is folded into a drawer for the next child, will be the first thing someone reaches to touch.

There is, of course, another way. A machine can knit the body of a small jumper in minutes — which is why a baby's cardigan can cost the price of a coffee. There is no judgement in that; most of us, at one time or another, have dressed our children that way. But a machine cannot pause. It cannot tighten where the wear will be, or ease where the neck will turn. It cannot look at a piece halfway through and decide. And it does not last.

We chose this way of working from the beginning. Not because it is romantic — though it can be — but because it is the only way we know to make something that holds. Organic cotton and pure merino wool, worked by hand, become a kind of cloth that softens with washing rather than wearing out. The shoulders keep their shape. The cuffs fold without losing their edge. A garment made over days, by a woman who has done this her whole life, lasts in a way a garment made in minutes simply cannot.

I think about this often when I'm packing an order. The little romper in tissue paper began as yarn on a kitchen table in a village in Bulgaria. A woman whose name I know, whose mother probably taught her, worked it for the better part of a week. It is now travelling to a child she will never meet.

That, to me, is what slow means. Not a marketing word. A length of time, and a chain of hands.

— Dilyana