Finger puppets

Here are some photos of finger puppets that we are practising to make right now. The patterns are from etsy designer Raynor Gellatly who designs very cute amigurumi with a finger puppet option for the body. The knitters are very happy to be working up the designs and enjoy watching the little critters slowly come to life in their hands.

The knitters are getting very proficient and confident at reading the patterns. Now we need to work more on improving the finishing, quality and consistency. I still need to find suitable stuffing. I might have mentioned before that basically NOTHING is available in Cambodia and I've had to order in most everything we need. The safety eyes are on their way from the US and I'll need to take a two day trip to Bangkok to find the stuffing and more tapestry needles.

So have a look at the pics, but know that these are just the start...

More pictures

My mother requested more pictures of the knitty knitters knitting. So here they are along with our lovely stash of yarn recently arrived from the USA. A big, big thank you to Ame for lugging it all back with her! Also, a picture of Meow being her usual weird self.

Birds birds birds

We are at the end of the second week of knitting. We've come far and here is a photo of some knitted birds made as part of pattern practice. The pattern comes from Claire Montgomery's book Easy Baby Knits, a wonderful book of simple patterns for 0-3 year-olds that I highly recommend for new or experienced knitters alike. Thyda is hard at work translating more patterns into Khmer so next week, I'll have even more to show you soon.

More exciting is that the yarn from the US arrives on Monday and we can start producing some things for actual sale! This will be very useful as we are a business and selling things contributes significantly to our success ;).

Knitting pattern in Khmer

Its been a long, tiring, but fun week. First of all, I present to you what might possibly be the very first ever knitting pattern in Khmer. I can not confirm that this is indeed the first (and perhaps that is rather unlikely) pattern to ever be written in the Khmer language. It is entirely possible that before the Khmer Rouge period there were books or booklets of patterns available at the markets. The history of knitting and crocheting in Cambodia is murky, but who knows what we'll discover on this journey. Still, none of the women working with me now have ever followed a pattern, let alone seen one.

A big challenge has been teaching them how to read and follow a pattern. An even bigger challenge has been figuring out how to write one! The knitters don't have language for all the terms that come up in knitting (things like garter stitch and moss stitch have no names, and terms for things like KFB, sl1k1psso are unknown). A knit stitch is referred to as stitch up and a purl, as a stitch down. Pretty much everything else we've been making up as we go along. When I say we, I don't actually mean me, except in the role of facilitator, encouraging the women to develop language that they can work with. For example, I explained that seed stitch is called so because it resembles seeds (or moss, if you call it that). In Polish is it referred to as rice stitch, again because of the resemblance. In the end, the knitters decided to refer to it using a Khmer word to describe a certain rice seed!

This is all very challenging, yes, but even more than that, its exciting! Exciting to be a small part in the process of creating a vernacular that can later be shared and passed on. Its possible that in the next few months, as we meet more knitters and hear more stories about how people learned to knit, that we'll come across some old pattern books or rediscover the lost language of Khmer knitting. If we do, we'll revert to using what is already there. Until then, we'll keep being creative and playing with stitches and words.

In the beginning there were four...

Just a quick one to post the photo of the first four knitters, hard at work learning combination style knitting.

it all starts on Monday...

So Monday is the day that we begin to knit, knit, knit. Up until now its been all about trying to find things and people. Now I have sufficient amounts of both to get Cambodia Knits on the road to actual production. The knitters are experienced in knitting but not in reading patterns, so that will on the top of the list of things that need to be learned. The knitting needles and yarn are all from the local markets and of very poor quality. OK enough to practice and play with, but not good enough to make anything for sale. Luckily, a friend has returned to the US for a couple of weeks and I've put in an order for several kilos of yarn that she can bring back. And I finally found a factory supplier in Beijing willing to sell in smaller quantities so the next order can be larger, cheaper and put our importing skills to the test.

It's very exciting to finally be at this stage! I'm looking forward to my living room being full of knitty chatter and experimentation. The apartment is going to be rearranged this weekend to make the space more "work-like" and comfortable for all of us. Finally, the full space of the apartment will be utilized (our flat is spacious to say the least). When we're ready to expand to more knitters and need a bigger office, we can move. For now, Cambodia Knits lives with me.

a long week...

The search for yarn continues. Thyda contacted all the garment factories in Cambodia that produce knitted products. Of the 16 I found listed, only one was willing to talk to us about buying extra stock of yarn that they might have laying around. I had visions of cones of multiple colours, wool, cotton, bamboo, all of suitable thickness that would be waiting for us to rescue them from the factory waste bins. I imagined getting a great deal on yarn we could practice knitting our products on, getting a feel for different textures before making a decision on what kind of yarn to go with.

There was no such luck... what I did learn and what I perhaps should have/could have figured out beforehand, was that factories that produce knit products do so with the thinest possible yarn, on machines, and that they rarely work with anything above a fingering weight yarn. The manager was very helpful and after looking at the samples I brought along, he called a few other knitting factories and the answer was the same at each: we have no such thing.

So its back to ordering from either US sites like Peaches and Creme or KnitPicks and asking some soon to arrive American visitors to stash as much as their baggage allowance will allow. The idea of importing several kilograms from China is all but dashed since all the factories I got into contact with have minimum orders of several hundreds of kilos... per colour!

Knitters found!

The radio ads, which have only been on for two days, have paid off. This morning I met with our first two knitters, sister's-in-law, who are happy to join our team. They come from a Cham community north of the city and are going to introduce me to other family members who also know how to knit, keeping things in the family is common in Cambodia and it will be good to hire knitters from the same community at the start of the project. I had a look at the samples that they brought and they are quite skilled and with a bit of training I'm certain we can start creating amazing things.

I found out that both of them had made handknit products for sale. One woman worked at a Chinese factory making handknit sweaters for 40 USD a month and the other woman had knit baby items for sale to a person who then sold them at the local markets. What was shocking was how much she was paid per item! For a pair of standard baby bootees, she earned 200 Cambodian riel. In USD thats 5 cents. 5 cents for at least 2 hours work!! The bootees were then sold at the market for 75 cents. The yarn was poor quality, but this is irrelevant. Thyda, my translator and right hand woman, told me there are a lot of 'business people' taking advantage of cheap labour in this way. The women who end up doing the work have no choice and feel that any income, however small, is better than none at all.

I hope we can provide decent and fair opportunities to more women like this in the future... bring it on!

searching and talking

Deep sigh.

This week, which is still a day and half (Saturday mornings are spent training Yeng's staff at NETPRO) away from being over, has been all about looking for things and people and about talking about things with people. I've driven around the city to all the markets, looking for someone who will import some worsted weight yarn for me. It seems not many market vendors are interested in doing anything other than what they are doing now, regardless of the opportunity for profit. This is interesting! I even told one vendor I would buy over a hundred pairs of bamboo knitting needles if he would source them for me. He yawned and waved me off.

I think I have a lot to learn about doing business in Cambodia...

I've spent countless hours online trying to find distributors in China (a major source of good quality yarn) but all I can get to are the factories and they need orders to be in the tonnes of yarn and I'm not quite ready for that yet.

Stitch by stitch

I guess at this early life stage of this blog it might be pertinent to explain why I am throwing caution to the wind and armed with only my enthusiasm and high expectations, starting a knitting co-op type social enterprise in Cambodia.

It all started when I was in Austria, a 6 year old child of a refugee family fleeing Communist Poland for a better life in Canada. Being so young, I didn’t fully understand the situation we were in, just that we weren’t home and were never going back. When my mother and sister started knitting hats and sweaters, I knew I had to get in on the action. I demanded to be instructed in the fine art of crochet and armed with a crochet hook and a string of yarn, I made my first chain. I was so proud of my creation, I wore it as a necklace and sometimes as a headband. Was my love of all things yarnish born then? Probably not, but I do remember the fascination and awe that stitch by stitch, a new entity was slowly created by my own two hands.

Stitch by stitch. That is what appeals to me most about knitting. It is a slow and laborious process, sometimes monotonous, always meditative, that results in an end product completely unlike what one starts with: two sticks and some yarn. Now, stitch by stitch I hope that I can help women in Cambodia improve their situations through fair, flexible and rewarding employment. Throughout the ages, women have clothed their families and kept them warm in winter, stitch by stitch, and now I hope that Cambodian women will have the chance to help their families (not with warmth, that’s not needed here), stitch by stitch.

Last month, I reentered the world of knit madness when I returned home for my father’s funeral. It was a difficult time, both sad and reflective. Getting back into knitting somehow helped me stay afloat in the emotional tsunami that lands shortly after the initial shock. It was a constant, a comfort, a connection to others. My sister, a knitting wizard, introduced me to Ravelry and the obsessive monster awoke, demanding to be fed more and more yarn, more patterns. It wanted to create, to clothe, to make things!

In the endless hours spent on the Internet looking at knitty things, I stumbled across an article about a woman who set up a small business in Bangladesh making high quality toys and baby knits for export. She’d started with $500 and four years later employs almost 3000 women. I was inspired and saw no reason holding me back from attempting something similar in Cambodia. I’ve never wanted to run my own business as making money was never something I was interested in. My driving force has always been ‘helping people’ at least trying to. I didn’t always know how to apply myself effectively to do that, nor am I a completely selfless do-gooder Mother Theresa type either.

I worked in NGOs for the past few years here in Cambodia and while that experience was rewarding, I’m hooked on the idea that social enterprise has the potential to reach more people, more directly with less strings (and reports) attached. Billions of dollars of aid have poured into Cambodia over the past decade and yet still the majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day with limited access to clean water, health services, or education. Creating jobs for people, helping them earn a decent salary in order to be able to access those things and aim for more… I’m betting its an effective way to ‘help people’ help themselves.

Which is key. Aid is often too much about handouts not enough about sustainability. (I’m reading Easterly’s The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good). So many well intentioned NGO projects have a life span of months or a few years. This is not enough to build anything long lasting and once the project support is pulled, the cracks begin to appear. NGOs should still have a large part to play, especially in advocacy, but I am less enthusiastic then in the past about how effective they can be in a country basically overrun by NGOs. (I could say so much more here, but maybe another installment).

So there will be no Knitting Unlimited, Cambodian Human Rights and Knitting Association or Knit for Peace. Not even UNKNIT. Instead Cambodia Knits will aim to become a profitable business not through grants or donations, but by creating and producing high quality products for sale locally, electronically and through worldwide distribution. I hope along the way we can add on things like preschools at the knit centers, scholarships, or even use profits to build wells, buy chickens or goats, seeds or whatever the women feel their communities need. The ultimate goal is not to enrich some far away investors who provide cash for returns but to enrich the lives of the women we work with.