Spells in the Stitches

There has always been a little witchcraft in knitting.

How else do you explain the way yarn multiplies in the stash as if by moonlight, or the ancient curse that says gifting a boyfriend sweater is the surest path to heartbreak?

Even the most practical among us will admit that second sock syndrome feels less like poor motivation and more like a hex. We laugh, we frog, we swatch like we are warding off misfortune, but the truth is this: every knitter already lives inside a world of spells.

Our tools may not be wands, yet the needles click and conjure all the same.

According to Cecil Williamson, “West country (U.K.) witches retain a strong Celtic tradition in much of their spell making incantations, such as repeating a thing over and over and over again. So using witches’ knitting needles (which must be blunt, thick and made of glass), they repeat the spell stitch by stitch. When the spell is regarded as being real strong the knitting is taken off the needles and burnt.”

But before needles clack or spindles whir, we sense the power in fabric. Textiles warm us, they conceal us, they declare who we are. They can even change us.

Elizabeth Lee’s essay A Spell on the Industry suggests something striking. As women became more visible in the textile economy, they also became more visible in the courts of witchcraft. Between 1580 and 1650 accusations soared at the same time that women crowded into weaving rooms and dye houses. By 1604, more than half of all weavers were women. In Florence, eight out of ten women who listed an occupation worked in textiles. And that connection between women and transformation made neighbors uneasy.

Textiles also stirred anxiety because they were not only useful. They were transformative. For the first time, ordinary people could buy more than bare utility. Fashion emerged as a restless, unsettling force.

The very word “fashion” began to mean counterfeit or pervert. If a farmer’s wife wore silk, how could one tell who belonged where? Clothing was dragged into the same atmosphere of suspicion. It could lift you into new status or mark you as dangerous.

The theater made this power obvious. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth was never called a witch, yet her promise to dash the brains of her child and her role in regicide echoed the same fears.

A woman who twisted the roles of wife and mother became unnatural. A woman who bent the rules of authority threatened the very body politic. Audiences understood. They were already seeing their neighbors accused for less.

Authorities worried too. King James himself saw witchcraft as treason, a direct refusal of his earthly authority. If a woman could subvert her husband at home, what was to stop her from unraveling the monarchy?

This fear of domestic rebellion was one of the reasons the household became such a contested space. Women were meant to keep the hearth and produce children. When infants died, midwives were accused of witchcraft. When crops failed, the spinner or seamstress was accused of malice. Even everyday household roles could become evidence of unnatural feminine behavior.

The danger was not only that women worked. It was that they worked with objects tied so closely to identity. Cloth lived against the skin. It carried memory. The idea that clothing held secrets was not metaphorical. In New England, dresses were admitted into evidence. In Renaissance London, sumptuary laws tried to stop people from dressing “above their station.” But enforcement was patchy.

Of course, not every witchcraft case was about gender. Men were accused, too. But as Christina Larner wrote, witchcraft was not a gendered crime, it was gender specific. Suspicion clung to women. It clung because women shaped the very stuff of identity.

And here lies the feminist resonance. To demonize a woman for spinning or sewing was to strip her of authority over creation itself. Whoever holds the thread decides what will hold and what will unravel. That was too much power to ignore.

Yet society could not function without this labour. By 1700, women no longer seemed so threatening, not because they worked less, but because their work was too essential to deny. The witch hunts dwindled as industrial organization grew, but the memory lingered. It still lingers. Every time we speak of “women’s work,” we hear the faint echo of the accusations that once turned needles and distaffs into tools of suspicion.

The story does not end in the seventeenth century.

The Liberty Crochet Mural at A Woolen Affair in October 2025.

Today, the witch has been reclaimed. Feminism embraces her as a figure of rebellion. On social media she is everywhere, altar beside embroidery hoop, spell stitched into protest banners, quilts spread out as memorial.

In Scotland, a tartan has been designed to honor the women executed as witches, every thread count and color chosen to remember blood and ash. Textile magic never really went away. It simply waited for us to see it again.

And of course, knitting has its own quiet spells. To knit is to bind and release. It is to risk unravelling and to make pattern from chaos. It is, in its way, enchantment.

Which is why I think every knitter should go ahead and embrace their inner witch. You already practice a little sorcery every time you pick up the needles. You conjure warmth, beauty, identity. You bring something out of nothing but a strand of string. That is power worth claiming.

So next time you cast on, consider it an incantation. And if anyone asks why you are grinning like a witch at your work, tell them the truth. You are one.