Sunday Read: With Her Own Hands by Nicole Nehrig
It began with a blue ball of yarn and a beginner’s kit - but for Nicole Nehrig, the act of knitting was more than a craft. It was a lifeline, a quiet reckoning, and eventually, the inspiration for her new book, With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories.
Part memoir, part cultural history, and part feminist manifesto, Nehrig - now a clinical psychologist and lifelong knitter - delves into the profound role textile work has played in shaping women’s lives across centuries and continents. From embroidery and quilting to beadwork, weaving, and knitting, she shows how these so-called “domestic” tasks have long served as vital forms of self-expression, survival, protest, education, and community-building.
Portrait of Nicole Nehrig. Source: Nicole Nehrig
In seven deeply researched chapters, Nehrig draws from anthropology, literature, science, politics, art history, and personal experience to reveal how women have made meaning - and remade their identities - through fibre. This “women’s work,” she argues, was often born from necessity and constraint. It was compatible with the rhythms of domestic life and often used to instil obedience, patience, and silence. Yet paradoxically, it also became a source of agency, imagination, and resistance.
With Her Own Hands is a book that challenges how we view craft. Nehrig reminds us that textile work was never simply decorative or trivial. It has been a carrier of cultural memory, a critical source of financial independence and social mobility, and a vessel for storytelling in societies where women’s voices were often suppressed. Stitch by stitch, women have passed down knowledge, comforted one another, marked grief, and celebrated joy.
Andean weaver. Source: Nicole Nehrig
From Native American beadwork and Chinese story cloths to Quechua weavers in Peru and the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, With Her Own Hands honours global traditions and gives voice to the countless women who stitched their stories into cloth when they had no other medium. These textiles speak not just of utility, but of heartbreak, hope, loss, and resilience.
Uterus Cowl by @loveisinthemaking, as knitted by Nicole Nehrig
Woven through these broader narratives is Nehrig’s own story - knitting her way through divorce, motherhood, and the strange silence of lockdown. In her hands, the personal and political threads are inseparable. Whether she is sewing a toy for her child or unpicking the history of textile protest, the message is clear: craft is not just about making things - it’s about making meaning.
Enhanced by eight pages of colour illustrations, With Her Own Hands is both scholarly and deeply personal - a warm, generous celebration of women’s lives, told through the textures and threads that have shaped them. It invites us to see textile work as a powerful, enduring language and a legacy stitched through generations, with care, courage, and creativity.
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Further Information:
With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories by Nicole Nehrig will be available from 19 August 2025 W.W. Norton & Co.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Cover Image minus title and author text from 'With Her Own Hands' by Nicole Nehrig. Featured on the book design by Anna Knighton.