Purls of wisdom

which she knitted herself

with her sheepherder's hands,

two socks as soft as rabbits.

I slipped my feet into them

as though into two cases

knitted with threads of

twilight and goatskin ...

from Ode to my socks by Pablo Neruda

First, knitting must be encountered. Not via a shop-bought cardi or socks, but under construction, beneedled, falling from human hands. I was three when my sister came back, fresh from leaving husband, baby and all past life in Glasgow. She was 20, kitten-heeled, raven-haired and nobody's patsy. She was wired as a polecat. We had a single room full of a single sofa bed but Mum, 44 and soft despite herself, let her in.

It was not easy. A waitress by day, surrounded by colour, noise and cheerful young men, my sister grew restless and desperate, shut in with a three-year-old (me) and a mother with a serious dusting habit. Filing her nails to the quick, reading a novel a day, watching anything that moved on telly and chain-smoking didn't help. She needed something to do. Dear God, my mother sighed, polishing no dust off the mantelpiece, everybody needs something to do. Inexplicably, my sister came home one night with a pattern cut from a magazine and read it from start to finish. She chose knitting.

She got it from no-one. Granny Galloway was rumoured to have wielded a crocheting hook in her youth, but no-one living had seen her do it. Granny McBride, my mother's mother, was near-blind, 4'11" and an ex-dynamite worker, washed her kitchen down with bleach and repainted her front step every Friday even at 75, but arthritis and an inability to sit at peace ruled out gentle handiwork. Mum rethreaded broken necklaces, darned like a trouper and sewed well enough for most domestic requirements, but dropped stitches every time she cast on. My sister's instinct, however, proved sound. She knitted from the age of 20 till she died from emphysema, just 60, and still with wool on the go.

I can picture her in the armchair watching TV, book open on her lap, wool and fags laced with equal tenacity between her digits, knitting without looking, even through the ads because I watched it every night between bouts of homework. My sister knitted like men joined the Foreign Legion: to preoccupy, absorb energy and to forget.

She knitted as though she had fallen from a ship and was making her own lifeboat on the way down. She knitted for friends, friends of friends, relatives and strangers who turned up at the door with a pattern asking if her legendary local talent was for sale. Winter shawls and summer skinny ribs, coats, short Twiggy tunics and matching mohair boleros were warm-ups. Next came elegant skirt suits with Fair Isle cardigan tops for my mother – two in timber shades for autumn, two in crisp blues and greens for winter, and a lilac pastel for spring.

She rattled through Norwegian mittens, Aztec ponchos, Afro hats and loads of stripy tank tops with whatever colour balls were left over from more serious togs. She knitted a wedding dress, a cobweb baby shawl fine enough to pass through a gold ring, every grey V-neck pullover and skirt outfit I wore as school uniform till I reached secondary school and refused to wear them any more. I also have a vague memory of a knitted bathing suit from when I was five, which seems the likeliest reason I still can't swim. Knitted clothes were normal. Without the m, our wardrobes would have been sparse and heavily darned. I learned the difference between two-ply and DK at my sister's feet while rehearsing algebra without even noticing. I thought everybody did. I was wrong.

By the 1970s, such utility knitting, like going to Saltcoats instead of Marbella for your holidays, was naff. Why knit your fingers to the bone when you could buy machine-knits more cheaply in the shops? Buying meant modern, upwardly mobile, fashionable while making smacked only of austerity, the elderly and those too skint to afford better.

Knitting's history was nobody's enthusiasm: taken for granted, female, domestic and low-brow, the story of knitting and its relationship to human beings did not signify in the era of Glam Rock, and never had to academia. If it had once been a male-only activity from its beginnings in Spain and Egypt in the 11th century, then the biggest boom industry in Elizabethan England, making good money for hand-knitters whose stockings (with additional purl seams on request) were coveted by all classes in contemporary Europe till the spinning jenny put them all out of work some 200 years later, who cared?

If knitting had been how centuries of fishermen staved off boredom by crafting patterns into oiled wool jumpers that would either keep them alive and warm or identify their owners if they drowned, it no longer signified. A once-solid source of earnings for the poor, a former advertisement of domesticity in young women, a skill practised only by down-at-heel genteels in Jane Austen and George Eliot was now only a dead-end hobby for elderly women lacking the mobility or aspiration for anything else, or louse-haired, loony hippies. "Hand-knitted" came to mean only unstructured, clumsy, lacking in finesse, and wool shops went to the wall in their thousands.

By coincidence, this nadir of knitting's reputation was when I chose to take it up. Closing-down sales meant good wool going cheaply and I had a steady boyfriend prepared to be kitted out with V-necks by my inner need for traditional approval. Miss Currie, who taught domestic science at school, and insisted on sewing as opposed to knitting, since knitting led only to scarves and balaclavas, whereas sewing led to smart living-room curtains, may also have provided a spur. My sister it was then, her hands over mine (for once not to issue a Chinese burn) who showed me the ropes. Here they are:

1. Make 12 loops of wool round left-hand needle, knotting each in place as you go. Pick up right-hand needle.

2. Push RH needle through first loop on LH needle so its tip pokes out the back. Twist wool around LH needle near tip, then pull wool through to the front making a new loop. Drop old loop off the LH; retain new one on RH.

3. Repeat with all stitches to end. Swap needles and do it again.

4. After around 15 rows like this, stop and look at what you've got.

Knitting, that's what you've got. Those four steps are it. Close-up, my square resembled scribbled sea waves in a child's drawing, serpentine strings. This was garter stitch: springy, tight, elastic. It is made by plain stitch alone. Next, learn purl. Alternate with rows of plain to make stocking stitch – one side of solid waves crushed as tightly as buttons in a box, while the other side shows row after row of perfect tiny V shapes, snug as corset lacings or cress seeds germinating into sprouts. The wavy side was gruff, tenacious; the V side, smooth. Plain and purl were the basis of everything else, so I could stick here or keep learning new stitches that were, after all, only elaborations. I went for the second option and am still learning. Knitting, still, gives back more than it takes.

First, as Pablo Neruda's poem makes clear, is the feel of knitting, its texture under the hands. Traditional fleece – the excess hair of goats, sheep, musk oxen, rabbits, alpaca, vicuna, llama (or any other member of the family camelidae) – is washed, carded and spun finely for merino, cashmere, angora, camel hair and the rest. Animal yarn can also be blended with weaker vegetable fibres (bamboo, cotton, linen), with silk or even man-made stuff to vary its durability and feel against the skin.

In addition, sheep's wool is different depending on which breed the fleece is derived from: Cotswolds, for example, offer yarn as fine and coiled as baby ringlets, while Soay fleece (which need not be shorn but separates naturally from the undercoat) spins to be tight, springy and waterproof. Mara Mori, Neruda's knitter, seems to have chosen alpaca, which slips over the fingers like kidskin mixed with goose-down. Wool, especially now that "designer" wools announce knitting as "artisan" and "natural", are a sensualist's delight.

Second, knitting makes things. That's what it's for. With the simplest of tool kits (needles and a little patience), anyone can turn yarn into something, at the least a fragment of fabric where no such fabric existed before. And to make a thing that is more than the sum of its part is always, always exhilarating (almost as exhilarating as writing, which creates a tangible thing from intangible ideas).

Third, knitting accepts all. Neither age nor sex, neither tribe nor class, make a difference to the craft's willingness to surrender and do what it's told. Knitting exists in all cultures with traditions and patterns singular, yet connected by method. Like folk songs, the patterns of different countries show a hidden history, a world otherwise unrecorded, full of beauty, meaning and pathos.

Fourth, knitting is a blend of creativity, utility and care. You can tailor pieces as individually as you choose (my sister made my mother's suits in her favourite colours and to her exact instructions) or to suit an occasion – baby blankets, cushions etched with names or dates, socks patterned with family emblems. With experience, you can knit anything: flowers to furniture to wall hangings; toys to Christmas nativity scenes; lions' manes for cats, beards for boyfriends and packets of fags complete with glowing silk tips and mohair smoke.

Fifth, knitting can serve up moments of connectedness, even timelessness. Tom Leonard's poem "in hospital" arrived on a postcard when I was actually in hospital with my knitting beneath the bed as a comforter.

I like seeing nurse frieda knitting/ as I like watching my wife knitting/ as I liked watching my mother knitting ... knitting the future/ the present peaceful, quiet/ as if ... the same woman knitting/ for a thousand years

And sixth – let's call it the memory, the deepest, darkest kind there are few words for, that connects us even to those we thought we knew. When my mother died, I had three days to clear the house and get her keys back to the council: three days for a lifetime of stuff cramming corners, cupboards, shelves, drawers and mantelpieces. The oddness of the situation forced me to see through new eyes what she had retained, its preciousness somehow vulnerable, fragile, even naked. Figurines from Barnsley market, a Japanese teacup brought back by a POW that had been broken and glued with yellow strings of Evo-Stik, a blocky painting of a sunset she had insisted I make for her when I was 16.

I tumbled her pills and toiletries into the sink, gave up on the kitchen and living room and let instinct take me to her wardrobe. There were her Sunday hats: cloches, turbans, knitted snoods – a scarlet beret she had acquired somehow but had never been known to wear. Coats, wedding suits, pinnies. None was her enough.

Then I found it: the one thing I wanted, folded neatly in the top drawer of her dresser on a scented sheet that no longer retained any scent whatever. It was her favourite cardigan, a merino chocolate four-ply knit from one of the prized suits my sister, her eldest daughter, had knitted, its green and peacock Fair Isle yoke as fresh as the day it had been knitted to a close. Every stitch of it had passed through my sister's amber-tinted hands: it had pleased and afforded a little glamour to my mother. I could picture her in it, that smile women do for the mirror when they feel dressed. Part-mother, part-sister, it was held by those who made me.

And now it's mine. It lives in a tiny tartan suitcase tucked in beside my son's first cardigan, hot off the needles only a few weeks before he was born. It is knitted in plain garter stitch, striped like a rainbow, and fastens with buttons resembling daisies. I have photos of him in it, but the real thing is better, imprinted. Tangible. Some threads connect far more than the sum of their apparent parts. Let Neruda say it better.

And the moral of my ode is this:

beauty is twice beauty

and what is good is doubly good

when it is a matter of two socks

made of wool in winter.

You can join Janice Galloway's Knitting Circle at the Wigtown Book Festival on October 3 (noon) www.wigtownbookfestival.com

All Made Up, the second volume of her memoirs, is published by Granta, priced £8.99