Give us a clew: Solving fictional crime through the adaptive popular mediums of knitting and sewing

Abstract

<p>Perhaps it is apt that people who knit and sew are drawn to solving puzzles, including fictional and actual crimes. The word clew is an archaic spelling of our modern-day clue. It is derived from the old English cliwen or cleowen, meaning a ball of thread. It may also be a nod to the ball of yarn that Theseus used to escape from the minotaur’s labyrinth in Greek legend. Without his clew, Theseus would have no clue how to escape the labyrinth. Its modern-day association with detective work first began with Edgar Allen Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin who followed ‘clues’ to solve his crimes and was popularized by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. In the past, and more recently fictional and reallife detectives follow clues to solve crimes, and many of them are crafty. This article considers how adaptative the mediums of knitting and sewing are when they are freed from their utilitarian or creative purpose and instead becomes a device to solve crimes.</p>