You’ve got to love a knitted boob, don’t you? Or at least you do if you’re anywhere near the Outer Hebrides. Because you have little choice. There’s a whole mountain of them up there. In recent weeks, a group of local knitters – the Knit and Knatter group – have produced a bumper crop of 150 woolly bosoms for use in a government-funded breastfeeding campaign. They hope to reach a total of 250 boobs before the end of the month.
Produced in Tolsta Chaolais, a village of 40 houses on the Isle of Lewis, the boobs will serve as breastfeeding demonstration aids as part of a project across Scotland. Popular with midwives and health visitors, they are used to show the best way to get a baby to latch on properly and how to mould or hold your breast to get the nipple in the right position for the baby’s mouth. They’re also used to teach how to express milk and how to deal with problems like blocked ducts. As a one-time sufferer of mastitis – an inflammation that makes you feel as if you are going to die – I consider this intervention to be life-saving.
The initiative has raised eyebrows on the island, and one woman has bowed out of the experiment because she “hasn’t felt comfortable joining in”. In many ways, I don’t blame her. How do you even start to choose your contrasting colour for the areola?
But it’s already raising awareness, with one knitter reporting a local man’s perfectly sensible question: “Why would a midwife need to show someone how to feed a baby? Surely it comes naturally?” As anyone who has clamped a baby onto even the teeniest wrong bit of nipple knows, it’s just not that simple.
The use of knitted teaching aids has a noble history among midwives, long before it got its own Pinterest page featuring “knitted glove uterus” and “knitted placenta”. Ten years ago, I remember my first NCT teacher passing around knitted boobs and an elasticated handmade womb, through which she passed a doll with a very large head. Somehow, such aids are at once laughable, sobering and useful.
The idea of knitting for breastfeeding awareness brings together two trends: the craze for crafting (although it’s definitely not anything new for the ladies of Tolsta Chaolais) and the drive to promote breastfeeding. Despite long-term efforts, breastfeeding figures are static, with a slight drop in numbers reported in 2013. Funding for a national breastfeeding awareness week, which ran for 18 years, was quietly dropped four years ago. Now, it’s up to the grassroots – which is why the knitting needles are coming out.
The popularity of knitted demo boobs is matched only by the demand on Etsy for “boob hats” for babies, also known as “pro-breastfeeding caps”. These are knitted hats with a nipple “bobble” that you can pop on a baby’s head, so that when the baby is feeding it looks a lot like an actual boob.
Meanwhile, up and down the country, boobs are being requested by the NHS. From Ashton, Leigh and Wigan: “If you’d like to donate a knitted breast, we would be very grateful.” From Staffordshire: “Can you knit a breast for us?” Lanarkshire: “No need to be flesh-coloured. Your bosom just needs to be two-tone.” You can download a pattern from the Lactation Consultants of Great Britain (“Cast on six stitches ...”). All we need now is a celebrity mascot and a spin-off series. Kirstie Allsop’s Homemade Bosom? Claudia Winkleman’s Great British Sewing Boob? It’s only a matter of time.
