“My aim in life is to learn how to make just about anything, and I love a challenge.”
Gem Bowes hand-spins rope in a workshop in Cambridge, one of very few people in Britain still doing it by hand. She works in cotton, flax and dead-stock yarn, and makes dog leads, doorstops and juggling balls. The dead-stock yarn is her favourite to work with.
The rope work came from Arthur Beale, the Shaftesbury Avenue chandlery that had been making rope and ship-fittings since the 1500s. Gem spent nearly seven years there and learned it on the shop floor, among the sailmakers' tools and brass blocks, in a building that had done the same job for four and a bit centuries.
Cambridge is home, born and raised. The leads are her steady seller, but she is happy to take on bespoke work. "I love problem solving how to make someone's design ideas a reality," she told me, "and I might regret saying this but I don't think any idea is too crazy!"
Rope-making is on Heritage Crafts' Red List of Endangered Crafts. Very few people still practise it in Britain, and almost none by hand, in colour, at this scale. The making is slow and physical: each strand measured, looped and twisted at the right tension, so the finished rope has a particular springy give.
Gem's training was theatre, not textiles. After a BA in set building at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, she spent three years on student and fringe productions in Edinburgh. The rope-making came later, at Arthur Beale on Shaftesbury Avenue, a chandlery whose history stretches back to the 1500s. She worked there for nearly seven years. That is where the splices, the lays, the eye-splice-stronger-than-a-knot all came from: rigging knowledge passed across a counter from the people who had been doing it the longest. When the physical shop closed, she took the knowledge with her, moved back to Cambridge, and set up Tightrope Knots.
Three fibres do most of the work. Cotton, hand-laid and dyed in colour, makes the dog leads and the juggling balls, with the give coming from how tightly it is spun. Flax is heavier and more traditional, off-white, thicker and a little hairier, and goes into the larger doorstops and the flax leads. Dead-stock yarn is the third: mill ends and offcuts of wool, linen and cotton, hand-blended so no two doorstops come out the same. The flax lead is the one she does not spin herself. That rope is made by Chatham Historic Dockyards, master ropemakers who have worked by traditional methods for more than 400 years, and Gem splices the lead from it. Everything else is hand-spun by her, in Cambridge, on a rope-walk that fits inside a workshop.
