Things I Did This Week: Formed a Reading Group, Finished a Shawl, Read About Mindful Knitting, and More
Highlights from this Week:
- Set up a reading group with myself and three other students who are all interested in wearable technology
- Unraveled an old project and salvaged three bags of tiny balls of yarn to be used on the sock yarn blanket.
- Found projects with interesting geometry to study and observe
- Ordered a spinning wheel
- Read “Unraveling Knitting”
This week has been a lighter week in terms of reading, but I’ve been processing a lot of thoughts from my personal knitting practice and trying to take stock of what really enamored me with the craft.
While I did read a few articles this week about materiality and mindful knitting I feel like I needed to spend a little bit of time just taking stock.
Behind the scenes this year, my family is getting ready to downsize and that means cleaning out closets. One of these closets held some projects that I hadn’t touched in a while.
One of them was a blanket that was designed to be made modularly but over the course of the last ten years, I realized that it just wasn’t practical to finish it because it would never get used.
This project, known as the “Beekeeper Quilt” was a craze started in 2011 to 2012 and I liked the project because it allowed me to take tiny applications of knitting around with me.
My thoughts as I was unraveling this project (yarn to be used in another scrap blanket project) aligned well with one of my readings this week.
Unraveling Knitting: Form Creation, Relationality, and the Temporality of Materials examines time and knitting as it relates to materials. Here are a few of my takeaways
1) Part of why knitting folds into women’s work is because it fits cleanly with other household tasks.
“A historically gendered activity such as knitting that can be executed parallel to the requirements of everyday life needs to be interruptible. Put differently: knitting is only suitable for inclusion into everyday life because it is easily interruptible and spatially unbound.”
This quote for example aligns with the research I’ve read so far about the history of knitting. It’s also why I myself gravitate towards knitting because it’s portable. It allows for me to pack something to do that I find relaxing while not having to worry about a lot of side equipment.
2) Knitting and making take a toll on the body and sacrifices time and space.
Making in the context of knitting does not only imply a “correspondence between maker and material” (Ingold 2013:xi; emphasis added), but also a sometimes conflicting confrontation of the knitter (or his or her body) with materials and tools as well as the tempo-spatial and social environment.
There’s an idea in knitting communities that some of your friends are knit-worthy and others aren’t. Arantes details a number of people who have knit for others in different respects.
I am curious about how other knitters view their relationship to their materials and what they’re doing with their finished objects.
More things that I worked on this weekend.
I worked a bit on this sleeve for a Brandied Cherry sweater that I started in November of 2018! My goal for next week is to finish this so it can actually not be in pieces.
This is the Spring Cleaning Shawl by Stephen West. The sections I’ve been working on so far have been made with scrap yarns and it’s knit modularly so it allows me to explore shaping in different directions. Each section has informed how I may shape a future project.
