Things I Did This Week: Started a Journal, Moved My Notes to Notion, Registered for a Knitting Conference
This week was about getting my thoughts organized and as such, as I continue through secondary research.
A Brief List of Things I Did Last Week
- Reflected on my feedback from my midterm presentation
- Went on a hunt for a knitting fairytale (no hits yet)
- Registered for the virtual Vogue Knitting Live event in December
- Read two chapters of Making is Connection
- Read a new essay by Nina Lykke
- Started a journal to keep track of my own thoughts about knitting
- Put two more rows on my sock yarn blanket
- Finished most of the Hayley’s Comet Shawl I started
- Received a knitter’s oracle deck that I ordered from Wild Hunt Design
- Placed a small yarn order from Neighborhood Fiber Co. (stainless steel core for the win!)
- Emailed Tega and Scott to meet and talk about some of my ideas.
I am trying to keep in mind that I could be making something for my final deliverable next spring. As such I wanted to expand my knitting skills.
I was looking at attending Vogue Knitting Live’s in-person event that was set for January 2022 in Times Square.
This week, they announced that they wouldn’t be holding the event, so I decided that I would instead invest in a package for the virtual event in two weeks making sure I selected courses that would challenge me.
Additionally, there were several lectures offered including one about knitting myths.
My final registration consists of four classes and three lectures including everything from fiber production from mills to needles and how to play with color to create striking patterns.
It is my hope that that weekend will give me some new perspectives about how I could use my skills for my thesis.
This also has me thinking about my own personal knitting journey.
I’ve purposefully left myself out of this project right now while I was doing my literature review. I am still reading and still connecting, but I am realizing that I can’t leave myself out of the overall work. So I decided to start keeping a journal.
My hope is that this journal will focus on my habits and thoughts around knitting but if I am honest some of the other things happening in my life will probably bleed through.
I am okay with that, but I do feel like I have to capture these thoughts as they are occurring to figure out where I am going with this project.
Some notes on folklore and handcrafts from “The Folklore of Small Things”
This week I happened upon a short essay by Willow G Mullins that appeared in an anthology entitled, Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies.
In the essay, Mullins talks about how we do a disservice in keeping folklore separate from general conversation and recalls an encounter she had with some women in an airport about knitting modalities and sewing and the like.
It also points out how constructing communities around craft presents a problem for folklorists.
“If one of the initial problems that folklorists have had with the internet lies in the constructedness of its communities and folk forms, then those groups and art forms that are too close might also fall outside the spectrum of visible scholarship. Perhaps there are times we cannot escape the weight of our own cultural histories and social order enough to see the processes of production, or perhaps there are times we choose not to.”
It also hit home in a way, because we’re cleaning out my grandparents' house and we are finding all these small cross stitch samplers my grandmother made. We don’t have the capacity to store these things but Mullins offers a perspective on the things we create.
The bulk of the perceived value of a sampler lies in the object’s longevity. The very smallness of the sampler, however, also has value. It shows us that we have replaced instruction in stitching alphabets with instruction in phonics. It shows us how our culture genders education and how that education, in turn, genders our children. It reveals an individual creative mind at work in the shapes of the letters, the pictures drawn in the margins. The trick, of course, is to see the value in the small things now.
Engaging with The Knitter’s Oracle by Wild Hund Design
An adjacent and almost entirely different obsession of mine is tarot cards. I’ve done a digital and a tactile project with tarot cards while in my program and I am working as a GA on a wearable card study.
I found this on Kickstarter and investigated the website. This deck is 36 cards that basically follows the major arcana of tarot with the lifecycle of a knitter and archetypes for each.
The deck is designed to be used for anyone, not just crafters, but the designer of the deck admits that the cards may have a narrow interpretation.
I am looking forward to playing with these a little bit more this week and seeing what I may be able to gleam from it.
A List for This Coming Week
- Meet with Tega and Scott
- Finish reading The Power of Knitting and Making is Connecting
- Finish knitting my Hayley’s Comet shawl
- Select new pattern and record my observations
- Review catalog from Cornell’s witchcraft collection and see what could be of use
- Further familiarize myself with the Knitter’s Oracle cards
- Read essay by Nina Lykke on cyborg goddesses
