Knit me!

I was up in Edinburgh last week and took some time out to visit a delightful exhibition at the Dovecot Gallery on Infirmary Street. Called Taking Time, it is all about slowing down to appreciate traditional crafts. There is really cool knitting wall where you can add your own yarn-related piece of art. So I knitted a piece of Shetland Lace and left some instructions for continuing it with the address of this blog. So, if you find it and add to the wall, do post a comment and let me know! You can see some more images of the wall here:

Edinburgh Knitting Wall

AND WHAT'S WRONG WITH SCARLET?
In other knitting news I managed to complete a Debbie Bliss baby jacket with matching shoes for a work colleague who has just started her maternity leave. The jacket was fine but the bootees, which I have made before, caused me some grief. The knitting is straightforward but the sewing up does my head in. I really thought I'd cracked it this time and was feeling very smug when I completed the first shoe correctly. Then I made a mistake with the second one and had to unpick it. I managed this successfully with no snipping of a knitted stitch by mistake and set about re-doing it. By now time was running out as I wanted to hand them over before heading up to Edinburgh. So I carried straight on with it - and did it wrong again! At this point only a disappointed knitter can probably understand how distraught I felt. And of course, what I should have done was put it down for half an hour and come back to it later.

But of course I didn't. Carrying straight on, again, inevitably I snipped in the wrong place and cut through a stitch. Disbelieving AND distraught - not a good combination. The only way out was to carry on snipping, which I did with great satisfaction. And then sat right down and re-knitted and re-assembled the second shoe, finishing about midnight (the stubbornness of the Reece clan is legendary!) I won't say I can laugh about it now but I do feel satisfied that I carried on and completed the project. Hopefully the new baby will appreciate it!

I took some comfort from Elizabeth Zimmerman's words of wisdom in the February section of her Knitter's Almanac which is called "Some Babies' Things". She writes: "Although babies rarely, if ever, express their pleasure at being dressed in wool, it is surely manifest when you dote on a small plump person soundly and contentedly asleep" in it. My friend asked for bright colours - and I took her at her word. So I was pleased to note that EZ also suggests using darker and less delicate colours for babies, ending with "And what's wrong with scarlet?". Indeed - it looks good to me!

Scarlet Knitting

The Art of Losing

Feeling much better but it has taken a while. Didn't get back to work until the middle of the month and have definitely been pacing myself since. Jam Factory Knitters, I will come and see you again soon! There's a sense of time lost since that moment in the week before Christmas when I went under with my lurgy. For a while I just lay there and groaned and even when I began to feel better I still found myself spending an inordinate amount of time in front of the TV. Now I'm having to wean myself big time off repeats of House and CSI. The evenings are lighter and it's time to come out of hibernation. And the time hasn't been completely lost, of course, because I have been knitting - cables for my course and a baby jacket for a work colleague who has just started her maternity leave.
I've been musing on losing things this week because I seem to keep strewing my possessions about the place. I managed to leave a favourite scarf behind after the AGM of the Oxford Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, practically my first social outing of the year. And then, dashing between trains that were running late, I left behind a very useful hat and a pair of gloves. Fortunately, someone picked up my scarf and we were reunited, although not before I had a few choice words to say to myself about not keeping track of my stuff.
To err is human, however. After the pre-Christmas gathering of JF Knitters at my house, I was the richer for one black scarf, a cable needle and a box of stitch holders and markers. (If they are yours, please reclaim!) And I was once fortunate enough to meet the famous "Historian of Ideas", Sir Isaiah Berlin, who left his hat behind in my office. When his wife came to collect it, she said that it was deeply psychological and meant he wanted to meet me again. It was a nice thought, but I think he just forgot his hat!
Elizabeth Bishop, an American poet, wrote a wonderful poem, a villanelle, called One Art, which starts: "The art of losing isn't hard to master;/so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster.//Lose something every day. Accept the fluster/of lost door keys, the hour badly spent./The art of losing isn't hard to master.". If you don't know it, I highly recommend it. If it's not my favourite poem, it's certainly in my top ten. I really like the rhythm of the villanelle form and the way Bishop uses it in this poem. Laying out lines of poetry is not unlike creating rows of knitting as the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis, has observed.
Bishop's poem goes on to talk about losing houses, cities, rivers and continents. "I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster". Nor is loss of love, she concludes, although it looks like one. It's as if she's saying I can take that one on the chin too, although perhaps she doesn't convince is. Musing on all of this while the television screen has been full of images of the people in Haiti who truly have lost everything, it's hard to get too worked up about the odd hat, scarf or glove.

Feeling thwarted

Once again Christmas plans have been somewhat thwarted. Having started the year with Other Half on antibiotics for early-stage pneumonia, it's been my turn to be put on penicillin on Christmas Day. Fortunately, we were staying in Denmark with my doctor cousin Stella who decided to take action! We still managed to have a lovely Christmas with her and the family, which they weren't celebrating until the 27th December this year (so all the family could be together) - and we had lots of snow as well. Nevertheless, it's all been rather disappointing and I'm still feeling very weak.

Danes celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve and ours, on 27th December as I said, involved a traditional turkey meal at 8pm cooked by my cousin Caspar (although that was the English influence - Danish Christmas meal is usually roast pork or goose). Then there was the wonderful Christmas rice pudding with hot cherry sauce. A whole almond is hidden in it and if you find it you can claim a prize. The idea is to keep it hidden at first to encourage others to go on eating in search of it. The dedication of my nine-year old cousin Kjarthan in pursuit of this goal was truly amazing - he must have hollow arms and legs - although he did confess to having a slightly sore tummy afterwards. He duly received his prize - a big box of chocolates! After that we walked round the beautifully decorated and candle-lit Christmas tree (chopped down that morning) singing carols before opening our presents and eating more sweets. It all finished off about 2 am and not much activity was to be observed the next day. Usually things kick off a little earlier and end with a midnight walk but nevertheless it was all really delightful and a much better expression of Christmas than we seem to be able to muster in the over-commercialised, over-crowded UK, which greeted us with long delays on the M25 and a five hour return journey from Harwich, something we could have done without.

Anyway, that's it for 2009, which has been a strange mix of illness, bereavement and job struggles, alongside some really good travels and opportunities for creative expression. With knitting, it's sometimes felt like one step forward and two steps back, with lots of ideas for designing but not so much realisation of projects. I'm hoping that 2010 will see an increase in the latter as well as new approaches to work.

Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year and lots of inspirational knitting. Perhaps these decorative features at the entrance to the Natural History Museum in London will inspire us all!

Where did that last 6 weeks go?

Not quite sure how it has got to be the end of November! Last time I said I'd post some pics of my trip to southern Spain and here they are - lots of wonderful design inspirations from a weekend wandering around Seville and Cordoba under warm blue skies. I spent a delightful time virtually on my own in the Real Alcazar in Seville among wonderful blue and yellow tiles and water gardens. The trick, as advised by a seasoned traveller, is to be the first in the queue and walk right through to the final garden then work your way slowly back. That way you get about an hour to yourself before re-joining the tourist crowds. In Cordoba there was a miniature version of this Alcazar next to the famous Mezquita. If you are patient enough to work through the photos, do be sure to check out the Roman mosaics from the museum there. These are brilliant inspirations for cable patterns, which are my current City & Guilds preoccupation having moved on from Intarsia and Fair Isle work.

Seville and Cordoba

Since then the clocks have changed and we've plunged into an English winter. Despite the dark evenings I've been enjoying going up to the V&A on Tuesday afternoons to learn about Asian textiles. We've worked our way along the Silk Route from Japan to Turkey and are now in India for a couple off weeks before finishing off with a fortnight in South East Asia. I'm posting a small selection of some exquisite Chinese embroidered animals, which apart from being stunning in themselves, will I'm sure inspire future knitting, especially their exceptional use of colour.

Chinese Embroidery

It's still too early to wish everyone a Happy Christmas so I will try to do another post before the holiday season is upon us. But I do hope you are warm and safe and enjoying the time you are managing to create for your creative activities.

Still here

A very quick post to say that I'm still here, still blogging, and still knitting. It has been a very busy time at home and work since August and surprisingly painful without dear Solomon, still very sorely missed. Touchingly, a sweet little cat from two doors down has decided to adopt us from time to time and her owner is happily willing to share. The possibility of a visit from Dora has been a great help over the past few weeks - long may it continue!

On the knitting front there is some really exciting news. I'm going to tutor a course at the Oxford Summer School in 2010. It's called New Directions in Knitting and will explore the boundaries between knitting as art and craft. We'll be doing lots of exciting things with different fibres and other materials, so do think about signing up for this. The date for your diary is the week beginning Monday 26 July, probably from Wednesday to Saturday. I will post more information about this over the coming weeks. I'm also arranging to take a group of Jam Factory knitters to Shetland and Fair Isle in late May/early June, something I've wanted to do for a long time.

Yesterday I started a ten week course on Asian Textiles at the V&A in London. It's quite hard to manage logistically around my work but I think it will prove really interesting. I've also written an article about my trip to Xinjiang and Kyrgyzstan for the next issue of Asian Textiles, the magazine of the Oxford Asian Textiles Group. Look out for this on the OATG's website - http://www.oatg.org.uk/index.html

I've been working on my own designing, too, like the butterfly in the picture. I'm even beginning to enjoy the dreaded Intarsia! At the moment I'm working on Fair Isle swatches for Module 4 of the City and Guilds course. Good for the long bus journey back from the V&A on Tuesday evenings...

And finally, I am off to Andalucia this weekend, for a bit of autumn sun and hopefully some knitting inspiration. I've bought a swanky new camera (Canon IXUS 100IS) so there should be some nice pictures for you to look at in a week or two.

Farewell My Lovely

Just a few knitting-related pics of my wonderful feline companion Solomon who sadly passed away on Sunday 9 August, 11 years after we moved into "his" house. Sorely missed.

Slow Knitting

Progress has felt quite slow on all knitting fronts lately, although in fact I've just completed Module 3 of my City & Guilds Hand Knit textiles course. I've thoroughly enjoyed it too, playing around with print-making, line and mark-making, embroidery on knitting and lots more besides. See some pictures here.

C&G Module 3 pics

I think it's a general sense of stuckness I'm feeling, as I'm frustrated on a number of projects. I feel that I need to press on and complete several of these but various things are blocking their completion. Most of these are actually to do with finishing things off to a satisfactory look, rather than the knitting itself. And some of it is about feeling that I don't have enough time or energy for everything I'm trying to do at the moment.

I have of course written abour Knitter's Block here before, specifically on 20 July 2008, when I see that I wrote that: "Far from representing stuckness, knitter's block can create progress." Creative blocks (in both senses) have been very much on my mind for the past three months as I've been working my way through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. This week I'm completing the final week, Week 12. It's an amazing book, full of insights about how our creativity becomes blocked and the steps we can take to recover. In fact it's a 12 step recovery programme for blocked creatives! The exercises in the book are certainly helping me to resource a way forward and I highly recommend them to anyone who wants to explore and improve their creative abilities.

All of this has led me onto thoughts about Slow Knitting and as I've been mulling over what that might mean, I've had the image in my head of broken bones slowly mending. Indeed, this is sometimes described by the medics as "knitting together". Julia Cameron talks about the need to take baby steps on the journey to creative recovery, to go at things slowly, not running before you can walk. Slow Knitting might also be likened to the Slow Food movement, something that brings the pace of life and eating back from the frantic "sandwich-lunch-at-your-desk" to a more meditative and sociable time out to enjoy the good things in life. In this sense, knitting can become meditative, a contemplation. The root of the word, contemplare, means to see things as they really are. To be here in this moment, now, and to know it for what it is. "The Kingdom of God is here, this is it, now." Annie Dillard, that wonderful writer about the natural world and the spiritual life has it thus: "A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet." (The Writing Life, 1989)

There is certainly plenty of opportunity for a life of the senses as a knitter: more stash, more projects, more patterns, more magazines, more courses, more blogs, more websites, more events. It's a wonderful world of sensation and delight and I'm certainly not against it. But, as Meg Swansen said about Ravelry in a recent interview, it's "like taking a shower under Niagara Falls, there is so much information that it is impossible to take it all in." (Yarn Forward, Issue 16, August 2009) And eventually one can begin to reel from a kind of Stendahlismo , named after the nineteenth century novelist Stendahl who experienced sensual dizziness when faced by the artistic and architectural richness of Florence.

Slow Knitting may be the life of the spirit for knitters, a point where the simple act of hooking loop over loop in a set pattern becomes meditative, centred entirely in the moment, this Now, which is all we every really have but which links into something else, perhaps to another unknown knitter clicking her needles in the same spirit at the same moment, or to a sense of Other, knitting into a piece of eternity.

In the spirit of Slow Knitting, I've been knitting a letter E for the Poetry Society's Knit A Poem event (pictured above). The aim is for individual knitters to knit a square with a letter in it plus some blank squares, which will eventually be joined together to make a giant knitted poem. We don't know yet which poem it is. Knitters are asked to think about the poem that they would like it to be as they knit...

Doing this has also been good practice for Intarsia, which is a bit of a bete-noire for me - and also a big element of City & Guilds Module 4! You can read more about this project on the Poetry Society's website and there is also a Knit A Poem group on Ravelry. And talking about Ravelry, that great Niagara Falls, I have now finally developed a profile there as Stileknits, so do go and take a look and, if you are a Ravelry member, do drop by and say hello.

I'm off to the Bath Fashion Museum with some of the Oxford Jam Factory knitters next Friday to look at the Bill Gibb exhibition, the Supremes' costumes on tour, and peek behind the scenes at their collection of 20th century knitted textiles. A few pictures below of the wonderful Bill Gibb show from my last visit.

Bath Fashion Museum visit 3 July 2009