It is a piece about the space between me and my sister, born 11 months apart.
It has been one year in the making.
It is love.
Our mother dressed my sister and I in identical clothes for about 12 years until we found the voices to be different. We were born in 1963 and 1964. You did what you were told. And, we were told. Clothes say so much about the wearer, about the social history, about what people what to portray, about many things.
My nana knitted us identical cardigans – probably for the same amount of years. But my sister and I were very different people. And we are very different people today. I am not sure if differences in kids was either an accepted or a noticed thing in the 60’s. It certainly wasn’t in our house.
I will knit another piece, in the colours that my sister likes – Black, Grey, Navy, Dark Red and Mustard and place it alongside this piece, made up of over 90 colours and I will hang it beside this piece. I am interested in the Japanese concept of Ma 間 the spaces and the silences in between all things. when the 2 pieces are placed alongside each other, they will show the spaces between us.
For now, this peice will be entered into the Harley Foundation open, because I am regional, because it is art, because, it is love.
On a practical level, I will be starting a knitalong for the Fair Isle worksheet that accompanies this knitted pullover and will email everyone who has bought this pattern to ask if they/you would like to join a free 1 hours zoom session on the worksheet and how I made the pullover with a Q&A, so that they / you can join in the knitalong and use the worksheet to your advantage – to make what you want – hat, scarf, vest, pullover.
If you would like to join me, I will be starting in about a month.
Under a week after handing over this commissioned piece of
knitting, I have had time to reflect. I
have a window of time to reconsider what I have made and why and what happened
during the making and designing process and the outcome of what seems to some,
to just be a knitted pullover.
The idea for this hand-knitted piece actually came from my thinking son because I was questioning the time involved in knitting and designing one off pieces. He suggested for me to consider intricately knitting something that I loved and to log every hour and minute spent making it. This type of time is not commercial time but entirely creative, without speed, without a target. So, to make a knitted piece in this way, with this idea behind it was the initiation that made it a project or a work of art; not just knitting and certainly not textiles.
A constant driving question of any maker is what is the value of time spent. I question time and the value of an hour of my time because, at 55 years old I may be running out of hours and what do I want to do with my one precious hour? is my hour of more value than, say, a 23 year old who, statistically, has more hours left to live than me. If we knew how many hours left, what would we do with those hours? Knit?
So, the act of writing, logging and recognising time spent whilst making became an underlying, fundamental principal of this knitted piece. I did not lie about time, did not hide time spent in the making process, did not adjust hours to fit ‘within time’ or an acceptable amount of time judged by others to take to knit this item and I did not exaggerate either. I was wholly honest.
During the process there was no brief, or contract or even a binding conversation with the person who may or may not buy it, I made a Fair Isle pullover with a woman in mind. A woman who I know respects hand-made items, understands art and creativity and supports makers. And, I know that time is precious to her. Of course, in the end, it is wearable. Win, win.
There was no design brief or discussion or demands or
expectations.
Carte blanche.
There was also no discussion of money due to the fact that
this was not my driving force for the knitted project. Notice, that this knitting has been called
many things – a project, a hand-knitted piece, a piece of art but never just
knitting or textiles.
This whole project was a thought process – thinking about
design, experimentation, research in practice, 2 years in an MA to research
knitted lace, colours, heritage, Shetland-inspired memories, traditional
patterns, blending colours, making mistakes and undoing mistakes, patterns I’ve
previously knitted and why I wanted to weave those things into each stitch. How can you sell that? In a story? To a believer? It’s an investment of time and detail.
In brief, the underlying principle was to create a work of art which encompassed understanding and mastery of the craft of knitting, which I have done for over 40 years now. To the untrained eye, this knitted piece is ‘textiles’ or ‘just knitting’ but, to the thinking mind it is not.
So, I started. And unstarted. Designed and redesigned and felt my way through many, many, many hours of knitting. Each hour was logged and sometimes what I was thinking, what I was feeling and my understanding of developing certain areas of the piece. The work went everywhere with me and I knitted every day over 4 months. Yes, 4 months – sometimes at night watching things on iplayer. It went to café’s, babysitting, to Sheffield Institute of arts and on train journeys and to different cities but always I stayed true to the principle of logging the hours and to making every loop perfect. I began to want to hold the work and get back to it. It became a piece of wellbeing.
I became fascinated by thinking about how one colour sat next to another and where the pattern had come from and what memories the knitting drew on. I undid anything that I was not totally, absolutely happy with and the happiness came in the detail which fed back to the process of thinking. The whole process took on a journey of its own.
The result is like a tightly woven carpet.
I am partly embarrassed about the hours I spent on this knitted piece and partly in awe of how much time I spent dedicated to something that a knitter would do in under half the time. But, that knitting, from a pattern would be ‘just knitting’. This piece came from scratch – from an idea and a bundle of over 50 colours of Shetland yarn.
On bank holiday Monday – the jewel-coloured surprise was ceremoniously and fittingly handed over
tracey doxey 