Do we knit, across place or time, in fellowship with a person we’ve never met?
Do I knit, across place or time, in fellowship with another self?
See more of Ranía Hassan’s knit paintings at her blog here.
A few weeks ago, Eli came across instructions online for making his own messenger bag out of fused plastic bags. He e-mailed it to me and asked if we could make one. In the past few days, we did.
An absolute novice, he approached the sewing machine tentatively yet was open to advice and coaching. After his first few wandering seams, he got the hang of it. And eventually he got into it. From start to finish, we prepped, cut, sewed, and finished that bag together. I believe that Eli experienced the awe and sweetness of having one’s hands close to substantial mechanical power and guiding that force with purpose.
If you know Eli and me, and you’d like to see highlights from our project, then click here for a slide show (and choose “Gallery View” for most pleasing size). If you’re a sewer, or if you enjoy reading accounts of do-it-yourself projects, then read beyond this paragraph for my description of how we adapted Bre Pettis’s directions to make Eli’s bag. At the very end, you’ll find a photo of the bag we made. Continue reading
Lydia has been knitting like a fiend, aiming to finish some pieces before Christmas. Her knitting goes to school with her; she works on it during free time in the afterschool program. She reports that her friends, non-knitters, have asked her, “Is it fun?” Lydia says, “No, it’s not fun.”
So, as I sit on her bed one night and speedily cast on 45 stitches for her next item, I ask her why, then, does she knit?
She answers, “Because it’s calming, and…” (she hesitates, searching for the word) “productive.”
And, you know? That is what knitting is.
Years ago I learned the phrase “transition time” from one of the kids’ preschool teachers. A bridge from one kind of activity to another, it’s something that all children need and something that some have trouble with. For example, if a child is engrossed in building with Legos, he might be unable or unwilling to follow directions to put away the toy and put on his coat if he has not first been given a warning as well as some time to transition from his play into the practical.
Transitions help us cope with change by easing us forward. Routines help, too.
Two days before Thanksgiving, on November 20th, it snowed lightly. There were still plenty of leaves on the ground, and the Japanese maple in our backyard, which bursts every fall from green to crimson and then drops its leaves within a few days, still wore half its foliage. I stood in the backyard, trying to gauge when the leaf guys would come to finish their work for the year and, after that, when I would have an hour or two to break open the bales of hay and mulch around new shrubs and divided plants.
I stood in my neighbor Gail’s yard and looked into my own. There was a soccer ball left behind from some game that did not involve me; there were the patient hay bales against Bob & Mary’s fence, the carpet of crimson leaves, and a toddler picnic table under the maple.
I have no toddlers in my house, and won’t again. The sight of that leaf-covered picnic table, too small for any of our children, reminds me of its redundancy. At best, it’s an artifact. I stood there for a long time and looked at it.
What happens to knowledge when it is not applied to daily use? I have this expertise in caring for the newborn and very young: feeding, washing, handling, soothing, delighting, lugging. I no longer need to mash up anyone’s food, wash a boy’s hair while protecting his eyes, or grab a girl up and out of a sandbox. Now that there are better music makers in this house than me, I haven’t sung anyone an invented lullaby in ages. (One of my lulling hits: “You’re A Baby.”)
Does such knowledge disappear? Is it transformed and applied to other uses? Does it go underground, and hibernate?
The leaf guys came on a clear day and vacuumed up the red leaves. Soon after, it got cold – bitterly – and we got busy here. It has since snowed again; the stray leaves that fell after the final cleanup are clumps under snow. The brilliance of the fall is a memory. I wonder if I missed my chance to lay down the hay. Like a child sometimes, I don’t like to be rushed, and I waited too long. It’s December 9th and gardening is over for the year.
I’m not a person to spend the winter months dreaming of what I’ll plant in the spring. I put those thoughts aside until signs of thaw, and then I feel, too, as if I’m thawing out. My interest in the yard reawakens. In the meantime, I keep my hands busy in other ways. Knitting is one of them.
How floating this is, yet how shaped and shapely. The fabric appears to be gauze or some sort of soft netting. So fine, it’s translucent; any woman wearing it would find her skin visible through it. It appears so lightweight it may even lack weight. On, I imagine it might feel like someone’s breath or a second skin.
In fact, it is a second skin: This dress, made from huge pieces of “hide” created by lavishing her body with a skin-peel facial mask and then gently stripping it off, is embedded with artist Laura Splan’s dead skin cells. The fabric is herself, in a way, which she then trims, sews, and embellishes as she would any delicate cloth.
Splan must have a light hand and lots of patience. 
Look at the machine-sewn detail on the bodice. She calls this sexy, ghostly work Trousseau (Negligee #1). Inspired equally by the body and artifacts of medicine, Splan also paints in her own blood on watercolor paper, tracing the patterns of neuroanatomical forms. She sews lace doilies based on the structures of viruses. She has knit a blood-filled scarf from vinyl i.v. tubing and photographed it. See for yourself — more of Laura Splan’s fascinating work is here.
After reading my friend Lauren’s lovely short essay, “Paper Trails,” about the archives left in her care by three deceased relatives, I thought about my own files of cards and letters from people, once dear, who are now dead to me, whether or not they are still living: Aunt Elsie; Ellen, my maternal grandmother; Nicole, a high school friend. I hold one side of what were once active correspondences; absent is the other side, that is, letters from me.
My letters might have ended up in the trash or in a never-opened file cabinet. They’re as gone to me as the person is. Concrete evidence of who I was and what I cared about in, say, 1985, when I still wrote devotedly to the Davenports, a Yorkshire family I stayed with for a month in 1983, belongs to the recipients.
Those long, newsy air letters could, also, have ended up in a daughter’s or son’s hands, as did the checks, diaries, and documents of Lauren’s parents and her old aunt. They could also have ended up in the hands of a stranger, who came across them at an estate sale and who knows neither me nor the Davenports nor any other person I wrote to.
If the stranger were an artist, she might have sewn them into a dress, as Jennifer Collier does with maps, pattern paper, book pages, and old letters and envelopes. In describing Collier’s constructions (which are not made to be worn), Craft magazine’s print version calls them “a great reminder of the way clothes get loaded down with meaning.” I look at this stitched paper dress, wonder about the origin of the letters, and think of the persons — strangers to me, intimates to the letters’ recipients — they stand in for.
The details get me started.
At a community garden I see a variety of baptisia, or wild indigo, and have to get one and find a patch for it. In the tub, after a child has sat on the edge and washed her feet, I notice a dirty bar of Dove soap; the words “dirty bar of soap” seem to leap into consciousness and clamor. They seed a poem, currently in progress.
I like compact words and their solid sounds. “Leaf,” “stitch,” and “word” are multi-purpose, with many meanings and applications each, and, because I’m practical, I like that. All function as nouns and verbs, too. These words are enough to capture something about me and launch this project.
Because I spend more time writing, professionally and personally, than I do gardening or sewing, this blog will be more about the composition of words than it will be about gardens and garments. Do you see how all three — leaf, stitch, and word — are components of books? Still, doing one kind of physical and creative labor links to doing another kind. My consternation with the spring garden, for example, reminds me of my uneasiness with a shapeless, thin draft. I’m sure I’ll write in a way that unveils these intersections.
The challenge of what to do with my materials keeps me going. So a blog begins, with the merest of pieces: title, thumbnail, statement, and a first post. Already, the question “what to do next with three five-cent words?” provokes me.
leaf stitch word 