yarn-o-matic

 

Dear String People,

These things* are the ne plus ultra of objects for me.  I am trying to make something like them (see above).  The One Cat likes to sleep on it, even partly finished.  The Two Cat likes to wrestle it into a snarled heap.  The three of us together are pretty chuffed with this project, which has been going on for months and months.

My other yarn projects include a sweater with the kind of skinny-slow-splitty yarn that I cyclically swear off.  I am in an ascendant phase of swearing, which might reach its peak in something wearable, and it might just languish in a cute knitting bag until death does us part.  I was betting on the sweater until recently, when I got to the point of the sleeves.  So many sweaters end there, I expect.  Still, maybe it could have a life as a short skirt?  It doesn't even have sleeves, but separating the 266 stitches into two sections of 131 has been a serious blow to morale.  Morale is everything in making.

Anyway, the whole silly sweater thing wouldn't have even been attempted if it weren't for the beauty of these yarns from La Bien Aimee.  So delicious!  I showed them to a friend who said: "My next cat is going to be a skein."

* I really love this artist's work; all of it, the yarn things, the watercolors, the photographs, the clay things.  I am in extreme awe and envy of Renilde de Peuter.  See more of her work here.  As usual, I am asking myself, Why Can't I Be You, Renilde? 

Love & Envy

Stop Looking Like a Sweater,

wool, 142 x 65 x 5cm, 2013,

Celia Pym

Dear Dying of Envy,

Oh I know how you feel!  You plod along for years, you think you are getting somewhere, you feel, 'yes, this little square of felt with threads through it is really saying things, this is it, I have made something relevant!' 

And then.  You find someone like Celia Pym and you know that you have wasted your efforts, because here is a her that is really making beautiful, poignant, elegant, expressive objects.  The kind you have always wished to make.

Well, tough cookies.  There is nothing you can do but try to bury your hurt and soldier on making things that are not as clearly distilled as these.  A better one made by someone else is just that; a better one made by someone else, and our job here it to minimize the suffering we cause, and that includes our endless, whingeing self-suffering.  So let's rewind, and re-phrase this post:


Dear Looking Out for Beauty,

Here it is, an artist and maker who is sending me over the moon with the wonderful things she has made!  I know you will love them too.  Let's run and get our needles right now, and start to stitch together the beautiful old broken and tattered scraps.  Let's not worry about it coming out good, let's just let each stich come like a drop of rain, with only gravity to guide it where to fall.  Let's just make little marks until we have daubed out a poem of plenty, an elegant pile of eraser rubbings, a page of smudges that mean that time happened here, and it was.









PS
Be sure you investigate a piece titled Blue Knitting.