Soft Intro

The repetitive action of looping yarn

 over needle, 

and sliding needle through yarn, pulling yarn taut,

 and counting up the stitches.

Knit and purl, 

knit 

knit 

purl:  

keep that tension consistent. 

Patient repetitions of simple movements, meditations slipping into muscle memory. 

Repetitive strain injuries 

on the wrists, 

friction smoothing out fingerprints, 

and still, 

thread caressing with its gentle kiss. 

Trance-like, transient. 

Time slips, 

slides - 

hours crashing in an avalanche. 

But here are the rows; 

neat, tidy, imperfect rows, a scattering of stitch markers puncturing the lines. 

And I can count up the lost hours. 

Days spent with yarn wandering down my forearms, 

snaking up my wrists and deftly moving through my hands 

to loop

 and rotate 

and twist on the needles. 

Loops eventually forming fabric, 

thick. 

Spongy to touch and 

clench in fists.  

Visceral evidence of the time that had disappeared behind my back. 

The world was unravelling, 

but I had my knitted scraps, 

and that was enough.

*

These words (both above and below) were the first two pages my dissertation tutor read, after I submitted a frenzied blur two minutes before the extended deadline, seven months after it was first due. Blind panic had set in; and the cocktail of sleep deprivation and excessive caffeine consumption was dancing across the screen with pixelated footnotes.

Obviously, I pretended my dissertation did not happen and never existed, blocked it out from my memory with a couple of beers and a blanket of sleep. I only looked at it again recently, when I was searching for my expired student number. Decided to read the soft intro, soft like a pillow to bulk out the word count.

I remembered why I wrote it, and how these words were the only ones I could catch hold of amongst the swirl of half thoughts and broken phrases. almost like cloud staring, and these words were the only shapes I could pull out.

Words mean everything and nothing. So I thought maybe these would mean something to someone else. Or maybe they mean nothing, and that’s okay too - they’re only words.

P.S. In the process of transferring it here, I have fixed it up a bit to save embarrassment.

*

I think it would be naive to ignore the overwhelming presence of the Pandemic, and the effects it has had on modes of cultural production, ways of creative thinking, and even the most base and deeply personal states of emotional wellbeing. If it were not for the pandemic and the acute set of circumstances it has generated over the past year, I would not be discussing the necessity of craft practices, nor would I have discovered my interest in craft making processes and histories. 

In a period defined by isolation and loss of the physical experience, I found myself lost  and spiralling through virtual interactions. I’d venture outside once a week to walk three minutes to the cornershop, before shuffling home and urgently closing my bedroom door again, as if pushing a towel against the inch gap between the door and floor would nullify any reality outside. After too much time obsessing over news cycles and daily statistics, I shut down. Numb; as if my brain was pushing that towel against my nervous system. 

I didn't quite trust anything that danced across my screen. And so, in desperate pursuit for something physical to do, whilst my brain slept, I dug out an old ball of yarn and slightly warped set of needles from under my mum’s bed, and relearnt how to knit. Simple squares of garter stitch to begin with, serving no practical purpose as an object, or in terms of aesthetics. But it was the process and repetitive actions of knitting these “useless” squares that embodied the sense of urgency I felt to create something tactile and tangible.

Squares, eventually morphed into metre long stripey strips, with the distant desire to make a blanket - perhaps a need for functionality, and subsequently a practical purpose. Eighteen months later, and that blanket is yet to materialise. However, I knit almost everyday, finding a quiet comfort in the motions, and the gradual growth of the indecipherable knitted things I produce.