Day 6: “The best reason for a knitter to marry is that you can’t teach the cat to be impressed when you finish a lace scarf.” ― Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit’s End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much
Actually, my biggest knitting fan is my cat, and I think he can’t wait until I am finished with The Alone Together Sweater, so I can wear it and he can sit on me.
Today is another day of Parent Teacher Conferences. I’ve never taught at a school that brings me such joy during PTConferences. We do team meetings, and we sit around and talk about how the student has grown, strategizing ways to make learning easier and more effective. The high schoolers attend their own conferences, and they participate in the strategy sessions. Today at the end of a session a student gave an impromptu speech about how much Janus has supported their personal and academic growth, and their parent had everybody getting teary talking about how proud they are of their student’s persistence and kindness and creativity.
Today I got to the ribbing at the wrist of the sleeve, and made nine little hearts for Pride, holding onto that beautiful and loving energy of my students and their parents and my colleagues. May we all See each other with such gracious eyes.
I came in to school today, and this was in my box! A colleague bought it for me. I feel Seen! The synchronicity is abundant these days.
This knitting element of my Tying Up Loose Ends project has me thinking a lot about textile arts, how they’ve been so often the province of women, how “women’s work” has so often been derided as less than the work and the art of men, how the spinning and the knotting and the weaving of threads are ancient work, necessary to our ancestors for keeping families clothed and warmed, how these acts became magickal acts.
We spin the stories that connect us to each other, weave and knit together the strands of our separateness into whole community cloth. We untangle threads to see more clearly the path we must follow.
I cast off the second front piece today, and began a sleeve. Thor really does love this project.
I’m home today because all my Parent Teacher Conferences are on Zoom, so I have moments between conferences when I can knit a couple rows—a palate cleanser for the brain, if you will. I’m almost finished with this front panel.
Next week is Spring Break, and I have a feeling I might finish this sweater then! Unless I find myself unraveling to remake bits. I am in this project to learn.
“Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?” ― Susan Gordon Lydon, The Knitting Sutra: Craft as a Spiritual Practice
I found that quote online, and just went and ordered the book on Thriftbooks.
It’s harder to see the progress in only a few rows today, in about 15 minutes of knitting. Long day.
I’ve been wanting to write a little bit about Art as Resistance. My husband and I have both been enjoying creating thoughtful and artful signs for protests, so that’s one kind. Poetry which calls the dictator and his toadies to account is another kind. You see it everywhere sprouting up on the internet: reels of fierce new protest songs, comics and collage and editorial cartoons and posters and t-shirts and buttons. I want to keep pushing out my own art and poetry in active resistance to cruelty and evil.
Also, simply doing art of some kind is, for me, a powerful resistance. Bring me beauty! Bring me joy! Set my feet to dancing! We’re in this thing for the long haul, and we need all the art, all the music, all the poetry and dancing.
Recently, knitting and crocheting have been extremely regulating for me. The Files and the evil they uncover have me quivering daily in fury that dysregulates my nervous system. I feel like I am dissolving into a red haze. And so I take up the yarn, repeating the same stitches over and over again, watching the stripes of color appear, feeling the softness of yarn sliding over my fingers, listening to the swish and click of yarn and needles. I am going to need to stay grounded and regulated if I am going to stay in the fight. Making art is part of that necessary medicine.
Yesterday after I posted, I continued to knit my ATS 2.0, so the first photo is where I began today.
The Alone Together Sweater was designed during the pandemic by Lærke Bagger, a wildly creative out-of-the-box textile artist from Denmark (look her up on IG). In her directions, she gave permission just to knot yarns together. The idea was that since we couldn’t go out shopping, we needed a way to creatively use up our stashes, using two or three strands at a time, giving the feeling of impressionistic painting with yarn.. Her original construction was a back, a front, and two arms. After my initial sweater was too wonky, I decided to divide the front into two pieces to make a v-shaped neck. I might make it a cardigan or I might stitch up the front.
What I love about this project is that it gives me the permission I crave to be free-spirited and messy. There is a punk quality to her designs, a refusal to force herself and her art to fit into the pretty and fine art box. And yet her designs are incredibly artful and exuberant.
This is the first time I have made a complete knitted or crocheted garment (other than a scarf or shawl), and ATS 1.0 was the first time that I have unraveled a project of any significant size. So I’m growing.
The first photo shows the two completed pieces (of five) of the Alone Together Sweater I began in 2021 when I was in Covid Quarantine. I completed it about a month ago, and unraveled it because the sizing was way off. The second attempt (ATS 2.0) is less wildly wonky, but still wacky, but in a satisfying way.
Today I cast on the 35 stitches for the third piece, and knitted 11 rows.
Then I sewed in the loose threads on several flowers for Pride. I have 53 ready to go. I think I’ll want to increase my goal number from 200 to 400.
This afternoon on a Zoom call, I am going to do some mending. I won’t keep up this pace for 100 Days, but today is a Sunday and rainy.
For #The100DayProject, artists choose an artful activity and do it every day for 100 days, recording their work, and posting about it every day. The project begins on February 23, and I decided to begin my Substack life by posting my daily creations here.
What is a book?
Is it words on pages between covers? Is it a box, a basket, a vessel of words and images? Is it a kit for your imagination? What makes a book a book? And what is the line between book and not/book? Or is there even a line?
One of my students, when I posed the question to a class, said,
Perhaps a definition isn’t so much about what a thing is as about how it is used.”
Wise young person.
My aim for #The100DayProject is to explore the spaces between what is “book” and “not/book.” I aim to make some traditional (though whimsical) books in the form of pages between covers, and some boxes, baskets, vessels of words and images, photographs, to expand the definition of what a book is, and explore how it may be used. . .
Can I create one book a day for 100 days? Perhaps I will have some days when I record the process of making one book over several days. I cannot let this work interfere with my daily work, so I give myself permission to make quick little zines on busy days, to call anything a book, and to create junk.
I will make a bōchord (library in the old English), a BOOK HOARD, a library of sorts.
bōc as Vessel by Beth Weaver-Kreider
The leaves of the beech quiver in the winter wind, rustling whispers, so many stories to tell,
Etymology: bokiz or bece to bōc, to book. Bark and leaves, cover and spine, the line of words across a page.
It is written in the trees, you see, not just cellulose and pulp, but in the very essence of the word: seeds of ideas, leaves, and bark.
Not only Goths but Gauls too saw forest as library. Livre from librum, the tender inner bark of the tree.
When he was a child, my father carved his name into the soft grey of the household beech. I found the letters there, the book of his childhood, the story of branches shading the quiet balcony, the pious lives, the quiet joy, the industrious aunts, and some words allowed to be spoken only by the whispering leaves.
Once there was a guardian beech watching over the river and the valley, serpent branches spreading shadows across the hill. But insects burrowed her barky pages until the book of her began to die. We honored her story, you and I, the best we could; we read the book of her until the end.
Here in the pages of my palms I cup this small wooden bowl you turned from the branch of the serpent-beech, a new vessel to contain magic much as the tree herself held her secrets, the livre, the living library, still here, alive.
Mockingbird Chronicles 