January 19, 2005

• Tout le knitting blog monde is doing a sort of survey where they tell what brands of things they use. It seems rather dull to me, but I want to be cooperative, so I will try a few.

  
  

  I use my own homemade shampoo bars made from Sunfeather’s natural shampoo base. Let me know if you ever want the ecological reasons for this. Mentadent toothpaste. I have Ralph Lauren sheets and vintage linen pillow cases. I drink tap water, being lucky enough to live in one of the few places in the country where one can do that. 

  
  

  No, I was right. That is boring. It would be boring, too, to show you my dull sock. It is not boring to knit the dull sock, and I am looking forward to wearing it, but it is not something to take a picture of. Pioneer women were expected to make four pairs of socks a year for each family member — usually including eight to eleven children — and also for any servant or slave they might have about the place. Although, I suppose, if you had servants you could get help with your knitting. In the course of my work at the History Institute one year, I calculated that a woman in these parts in the 1830s who worked a full day, 6 days a week, could expect to spend a total of five months each year dealing with fibers. In the absence of eyelash yarn, self-striping sock yarn, and colors like Lotus Blossom and Wisteria, did they get bored with the whole thing?

  
  

  While cleaning out my crafts cupboard, I found — or had brought to my attention, since they were never lost — a couple of UFOs. Not Unidentified Flying Objects, but UnFinished Objects. They differ from WIPs (Works In Progress) in that at some point we got bored with them and set them down and never picked them up again.

  
  

  Here is one, a crocheted thing composed of 4-inch medallions in the Carnaby Square pattern. The idea with this is to crochet several hundred of these little motifs, block them, sew them together, and thus create a beautiful throw for the bed. My bedroom is decorated in a very romantic style, with Pre-Raphaelite prints and antique furniture, and this will be perfect at the foot of my bed, if it ever stops being a collection of little crumpled white things.

  
  

  There are also two quilts at some stage of progress. One is a finished quilt top, with the batting and backing sandwiched to it, pinned and waiting for basting. Another is not-nearly-enough pieces of flannel, cut and waiting in a tin for enough more pieces of flannel to join them so that it can actually become a quilt.

  
  

  I can’t do either of those until I make #1 son’s quilt. It is his turn. He wants a plain blue quilt with a Celtic knot in the middle, one of those “stained glass” quilts. I have never made such a thing, so it is still in the incubation stages while I find a pattern or a book or something. And then there is the sweater I am planning to make with my Christmas-gift yarn. And the mittens, socks, and slippers waiting in a mental line. And, you know, I never did finish my blacks for that performance — I’ll have to do that before the next concert.

  
  

  This is how things become UFOs. They lose their spot in the mental line and have to wait for an empty moment, a time when we can say to ourselves, “Now, what shall I make next?” and hope they spring to mind.

  
  

  Well, this way I know I will not run out of things to make.

  • 7:39 am
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