The blog paradox

'If you'd told me five years ago that you'd one day have a blog, I wouldn't have believed it,' said my friend Tracey recently. Five years ago I wouldn't have believed it, either. I'm not interested in computers for their own sake, I find surfing the net more tedious and less useful than cleaning the bathroom, and I used to think blogging a waste of time – why would you blog about something rather than actually doing it? Not to mention that it seemed rather self-obsessed and self-indulgent.

That was before I started blogging on a whim. The Unfinished Project Project is now three months old and I've discovered that although blogging takes time, it doesn't waste time. It has actually made me more productive; I've finished off three major millstones that have been hanging around my neck for years, which feels like a considerable achievement. I've also been more inclined to plug away at other things that are lying about the house, and I've had more ideas about what I might usefully do with some of the rest.

And as an anti-procrastination tool it's had an effect on more than just my craft projects. Okay, my last two tax returns still remain undone, so my reform isn't total, but at least I do the washing up and the vacuuming more often now. Even small steps are steps!

And most of all, it's been fun. I've enjoyed writing my posts and finding that people as far away as Sudan, Argentina and Egypt have been dropping by. Who would have thought?

But as to whether blogging self-indulgent and self-obsessed … the one-woman jury is still undecided on that point.

Announcing the winner!

It's time for the stripey scarf to go to a new home. Thanks to the very exclusive field of six people who entered the competition. (If only my chances of winning Lotto were as good as yours were of winning this scarf, I'd probably be blogging from somewhere much more exotic than Sydney as we speak.)

So without further ado – the winner is the anonymous wannabe boyfriend impresser. I hope you're more impressed with your prize than your boyfriend was with your efforts (he sounds like a bit of an ingrate, frankly; are you still with him?).*

Anyway, make yourself known to me and receive your prize. Congratulations!

I'd quite like to know who the other entrants were, too. India, your writing style is unmistakable, but the rest of you have managed to camouflage yourselves well. Anyone care to fess up?


* I've since found out that the winner was my friend, colleague and original crafty kitten, Amanda. And yes, she ditched the ingrate boyfriend.

In search of the perfect peg bag (the world's most trivial quest)

Ignore what I said in my last post about not being a domestically obsessed perfectionist – I've now made not one but three peg bags. I realised as soon as I finished the first that it could do with some modifications – the opening was too big and also a bit low – and also that it would have been more sensible to make my prototype out of scrap fabric, not the real thing, in case of such stuff-ups. Oh well.

During the week I made a version with a buttonhole-stitched opening, which is okay but still not quite there. Yesterday I made a modified version of the first one, and I think it's a case of third time lucky. I even wrote down the pattern rather than just relying on memory if ever I want to make another. Unlikely – I think three peg bags per lifetime are more than enough. It's not as though I own three houses, after all (or even one) so two of these bags will be given away.

So that's three of the six finished rose bouquets from the chopped-up tablecloth accounted for. I have plans for the others – check this space.

Prettying up the prosaic

My crafty inclinations lately have leant towards repurposing neglected embroidery. Today's project was refurbishing my peg bag – a phrase that I realise might make me sound like some Martha Stewart wannabe domestic perfectionist, which I'm really, really not. However, I've had my old peg bag for several years and while it's perfectly functional, every time I hang my clothes out, one more tiny fraction of my aesthetic self despairs and dies. Mundane chores like washing should be jollied up as much as they possibly can, I reckon, hence my desire for a more pleasing peg bag than this one.

Before: plain, serviceable, dreary.

 Among my many unfinished craft projects is an embroidered tablecloth I started straight after either school or uni – in other words, a good long while ago. It had two bouquets of cross-stitched roses along each side, and the only thing I can remember about doing it was that I seemed to be at it for years, and it was tedious beyond belief. I finished six-and-a-bit bouquets before giving up about twenty years ago, having realised, I think, that even if I did finish it I was never going to use it as a tablecloth. It was another example of my tastes being much more nanna when I was young than they are now – and nanna in a daggy way, not in a cool, ironic, retro way.


So I decide to chop it up and give it a new life as a peg bag. I went slightly astray along the way – because I like doing things but not planning them, most of my projects are made in a fairly random and ad hoc way. So it was with this. I made a sort-of pattern from the old bag, but cut out the embroidered piece for the front of the bag before realising I'd positioned it so that the opening would cut away part of the embroidered design. That meant I needed to cut another piece. The binding and seams on the front needed to be unpicked and resewn at one point too – despite having the old bag right there, did I consult it for guidance? Did I bollocks.

But in the end it came together. I reshaped the top and used an old wooden coathanger rather than the nasty plastic number from the original bag. I even covered the wire hook with some bias binding (umm, what was I saying about not being an obsessive domestic perfectionist?). In fact I took a lot of care with the whole thing, despite generally being horribly impatient. Doing something properly, when I've got the time, ends up being so much more satisfying than just finishing it quickly.

After: bright, practical, bigger. And a bit nanna,
but in a good way, I think.

The final step was a rigorous pressing, because it's linen, which creases like a bastard. I'm rather chuffed with the result, and I'm sure washday will be a bit less dull with this hanging cheerily on the line.

And now it must be time to put a load of washing on.

Win-a-scarf competition closing soon!

Thanks to all those who've submitted entries – I've enjoyed reading about the crafty and not so crafty among you. For those who haven't entered yet but still intend to, this is a bossy reminder to get your comments in by the end of October. Overseas readers are encouraged to enter, too – so long as you have a mailbox somewhere on this planet, I'm happy to send the scarf anywhere should you win it.

One reader has said that you need to press the 'leave a comment' button several times before Blogger obeys, so keep pressing. The comments seem to turn up eventually.

I'm hoping the winner might oblige me by sending a photo of herself/himself wearing the scarf. It's not a condition of entry, although it would please me to see my handiwork in its new habitat. At the moment there are only five entries, so your chances of winning are higher than most internet competitions can boast! Good luck ...

Vanquishing the red menace

I thought this day would never come – today I finished the red jumper!

I've been plugging away intermittently since I last posted about it, refusing to be deterred by the inevitable stuff-ups, such as the back, which provoked some sighing and tutting. When I resumed it I realised my calculations from the previous session were wrong and that if I continued as planned it would to be too long, so I ripped back about 15 rows – and the instant I'd finished, realised that I'd been right in the first place and that I needed those 15 rows back. Numerate people must find life so much easier than I do.

This is the sort of setback that usually, well, sets me back – sometimes for eight or ten years, as previous posts have probably made clear by now. But this time I ploughed on stoically, reinstated the 15 rows then continued and cast off the shoulders. And then I had four pieces waiting to be joined.

After joining the shoulder seams I started on the neckband using my beloved circular needles. I can't stand straight needles as they always seem to be poking me, and I've used circulars almost exclusively since discovering them (except when knitting narrow pieces, for which I often use double-pointed needles). Then it was just a matter of going round and round in 2 x 2 rib until I felt it was long enough. This was a nice no-brainer for in front of the telly.

I decided to join the sleeve seams and side seams in one go, as I used to do when I made shirts. It's so much easier – no wrestling with tubes of fabric, just flat pieces.

 Tying the two pieces together at intervals like this makes it easier to wrangle the whole thing and to make periodic micro-adjustments when you find one side is slightly longer than the other.

One sleeve joined flat to the shoulder.

I used mattress stitch to sew the whole lot up as it gives an almost invisible seam. Also, as it's worked from the right side, it lets you easily check how the right side is looking as you go, making it easier to match patterns or decreases, as here.

Matching the decreases on the sleeve seam.

Mattress stitch is one of those wondrous little techniques (like making your own bias binding, learning a provisional cast-on in knitting, or doing tailor's tacks, something that I tried for the first time only last weekend) that seems like too much bother until you try it. However, it's easy to learn and, once mastered, makes you feel one step further towards craft goddesshood. Give it a go, any knitters among you who until now have been wedded to backstitch. (Although in its defence, backstitch gives you nice strong shoulder seams.)

For the neatness freaks – almost invisible seams!

 And this – looking decidedly pink, which it isn't – is the result:

A warm, cosy jumper, all finished and ready to give to charity – just in time for summer.

Lessons in being ladylike

A rainy, cold, appointmentless Sunday seemed destined for craft, and some neglected embroidery took my fancy. This hasn't been bothering me as much as many of my other unfinished projects – possibly because it takes up less space than, say, a knitted jumper and a barrowload of yarn – but it must be one of the oldest unfinished objects I've got.

I started it about 25 years ago and it's a dressing table set consisting of two small doileys and one large – further proof, if any were needed, that I spent a lot of my youth channelling my inner nanna when more age-appropriate activities might have included wearing blue eyeshadow, sporting big hair, drinking Malibu and dancing to Duran Duran. I didn't even have a dressing table back then; I do now, but I also have no desire to gussy it up with embroidery.

I still like the design of violets, though, but I'm aware my taste is a bit suspect, so I showed it to my craft-group friends. They're all much younger and groovier than I am, and they didn't make gagging noises, so it can't be that bad. I decided it could be repurposed, and that one of the smaller doileys might make a fetching pincushion.

Step 1 was to trace around the violets using two glasses; the inner line was to embroider on and the outer one to cut out along.

The idea was to chain stitch around the edge of the two pieces, cut them out then join them together using whip stitch.

This is a technique I learnt about a few years ago when I was editing an embroidery book. I mentally filed it away as possibly being handy in the future, but I'd never actually used it until now – or so I thought. However, when I was making this pincushion I had a sudden flashback to embroidery class at school when I was about seven, and the first thing I ever embroidered; a pincushion whose two circular pieces were joined in just this way. That weirded me out more than slightly. It's craft Groundhog Day again!

For a long time, that pincushion remained my only embroidery project. I didn't like sewing as a child. I was a tomboy, and also apparently an infant feminist. I  disapproved of having to learn to sew; this was about 1970, yet it could have been 1870 or even 1770. Mrs Gilchrist, our sewing teacher, insisted that any thread we used should be no longer than the distance from our fingertips to our elbow; this wasn't so it wouldn't tangle, or to prevent us from stabbing a fellow tot in the eye while flailing about, but because working with long threads wasn't 'ladylike'.

I thought then, and I still think, that no little girl at any stage in history should ever be expected to concern herself with what is and isn't ladylike. I continued to cut my threads as long as I wanted and to get into genteel trouble for it, and once I'd finished that pincushion I didn't pick up a needle again until I was about fifteen. Then I went berserk and was obsessed with embroidery for about ten years. The violet project dates from then.

So, back to the present. Once I'd chain-stitched the inner circle on each piece I cut them both out, leaving a small seam allowance, which I finger-pressed to the wrong side. Next I whip-stitched the two pieces together, remembering to make sure the grain on both ran the same way.

I sewed about three-quarters of the way round, leaving a gap through which I could stuff it. Traditionally pincushions are stuffed with sawdust, but all I had was polyester fibrefill. Despite its small size the pincushion soaked up stuffing at about the same rate as a Romantic poet imbibing opiates.

Once the seams started straining I finished sewing it up then pummelled it about a bit to settle the filling more evenly.

A suitable accessory for a lady.

In retrospect I could have machine-sewed around most of the outside for strength and just whip-stitched the embroidery for show, but it doesn't matter. The whole thing took me a pleasurable couple of hours and I like the result.

What to do with the rest of the dressing table set, though? I think I'll make a little needle case out of the smaller doiley. At the moment I can't think of a possible use for the larger one, and even if I could, I'd have to finish the embroidery first.

Check back here in another 25 years.

WIN STUFF!

In a shameless and frankly rather needy bid to attract more comments on this blog, I hereby announce the UPP’s first competition. The prize is this knitted scarf:

Perfect should you ever need to camouflage yourself amid a flock of parrots.

It's about 12 centimetres wide and 1.5 metres long. For those who like a craft spec, the stitch is 1 x 1 rib on 4.5 mm needles and the yarn is Noro Silk Garden, a wool/silk blend. I had a fascination with this yarn for about two years, knitting my way through a couple of hundred dollars' worth and finishing up with a whole bunch of ball ends. Thriftily, I decided to meld them into a scarf. Now I offer it to you, dear readers.

To enter the competition, check out the rules on the WIN STUFF page (top right) and post a comment there.

It's a modest prize, reflecting the youth of this blog and the number of people who seem to be reading it, but look on the bright side: your chances of winning will probably be quite high!

The one I've been dreading

Monday night: home alone, washing up done and put away, house tidied, nothing on the telly – and I realised that, short of doing my tax return, I'd run out of excuses to keep avoiding the Unfinished Projects. 

Bugger.

So I fetched out the red jumper that I started long ago for one of Melbourne's needy. It's the project I've been dreading the most as a) I don't much like it, b) I knew it was going to need quite a lot of calculations and cogitations to work out where I was up to and what else needed to be done, and numbers give me brain strain; and c) I've learnt a lot about knitting in the eight years or so since I started it and I'm not happy with how I've done certain parts of it. Knitting in the round on circular needles, for example – what a good idea that is! No need to do row after row of purl if you're making stocking stitch – just lots and lots of lovely knit stitches, with the bonus of minimal sewing up once you've finished all the pieces. 

But I digress. All that is beside the point, which is finishing stuff no matter how I feel about it.

So I counted rows and analysed the scribbles I'd made on the pattern, and once again wondered just why I'd abandoned it precisely where I had, until I remembered that after a hiatus in the project long ago I'd recommenced and knitted the entire back, only to realise I'd done it on larger needles than the front. So I had to rip it all back and start again. Yep, that would have discouraged me.

Nonetheless I did manage to redo a goodly amount of it before giving up again. In fact once I'd done my calculations tonight I realised I'd knitted about twenty rows too many – another thing to blame on my number blindness. So I ripped those back too then got down to the real task of shaping the front neck.

In real life it's a cheerful cherry red, not this retina-shredding shade of orange.

Despite the pattern being fairly basic – knit 8, purl 2 on right-side rows and purl every stitch on wrong-side rows – I've been finding it quite easy to go wrong, by doing my usual trick of musing vaguely on irrelevant things rather than paying attention. However, despite my not liking the jumper very much, the yarn (Patons Zhivago, for those who like such specs) is pleasantly soft to knit with. So now that one shoulder is well on its way, I feel justified in calling it quits for tonight. I've got craft group on Wednesday, so I will attack it again then.

Back on the job

It's all very well prattling about crobots and my crafty father, but this blog is supposed to be about unfinished projects, so yesterday I steered myself back on track. I dug out the cream-coloured wheat-ear jumper, allowed myself a sneer or two then got stuck in. First I inspected it for moth holes, and found none – it's been stored in a camphorwood chest since last millennium, so perhaps the smell really does deter the pesky blighters.

I recall now that one of the reasons I gave up on the jumper first time round was that the front had more embroidery than the back. My fondness for symmetry warred with my fedupness with the whole thing, and the fedupness won. Really, though, does this jumper need more embroidery? I think not.

The sleeve seams were already sewn up, so I only had to sew up the side seams and join the sleeves to the body. The proportions of the thing worried me a bit – the armholes were so deep it looked as though it was designed for a woman with a normal-sized torso but the Incredible Hulk's biceps. However, the bits fitted together okay, so perhaps the Chunky Upper Arm look was all the rage back when the pattern was written.

I'd forgotten that the sleeves were slightly puffed – how special.

In my haste to finally get it finished, my backstitching started out rather large and I had to go back over it more neatly; this was slightly annoying, but as the jumper had already sat in a box for fifteen years, spending another ten minutes on it hardly seemed onerous. And this was the result:

It's not perfect – or even nice! – but it's a second project to tick off the list.

All up it took me about an hour and a half, including a lunch break. I feel relieved that it's done, but also foolish to have sat on it for so long when so little work was required to get it out of my hair for ever. I'm going to give it to a women's shelter or the like.

And once that was done I could skip off to meet a friend with a light heart and a glow of self-righteousness. A good day's work, I say.

The craft gene

The idea that ‘craft’ is overwhelmingly a female preoccupation must be almost culturally hardwired, I think – sometimes even in feminists like me. My mother knitted and sewed well, and made most of my clothes when I was a child, but she never did ‘fancy work’, as she called embroidery and the like. Her mother had been partial to a spot of fancy work, though, and for ages I assumed I must have got my love of craft from this grandmother I never met. It was only a few years ago that I realised that my own craft gene comes much more strongly from my father than anyone.

Mum was only really interested in practical, wearable craft rather than decorative, and she stuck to knitting and sewing alone. Dad, on the other hand, was creative, imaginative and experimental. Things he designed, built and made for family and friends over the years included at least three houses, innumerable pieces of furniture, wood carvings, dozens of examples of wood turning, two intricate spinning wheels and a nine-metre yacht. He once made about a dozen boxes of decorative edging tiles for garden beds, packing the clay into a mould he’d carved himself, then firing it god knows where or how. When he decided our roof needed a skylight, he replaced some of the terracotta tiles with fibreglass ones that he’d made. I still use the five different-sized chopping boards he made for me twenty years ago, and the dining table he made me has been my most treasured possession since he unexpectedly arrived one weekend with it tied to the top of his car.

He was always pottering in his workshop, fiddling about with new projects, usually to do with wood and/or boats. He encouraged Mum’s and my interest in textile crafts, and even though he jokingly referred to our evening craft sessions as ‘the sheltered workshop’, I knew that his interest was genuine.

Some of his ideas were interesting variations on the standard – when I was little he made me a rocking duck rather than a rocking horse. Others looked better than they performed – such as his wooden wine goblets, which were appealingly rustic but made any wine taste like savagely overoaked chardonnay. Some of his other ideas were just off the wall. Soon after I learnt to crochet he decided it would be amusing to get me to make crocheted booties for the family corgi, to prevent her claws from damaging the decks of our boat. I thought it had to be a joke, but he persisted in suggesting it, and even bought some sturdy leather from which I could make the soles of the booties. Even at the age of twelve and in the first flush of my love affair with craft, I knew the whole plan was ineffably naff. In the end the dog solved the dilemma for us by dying (possibly of embarrassment).

Occasionally his lack of taste and fashion sense came in handy. It meant he was happy to sport such things as a tie that I made him when I was about twelve. For years he wore it to what passed for formal occasions in our family (of which, mercifully, there were few, given that the tie was crocheted in gold-flecked olive wool).

So it's to my dad that I owe my craftiness and my occasional bouts of dubious taste. He also passed on his procrastination gene – but that's another story.

One evening in the crobotics workshop

The craft group to which I belong, the Crafty Kittens, meets once every three weeks or so. Normally each of us does her own thing, but this week we decided we would all make crobots – little crocheted robot toys.* Not an obvious choice for me, as I don't like technology and am generally allergic to cute, but for some reason these caught my fancy.

They're mostly made by crocheting in rounds, and we all got a bit lost working in circles and forgetting quite where we were up to, but that's the beauty of crochet; you can wing it, and compensate for mistakes, much more easily and successfully than you can in knitting. Kitty had only tried crochet once before, yet she got the hang quickly and had a third of a sumobot by evening's end. I chose the dogbot, possibly in tribute to Doctor Who's K-9 (who, despite being no more than a discarded kerosene tin welded to some old pram wheels, always seemed a more convincing actor than Tom Baker). I got my dog's head and ears done, and am hoping that once the head is tightly stuffed, it will lose its disconcerting hexagonal shape. Now for the body and legs, before he becomes my newest Unfinished Project.


Works in progress:

Dogbot by Janine

Thinker by Kate

Sumobot by Kitty

Mechanobot by Bec

And then I might tackle a zombie. Embrace the silliness …

 
* Patterns taken from Crobots by Nelly Pailloux (Murdoch Books, ISBN 9781741969634).

In the waiting room at the procrastination clinic

Jumper for newborn Oscar, who is now in his third year

When my friend Jacqui said she was having a baby I started knitting a jumper. I chose the wool carefully – it’s a wool/silk blend which I thought would be soft and non-scratchy on infant skin, in a shade of blue that would do for either sex – and finished most of the body in only a couple of evenings.

Partial garment for an unfeasibly small person

Then I got spooked by having to use double-pointed needles for the sleeves (two sticks good, four sticks bad!) and flung it aside. (In my defence I did make him a cot quilt, which I finished and delivered a couple of weeks before his birth. Go, me!)

I briefly picked the jumper up again when my friend Rhiain became pregnant, but I couldn’t overcome the dpn fear, so instead made (and, yes, finished!) a pretty cot quilt. I felt sure her baby would be a girl.

He wasn’t.

I found that discouraging, so baby Tom never got a present, the girly cot quilt is still pointlessly living with childfree me, and the little blue jumper languishes yet. None of my other friends is, as far as I know, pregnant, but I want this project out of my hair.

Optimistically sized jumper with ill-advised embroidery 

My not-my-real-aunty Barb taught me to knit when I was about seven, but I didn’t take to it. My mother was a good knitter, making garments half from commercial patterns and half out of her head. She knitted constantly for the three of us and for various other relatives and friends, and I wanted to knit too; I tried to like it, but never did. That irked me.

When I was about 28, I determined to give it ‘one last try’ – and I was hooked. For whatever reason, it all came together in my mind and my hands and I was away. My first project was a forest-green crew-neck jumper than I finished in a respectable amount of time and wore for several years. The next project, a cream V-neck jumper, fared less well.

I had to get Mum to help me over the phone with the V neck as I couldn’t work out all the slipping and passing of stitches, but I eventually managed it, and the whole thing was only about an hour away from finished when I abandoned it. All I had to do was sew up the side seams! While I’m sure it wouldn’t have fitted me, I’m not sure that was the reason I gave up on it. I recall thinking I could give it to Mum, always a more modestly sized woman than me.

But what truly baffles me is why I ever decided it would be nice to include some folksy embroidery on it. Perhaps I thought it was 'too plain', a concept I no longer recognise. But wheat ears?!

'Naive' embroidery – so called because it's naive to think it could possibly look good

The mere existence of this jumper goads me, as it reminds me of both my procrastination and my dearth of fashion sense. I’m going to sew it up and give it to charity. There must be someone out there who isn't repulsed by embroidered knitwear.

Next, I open a can of worms

Eight or so years ago, my social conscience uncharacteristically flared up and I decided to knit garments for a charity called Knitting for Melbourne’s Needy. I chose a cheery red yarn and a pattern for a man’s jumper (amateur psychological assessment: vicarious boyfriend knitting), knitted steadily for a few weeks, and nearly finished it. Then I downed sticks. I can’t remember why; I expect some less worthy project caught my fancy. 

Obviously the cold and homeless people of Melbourne (or indeed anywhere) really need to rely on someone less dilettantish than me. So for reasons of guilt, this is my next target. It’s one thing not finishing projects for oneself, but I do feel rather ashamed not to have finished this one.  

I was quite surprised to find the pattern stored in the same place as the jumper. Such logic and foresight so long ago boded well, I thought. Encouraged, I resolved to unearth the rest of the wool and also to organise my stash of yarn. I sorted it mostly by colour but occasionally by intended project, and in the end was appalled by both the extravagant amounts I've bought, and the pointless odd and ends I've saved in the name of frugality – dozens of old ball bands, broken needles and 20-centimetre scraps of yarn. Hey, you never know when they might come in handy! And if they don't, I'm getting in solid practice for a mad old age spent compulsively hoarding crap. 

This is the damage:

Unfortunately for me, it looks three times as big in real life

And this is only from the two most accessible yarn repositories in my flat. There's more. Much more. Plus this is just the yarn itself, not the unfinished projects. Oh, kill me now.

Off to a good start

Eight or ten years ago I bought several skeins of a chunky Katia yarn on sale. I soon knitted it up into my first-ever lace pattern, in two pieces, the idea being to join them together into a shawl.

The twain finally about to meet

And there the project ended. I baulked at the grafting, and also it looked horrid on me. Big chunky knits; always so flattering on a hefty lass! So into a drawer it went until recently, when I dragged it out – and discovered that it was exactly the same pattern as a scarf I started a couple of months ago (and have since finished), and which also required grafting. Groundhog Day! I had no recollection of ever having attempted that stitch before. My mind has canyons into which all sorts of things slip.

Slightly wonky, but done!

My first attempts at grafting this hit various snags, but in the meantime I successfully grafted the grey scarf. On Sunday I went back to the cream project and nailed it. I realised a few centimetres in that I was somehow twisting the stitches, but I didn’t go back and fix them. The UPP is about finishing things, not making them perfect. A penchant for perfection does few people any favours.


The grafting isn’t perfect but it does what grafting should: it joins two pieces together and doesn’t look too obvious. I call this finished. It doesn’t work as a shawl for me but it can dress the bed and warm my feet, and it was a satisfying way to spend a couple of hours on a sunny winter’s day.

One project down, an astronomical number still to go.

And then I could justify spending the rest of the afternoon sitting on the balcony reading the new Tana French novel.

Too much craft is finally enough

When I was eleven, my Aunty Lola taught me to crochet granny squares. I took to it like a profiterole to chocolate sauce, and within a few months I had finished a single-bed-sized granny-square rug in the glorious shades of the 70s – mainly gold, orange and chocolate brown, with some purple and aqua thrown in.

I used and loved it throughout my teenage years and it is significant for two reasons: it was the start of my enduring love of craft, and it’s a project that I actually finished.*

In hindsight my teenage years might have been more normally spent chasing boys or actually going outdoors occasionally, but instead I practised enthusiastically for old ladyhood – crocheting doilies and traymats, cushions, slippers, ties for my father, potholders, and lampshade trims; making patchwork cushions (they’re still on my mother’s sofa, worn to shreds); teaching myself to tat; spending endless hours on Spanish blackwork and bargello embroidery; and fashioning macramé potplant holders (some of which are still, to my astonishment, on display in my older cousins’ houses). At university I once spent three days embroidering a cushion rather than going to lectures. But for every item that I finished, two or three projects were abandoned along the way – because I didn’t like the technique or the stitch or the colour or the fabric, or they didn’t fit me or suit me, or I gave up instantly as soon as I hit a tiny snag, or because something newer, shinier, more challenging, less challenging or just different came along.

‘Why don’t you finish one thing before you start something else?’ my non-craft-obsessed mother used to ask. Meanwhile my father was busy in his workshop creating, tinkering with, swearing at, buying materials for and abandoning projects, just as I was. Poor Mum.

Thirty-five years after that crocheted rug, the pattern continues: I start many more projects than I finish. I have hundreds if not thousands of dollars’ worth of fabric and yarn in my stash, and my cupboards and drawers are increasingly crammed with UFOs (unfinished objects). In fact I considered calling this blog The UFO Project until I realised it would attract more conspiracy theorists, Roswell obsessives, X-Files fans and general nutbags than I was willing to tolerate (to wit, any**), and that they would end up pretty annoyed, too, after typing their way into an alternative universe not of greys and government obfuscation but of craft.

And now I’m finally really sick of it. All this moribund craft is a waste of money, time, energy and space. I’m tired of scrabbling through drifts of it whenever I want to find a needle, buying more and more furniture to store it, and generally having it on my conscience. It ends here! This blog*** is about finishing stuff off, getting it out of the cupboards and giving it a life. Setting goals is alien to me, so there’s no time focus here; I’m just going to do it till it’s done. Blogging about it is a way of keeping it on track; if it’s out there and I think (even deludedly) that people are reading about it, hopefully sheer shame will make me do it. So pile on the shame, crafters of the world, and let me know what you think. (But do feel free to leaven the shame with praise and flattery if you feel inclined.)



*Some people might argue with this, as all these years later the yarn ends are still not darned in; however, I’ve accepted now that they never will be, and as the rug has been used and loved for many years without any of the squares coming adrift, I reckon it counts as finished.


** with apologies to X-Files fans; you have my allegiance, and I admit to a lingering fondness for David Duchovny, but this blog is about other things.

*** Thanks to Kitty for navigating the sea of my incompetence and helping me to set this blog up. Without her it would still be a Word document and a bunch of photos I didn't know how to extract from my camera.