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.