When in doubt, read the instructions

Winter is my favourite season by far. The more clothes I'm wearing, the happier I am. Boots, socks, coats, gloves, scarves – especially scarves. I like my clothes to fly well under the radar; I'm not confident with colour or the way I look, so I wear mostly black, but in winter I like to spice it up with a burst of colour in the form of a scarf.

With the weather cooling down here now, I want more scarves, so I've dropped the unfinished projects and the things I've been making for for other people. Right now it's me, me, me, sweetie.

The latest project is a lace scarf in lovely Malabrigo yarn that I bought last winter, in the appropriately named shade of Hollyhock.

It's a thickish (maybe 10-ply/Aran or so) single-ply wool yarn with
a lovely felt-like feel to it. I'm knitting it on 6mm needles.

 I started it on Easter Thursday in preparation for a weekend away. Being impatient, I didn't test out the pattern first, even though it was a new one, and much more complicated than any I'd tried before.

This, predictably, backfired on me. After two days of pretty solid knitting I had about 30 centimetres done. It wasn't right, though. The repeats kept going wonky and I couldn't work out why – until I realised I'd simply skipped part of the pattern. As my father used to say: 'When in doubt, read the instructions'.

'Do you think it's worth it?' my mother said, as she watched me rip back all but the first six rows and start again. And later: 'I think I'd give up if I were you.'

I didn't, though. I finished one end and am now doing the other separately, so they'll be symmetrical. I'll do stocking stitch or rib for the central section – I need to have a play and see what looks best – then graft them together. I don't think I'll block the whole thing as I really like the honeycomb effect, but I will block the very ends just so they don't curl up.

The pattern is a 16-row repeat called Leaf Lace and the idea for the scarf came from one
that took my eye on the highly distracting Purlbee site, which is full of lovely projects.

'How many scarves do you need?' a friend once asked me. I think her reasoning was that you've only got one neck, so you only need one scarf – but if I followed that kind of logic I'd only have one pair of undies. I think that with scarves, as with undies, more is more. Every couple of years I have a cull, and give to charity the scarves that have gone out of favour. I like knitting scarves as they are an achievable project for the easily bored and distracted (like me), you can generally do them in front of the telly or on the bus, and they give you a chance to try new patterns and new yarns without having to shell out masses of money.

And they make great presents, when I can stop thinking about myself.

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.

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.