'If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it… The goal should be an interesting life."

Dorothy Rowe

Monday 6 April 2015

Can you spot the (not so) deliberate mistake?


Not these. These were not mistakes. Weird, but not mistakes. Even the unfinished yarn ends which have felted together are deliberate. 

I may have shown you the left hand one before, but I've felted it a bit more since then. It was originally a tree with hands for branches. Now it's a glove with gloves for fingers, and has therefore, become the first of my unwearable gloves series. The glove on the right was intended to be unwearable right from the start. It was going to have a long tail (knit till the wool runs out) but I got bored and added a frill (increase in every stitch till the wool runs out). The result makes me think of a hand growing out of a brain. I am seriously beginning to wonder what is lurking in my subconscious and what will come out next. Especially because of what did happen next...

You may have noticed that all my samples so far have been made in neutral colours - because I was thinking of skin tones. However I've been pondering on using colour - after all, they are gloves, not hands. Or are they?

I wasn't sure what colour, but when I came across a big skein of  red yarn in a charity shop, I grabbed it. It felt like wool, and £4.50 for 800 grammes was a bargain. I like red, and I'd been very impressed by Louise Bourgeois' paintings of red hands at Southampton Art Gallery last month.

Of course, because it was a skein, I had to get out my swift and nostepinne. I know I shouldn't set up the swift in this ramshackle way, (that's not the deliberate mistake), but the stool is the only thing I can clamp it to. It actually reminds me of this. 


The image of the yarn on the swift is a more accurate colour than the others.

I thought I would only wind off about half of it to begin with, but I had a comfortable chair, I was enjoying the process, and I just kept going. It made me realise how important to me it is that I do these things by hand, in the old way. Wooden tools are nice too. But I don't think my foremothers had Radio 3 to keep them company.

I knitted a tiny sample and washed it - yup, it's wool - and started a glove. It wasn't going to be an unwearable glove, but one of a Louise Bourgeois inspired pair. But when I'd finished it and was sewing in the ends I realised this had happened.



I knew the stitch count was off when I got to the fingers, but just thought I'd miscalculated. Obviously my subconscious was telling me to stick with the unwearable gloves...






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