Getting Dressed
One of the most annoying aspects of being a woman who sometimes like to get bossy in bed, is the notion that expressing yourself sartorially by coating yourself in black plastic is actually compulsory. As someone who is typing this in a café wearing a green crochet dress and paisley shirt (shut *up* – it so *does* go) and a necklace with a little black elephant on it, this notion that my idea of style starts and ends with the front and back covers of Skin fucking Two pisses me off. I have so little interest in presenting my body as some kind of sleek plasti-coated version of armour-clad tactile/untouchable femininity.
Having said that though, I have just finished knitting the dress in the picture. (I did try and take a less impressionistic photograph but they just looked like the worst back-of-the-bathroom-door eBay shots.) The pattern for the fuzzy-wuzzy, clothkits-inspired dress-that-took-forever (– it took six weeks but I am very impatient –) was from a gloriously retro knitting book called, in a way that probably sounded slightly controversial in the eighties when it was published, Wild Knitting.
Wild Knitting – I bet you didn’t read that without at least feeling the urge to say it out loud and make a flashy hand gesture and a face like a tiger.
Wild Knitting (which is out of print, but occasionally available on Amazon from ‘these sellers’) is a wonderful book full of encouragement to take knitting needles and do things that are, well, certainly wild, but also possibly futile.
And for that alone, Wild Knitting is one of my biggest inspirations. When it comes to craft I really do love the possibly futile. I love the way Wild Knitting calmly and AS IF IT IS NORMAL AND EVEN POSSIBLE suggests knitting with lace and raffia and feathers other bits of random. I once raided every one of my relative’s bric a brac a crap collections to find enough things I could rip into strips to make, um, this.
Actually I like it. I always thought would be a nice tapestry, hanging on a wall like something from an ancient castle in a reimagined pomo universe. But it has never been on my walls because weighs seven million tons and thus probably needs something like to have some batons added to it to support it and I can’t be bothered to go get batons (even though, as I type, I think a couple of extra batons could have some fun uses round my place). Anyway no wall for it yet and it lies in my craft graveyard cupboard stuffed in a plastic bag.
And talking of plastic bags, and talking (as I was even further back) of dominatrix wear, one other idea in Wild Knitting is a pattern that involves knitting using strips cut from plastic bags. And I did think in a sleepy, lack of concentration moment, that I ought to try knitting a proper traditional dominatrix (rawr) dress out of strips of black plastic bags – mostly for the sheer LULZ. Haw haw – it is like what you want me to wear except I knitted it out of crap. Haw.
It’s a tricky potential project because knitting with plastic strips that are wide enough not to tear would involve quite big gauge needles and most patterns for those kind of close fitting tarty dresses aren’t written for 10mm needles. So this project might involve me writing my own pattern, which is always a thrilling roller coaster ride through tantrum town. But the thrill will be tempered by me having to make sample swatches – little counted squares of knitting to see how big the final garment will be utilising maths – which somehow manages to be far more boring than the sum of its parts.
That, though, isn’t the main drawback of knitting a dominatrix dress out of ripped up black plastic. Far, far more scary is the thought that it might actually be nice and then I would have to give up all my ‘just because I am a sexually dominant woman, doesn’t mean I need to dress like a ridiculous fancy dress hooker version of my own sexuality *grump* – and then where would I be?
But I’m going to swatch anyway, because I like danger! And danger just loves me.
