I’m obsessive. I like to knit a lot. I go through cycles. I binge knit when I do. The knitting group I go to looks at the skirt I’m making on skinny little needles and asks how long it will take me. When I say, a few weeks, I am lying. I want the skirt now. There’s a place I want to wear it. I will have it done. I will get obsessive about it.
But then I will finish. I will endure the process of making up. Which I hate. Making up (which involves a light delicate touch rather than the strangely satisfying plod of just knitting around and around and around) is my least favourite part of any knitting project. But then, when it is made, and I have covered myself in it, seconds of orgasmic elation…and then: it’s over.
I knit exclusively for myself. Sometimes (rarely) people ask me to knit something for them. I always make some excuse. It’s all for me. So every bit of clickery holds in it a fantasy. This thing I am creating. And every garment holds a promise of a better me. Crafting something for yourself is very like buying something for yourself in that way. I think the thrill of making is very like the thrill of shopping – just spun out long and low.
Pure materialism in the creation of material. Oh, when I own this thing, everything will be better. I will be faster and stronger and delightfully pretty. I will have an army of lovers and a new kitchen. Somehow crafting something makes it make its own marketing mythos. Oh, when I have this woolly hat completed it will surely (surely) pour balm onto every dark corner or my squalid, spoiled little life.
That want, that desire to consume becomes, here, not a matter of money but one of time. Craft breaks my time bank. Spends what I have not got on frivolity. I watch TV instead of reading so I can craft. I despair over my word count because my hands were busy elsewhere.
And the real trouble is that as I fly, I gorge. I miss the thrill of the journey in the race to get to the end.
It is almost exactly like reading a wonderful book. I am always that person flipping as I near the final chapters. Losing that joy of reading in the rush to see how it ends.
I wish I let myself enjoy the process more. Not because it is better than the product – but because it is equally important. Because it isn’t one or the other. It’s both. Both at once. The process is bittersweet with anticipation, being right in it, not knowing how it ends, but with the joy of immersion. The product is sweetbitter with the full knowledge every loose end sewn in, but with the sadness of it no longer being a part of you. Connected deep to a kind of energy inside.
And then of course, when I finish something I stalk around. I wait. I wish. I flick idly through pattern books. Not wanting to fall too soon – but sometimes not being able to resist the urge to fill that gap. I have been known just to grab some fancy looking yarn and a pair of needles and knit to nowhere. Just for the soothing sensation of it. Casual knitting with no expectations and no future. Just for a distraction until I find another project that makes the shape of my heart. (And, often, of my arse.)
