On Making Things
This has been an unusual period of waiting in my life. Like having a phone call scheduled at 3 PM that you spend all day anticipating, I have had an immigration deadline hanging off in an ever further future for months. It has instilled in me a sort of dissociated paralysis – unable to settle into the business of life making here in the small town I am camping in, working a dead end job during the normal hours of socializing, and falling away from rope. It seems to me that suburbia is a waiting room and there is little to do here but tap my foot.
One form of foot tapping is the repetitive and meditative task of turning raw fluffy wool into yarn, and then making things out of that yarn. I received this material from a neighbor who tends a small herd of sheep, and another of alpaca. They are very gentle animals that seem impossibly idyllic in the rural New England setting they live in. Using a small device called a spindle I turned the dyed fiber into single strands, and then twisted the strands against each other in the opposite direction to create a 2 stranded yarn that tensions the twist against itself to keep it from unraveling. The process was surprisingly efficient once I got the hang of it, but this should not be too surprising. After all, for at least 10,000 years the spindle was the sole tool available to humankind to turn raw materials into thread, necessary for all kinds of tasks related to the production of textiles.
The finished object tells its own story of growing experience. My first yarn was horribly inconsistent, and my first few rows of knitting with it were stilted and uncertain. I made up a simple pattern using half remembered stitches from a knitting lesson I am sure my grandmother gave me when I was about 11, and much more helpfully, some Youtube tutorials. The strands are very gently thick and thin, some sections of fabric bulky and dense, while others dip into a lacey lightness as the yarn thins out. Somewhere in the midpoint I picked up a stitch, so one side is slightly wider than the other. Still, at the end is a perfectly wearable neck warmer – made in the traditional way, from local materials.
There is something in psychology called the Effort Driven Reward Cycle, that describes the connection between doing things physically with our hands to complete some physical work. It is noted to be much more satisfying than other types of work – the brain simply is built to respond to physical exertion more than mental effort. So whether you are engaging in some human macrame or knitting a scarf, I hope that you find it rewarding!
boshai 