some things are years in the making
some things are years in the making
and I guess that's okay?
Earlier this month, I wrote a guest post for Treehouse! It’s all about our trip to Maine in Sept :)
Knitting takes forever. It just does. This is also true of sewing and embroidery and quilting and spinning and natural dyeing and… you get the idea. The creative acts I feel most drawn to are also ones with few shortcuts/time-saving hacks (why am I like this?). But beyond the time it takes to make things using your hands and various forms of fiber, I’m coming to believe that making anything just takes so much time, especially something you feel satisfied with. I remember coming across this thing that Ira Glass said, probably around a decade ago, that still (mostly) lands when I consider how creative practice feels:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
When I was new to sewing, I felt like the machine was driving me and not the other way around. I would whirl my way chaotically through a project, shocked that I made anything that would even remotely stay attached to my body. But as was the case with my knitting, as I get more proficient at sewing, my work isn’t living up to my expectations. I’m now in that (frankly, annoying) chasm where my skill level has not caught up to my taste. I sew a seam and it’s a little wonky, and I’m disappointed because I’ve been admiring finer tailoring details, but I’m not quite able to execute them yet. With knitting, it took until my 30th birthday (I’ve been knitting on and off since I was 11) for me to make something that I really felt represented my taste. This vest ended up even better than I was imagining and that was a first for me. But that took something like 20 years of on and off practice to achieve, and that is a Long Ass Time.
It’s not only that skills take time to build, but working the muscle of creative devotion does, too. Sometimes, when I’m not actively working on a project, I start to get antsy - will I ever make anything again? Is this it? Did I run out of juice and it’s all gone & will never return? But upon reflection, those times seem to be periods of integration, or fallowness, to loosely quote another person I admire,
. I need these days/weeks/months to shore up the resources to execute the project.Here are two projects I’ve been working on (read: dreaming about, thinking through, searching for patterns and materials, doubting my abilities, writing about, etc) for years: a puffer vest and a bright red cardigan.
I’ve wanted to make an Older Brother inspired puffer vest since about 2019 when they first debuted the style, interested in the process as much as the final functional garment (I love a vest, even a super ugly one). Likewise, I’ve been eyeing this Nikki Chasin cardigan for a few years, but the fiber composition (alpaca/poly blend) and the price point ($400+) made me determined to make my own. Over the course of my 4+ years of longing, a dupe materialized on Ravlery1. Praise be to the Ravelry knitters who share their modification notes publicly.
This month, I got back to working more actively on both of these projects. I sourced swatches for the dry oilskin2 I’d like to use for the puffer vest, and I continue to process wool fiber to stuff it with. Up next, I’ll trace my ugly (but somehow perfect) vest to create a rough “pattern” for it.
Meanwhile, the cardigan has mainly been an exercise in color sourcing and yarn matching. It took a while of scouring online and in-person and then a perfectly timed Labor Day yarn sale at Purl Soho for me to pick up a sweater’s quantity of this merino/cashmere blend in a perfect (to me) poppy red with orange undertones. In order to get closer to gauge3 for this sweater pattern & achieve a similar fabric look to the Nikki Chasin one, I needed to hold the yarn with another to bulk it up. I landed on Knitting for Olive silk mohair in “blood orange” which was a damn close match, not *quite* as invisible as I’d hoped, but good enough. Hot tip: Ravelry’s “search by color family” was particularly helpful for finding the right yarn & seeing it represented in a number of lighting situations. Now, I’ve knit the top of the back & have started on the shoulders. It’s knitting up pretty quickly and without too much confusion so far — here’s hoping it’s smooth sailing and next time you hear from me I have a whole entire cardigan to show :)
other things I’m working on
Executing a seasonal clean.
The basic premise is: take everything out of where it lives, clean the inside, discard/re-home what is no longer needed, and put it all back. This is quite the process, as you can imagine, but we’re getting better at it every time. Something about emptying the fridge and cleaning it out together at 8am on a Thursday seems like a new domestic partnership level unlocked.
Putting the yard to bed for the year.
This is another daunting (but exciting) multi-year project. In 2022, we were too preoccupied with making the inside of the house livable (and getting to know people in town) to pay attention to the yard. In 2023, we started paying attention to how the sun moves throughout the seasons, where plants might like to live, and we experimented with letting the lawn go to “meadow”. Now, we’re co-working with someone on a plan for the yard that will include raised beds, water-loving plants for our wetter areas to mitigate flooding, and more flowers. The long term plan includes more things, like a studio! Or and ADU! An outdoor shower! For now, though - it’s maintenance tasks all the way: tons of weed-whacking (perhaps letting the lawn go to “meadow” without a plan is ill-advised), repotting herbs to come inside, digging up and storing the dahlias, and solarizing the tomatoes to avoid blight.
Working on shelves for our office!
We’ve been living with all of our books in boxes for more than 2 years! Huge thanks to our friend Nick who built and installed these, and has been teaching us how to work with wood along the way.
Spending time with neighbors <3
In an effort to build the net between us and the folks who live on our street before winter arrives, I organized a low-key soup night recently. There were 10 adults, 6 children. Josh made a huge batch of chicken soup, others made sides, and we all wandered 10 houses down to our neighbors’ house to hang out. I spent most of the evening hanging out with a 3-year-old, talking about Bluey, and it felt SO good to pull the neighbor friends in tighter. Here’s hoping it becomes a regular thing.
For the uninitiated, Ravelry is a gigantic catalog of knitting patterns and the versions people have made of them — incredible resource, but fairly clunky UI.
Dry oilskin has been treated with a wax to help waterproof it, but it doesn’t have such a waxy finish to it as other oilskins or waxed canvases, and that’s preferable to me.
Every person knits a little differently, so “gauge” is a way of attempting to standardize that variation. When you knit from a pattern, you use recommendations from the pattern writer on yarn and needles, but ultimately your gauge helps you determine what size to knit, by essentially knitting a little sample that you can measure. My gauge was not quite correct for this, which I’m compensating for by sizing up and making some minor modifications as I go.
Purl Soho’s shipping manager here, I am SO STOKED on that red, absolutely obsessed with it across some of our yarn lines. I just finished a vest using Daily Wool in Flame Red, it’s such a dream.
I too have been knitting for most of my life. I learned when I was five and let’s just say several several decades later I’m still obsessed ! I just wrote a journal entry about that here on S/S…why we choose the longer path! And I love ours soho btw!!