Creative continuity

I’ve been knitting squares.

It started as a learning exercise more than anything else, just getting used to the rhythm of it, the feel of the needles, the small discipline of finishing something properly. At first it was uneven, a bit tentative. Then, somewhere along the way, it settled into something fairly neat and even...

I’ve mostly been working with what I have: creams, a few greens, the occasional pink. I do have a rather severe purple, but I’ve decided against it. It feels too declarative. I’m more interested in something like damson which is quieter, and with a bit more depth. I don’t have the right one yet, but that seems part of the process as well: waiting until something actually fits, rather than filling the space for the sake of it.

It made me think, in a very loose way, about local making, how people have always produced things where they are, often without much fuss or announcement. There was a local maker, Mary Walker, whose work still gets mentioned. I don’t know all the details, but I like the idea of that continuity: things made, used, passed on, remembered in fragments.

This doesn’t feel like a grand project. It’s just a series of squares, building up slowly. But there’s something in that that I like - doing something steadily, choosing carefully, not overreaching.

It suits me at the moment.

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