OK, people, let’s drop the pretence that this is a Wednesday series, shall we? I am not, nor ever will be, Havi Brooks, the indisputable [pirate] queen of ritual blogging. Be that as it may, here is the sixth post in the series, which so far has covered knitting, sewing, crochet, embroidery, and [...]]]>

OK, people, let’s drop the pretence that this is a Wednesday series, shall we? I am not, nor ever will be, Havi Brooks, the indisputable [pirate] queen of ritual blogging. Be that as it may, here is the sixth post in the series, which so far has covered knitting, sewing, crochet, embroidery, and quilting. As ever, if you do these crafts I’d love to hear how you got started!

“Making clothes”, of course, is a subset of the “sewing” category. But it is also a distinct craft of its own. (And like so many of these crafts I write about, it’s been far too long since I did any. All to change on foot of the glorious dawn of String Revolution, says you. Quite.)

Making clothes, once you strip away the cultural connotations, is simply about turning planes of woven string into three-dimensional containers for the human body (or, well, canine or equine or whatever, I suppose, if you’re into that sort of thing), usually by sewing of some kind. Two things make the task trickier: (1) the body’s irregular shape, and (2) its inconvenient habits of stretching, shifting, bending, and similar.

To get around the first issue, you manage transitions between areas of more or less fullness with shaping techniques – such as curved or sloped seams, pleats, darts, gathers (or simplest of all: a belt). This shaping can mean you need fastenings – zips, buttons, ties, etc – to allow for dignified entry and exit, or just as a feature in their own right.

To address the second issue, you generally add a little extra room, known as “ease” – a term knitters may recognise – unless you’re working with very stretchy fabric.

That said, stripping away the cultural connotations is a bit daft, really, because cultural connotations are what clothes are all about. (Barber is brilliant on this, by the way, in the book I’m not at all obsessed with, honest, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years.) Clothes are the supreme cultural performance, a complex communication about status, allegiances, preferences, intentions: a language we all understand without even thinking about it.

Now. Pardon me for a moment while I digress to talk semantics. (Because I’ve just spent ages thinking about this, and I’m damned if I’m letting you lot off the hook.)

You’ll notice that this post is about “making clothes”. In fact, what I usually say is dressmaking – a term generally defined as “making garments for women”. Don’t know about you, but when I consider that word, it conjures up quite a particular range of images. Wholesome, full-skirted sun frocks in floral cotton, for instance. Or matching velvet party dresses for matching little girls. Coffee-coloured satin blouses made by dressmakers: perfumed and whiskery ladies who wear their glasses on a chain and never quite straighten up. All of which suggests that the word could do with some political reclamation, at least in my prejudiced head.

Contrast dressmaker with tailor. Tailors are worthy businesspeople; they possess gravitas and command respect and all that good stuff. They have agency. Dressmakers have some agency, maybe, but not much. Their influence does not extend far out into the world. You don’t hear about things being “dressmade to your needs”, do you? (Mind you, they have more going for them than seamstresses, who don’t even get their own verb.)

Actually, I should note that my dressmaking endeavours have so far produced, overwhelmingly, dresses. (My one attempt at trousers so far was an abysmal failure.) And apart from my father, who got a tie in 1994, and a small stuffed-toy frog called Rhadamanthus, whom I kitted out with a formal suit for the Trinity Ball in around 2001, I have only made garments for women. Perhaps I should put my shingle out as a dressmaker who only makes dresses.

That’s my 1996 Trinity Ball dress up there at the top (sorry about the photo quality – it’s a full-length dress, in case you’re wondering). My friend brought me the silk from Beijing, years before I made this. I was experimenting with a curved empire line and dart-free princess-line bodice, and I seem to recall wanting to show as much breast as I dared. I was particularly pleased with the silver hand-embroidery – although I’d originally planned that it would wind all the way around the dress to the hem.

I’d been making my own patterns for several years by then. In fact, I used only a handful of commercial patterns before buying Pattern Drafting for Dressmaking,which convinced me that I could do anything – anything!

Most of the things I made are still hanging around in various wardrobes. For this post, I went hunting and came up with a small selection. Here’s a cotton summer dress from 1993, which I made after trying on something similar that was far beyond my means:

It didn’t turn out anything like the commercial version, but I loved it dearly nonetheless. (I wonder if it still fits?)

I started another dress later in 1993, but didn’t finish it until the evening of the 1994 Trinity Ball – I remember frantically sewing the hem as I waited for my taxi to arrive:

This is also made of Asian silk (I think my aunt bought it, but I don’t know where), and it was so scant that I designed the pattern to squeeze every square inch out of the fabric – above-the-knee hem, three-quarter-length sleeves, deep neckline. I had enough scraps left to cover the buttons, but very little else.

I was pretty comfortable with the pattern drafting by this stage. The best fit I ever got was with this blouse, which I made for a wedding in early 1995. The sleeves hung just so, the finishing was beautiful (the patterned buttons all face the same way!), and I was delighted.

Pity about the colours. I’m a total summer-colours person, but for some reason I convinced myself for years that I looked best in autumn colours. (I think it was a handy way of giving myself a hard time. Let’s not dwell on it.)

Then just as I got into my stride, I stopped. I altered a silk dress of my grandmother’s for my 21st birthday in 1995. Those disastrous trousers I mentioned were from summer 1997. And as far as I remember, I haven’t sewn any clothes since.

It’s funny – I still think of myself as an enthusiastic dressmaker. Dormant, I suppose. Stirring, perhaps.

It’s not Wednesday, but it was quite recently! So here is the fifth in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. (I started with knitting, then talked about sewing, then turned to crochet and embroidery.) If you do any of these crafts, I’d love to hear about how you got [...]]]>

It’s not Wednesday, but it was quite recently! So here is the fifth in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. (I started with knitting, then talked about sewing, then turned to crochet and embroidery.) If you do any of these crafts, I’d love to hear about how you got started, too.

Quilting always reminds me of that thing people say when they want to be witty about parachuting: “jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane”. In this case, you’re cutting up perfectly good fabric – often into very tiny pieces – and then sewing it back together.

Seems profligate, when I put it like that, doesn’t it? But the roots of quilting (or at least the “patchwork” part of it) lie in thrift: it arose as a way of giving old fabric items a new purpose. When your dress wore out, you cut it up, used the best bits to make quilts, and made rag rugs or similar out of the damaged sections (and before you go thinking I’m an expert on that bit, all I know about rag rugs I learned from Laura Ingalls Wilder).

What I find thrilling, though, is the amazing richness of the craft that arose from the necessity not to waste fabric. (Yes, thrilling. This stuff makes me fizz with excitement. You should know that if you’re planning to spend any time here.) Even the simplest traditional block designs – log cabin, nine-patch, drunkard’s path, rail fence, flying geese (and aren’t those names evocative?) – can be implemented in so many different ways. And that’s before you go near diamonds and hexagons, or the mind-bending world of the art quilt. (Check out the Flickr sets of the Irish Patchwork Society – these make me grin from ear to ear.)

Nowadays, of course, we tend not to save our fraying shirts to make bedcoverings to keep ourselves warm in winter. Instead we go out and buy gorgeous designer fabrics (can we say Amy Butler, Kaffe Fassett, Denyse Schmidt?) – or just whatever is on sale at our local craft shop. But we still take them home, cut them into little bits and sew them back together again, just like our foremothers.

“Quilting” is used as the umbrella term for this craft, but what I’ve been talking about so far is really “patchwork” or “piecing”. Strictly, quilting is the sewing you do through all the layers (top, batting, backing) to finish your piece. This can be as simple or as intricate as you have patience for, and it can be done by hand or machine. You can do patchwork without quilting, and you can make a quilt without patchwork. Most of the time, though, they go together.

My first patchwork project was a commission for my mother’s friend: a baby quilt in pre-cut Laura Ashley fabric squares, which I made when I was around eleven. I did it the way she showed me, by tacking each square to a paper template first, and then whipstitching along each seam. (This is known as English paper piecing, and it’s great for hexagons. Squares are usually done by machine seaming.)

I loved doing it, and I made a couple of other patchwork things in my teens (a tiny cushion, I remember, and a waistcoat). But I didn’t make another quilt until my youngest cousin was born, in 1995. I’d bought Quilting for People Who Don’t Have Time to Quilta little while previously, and I’d been itching for the chance to give Marti Michell’s methods a try. So I made a cot quilt for my baby cousin, using “magic nine-patch” blocks, set on point. It was brilliant.

And actually, that’s all I’ve done. Somewhere in me is a raging thirst for quilting, which can fade to near-dormancy and then flare up like a chronic disease. I’ve read books, I’ve bought fat quarters, but I haven’t taken the plunge yet. I think it’s something to do with the scale of it. Quilting is not one of the more portable crafts.

It is, however, straightforward – at least while you stick to straight seams. I’ll leave you with the advice I gave on Twitter last week to a couple of friends who were expressing interest in getting into quilting. It’s not exactly comprehensive, but it does sketch the procedure pretty concisely:

• Yay quilting! It can be as simple or complex as you like. Sewing squares together will get you a long way.
• Get a rotary cutter (srsly fab), cut carefully, sew straight seams, measure often, rip if necessary, press seams.
• When quilt top is done, make a “sandwich” with batting and backing, and tie or quilt (which is a knack, definitely).
• Last of all, add binding to finish quilt edge. Start small, maybe, because full-size quilts are unwieldy to finish.

And that’s it. By the time you’ve done that a few times, you’ll be ready to tackle anything. (Or at least, that’s my hypothesis. I intend to test it as soon as I’m able. Watch, as they say, this space.)

It’s not even remotely Wednesday! But here at String Revolution, I’ve arranged for time to stand still while I get my Wednesday series post written and published. So there. This is the fourth in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. (I started with knitting, then talked about sewing, then [...]]]>

It’s not even remotely Wednesday! But here at String Revolution, I’ve arranged for time to stand still while I get my Wednesday series post written and published. So there. This is the fourth in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. (I started with knitting, then talked about sewing, then turned to crochet.) If you do any of these crafts, I’d love to hear about how you got started, too.

Embroidery is the useless branch of sewing. By which I mean no disparagement – I have a burning passion for embroidery – I’m simply remarking that whereas knitting, “plain” sewing, and crochet are all good for turning out usable items, embroidery is pure embellishment. It’s something you do to an item that already exists. It doesn’t add functionality.

It’s still string, of course – that thin string called thread (or floss or wool, depending), which you pass through the surface of the item you’re embroidering to leave a pleasing pattern. It’s a little like taking a needle for a walk.

The variations on this theme are mindbogglingly diverse. (Well, they boggle my mind. But in a good way.) Some people like cross-stitch or needlepoint, which both repeat one basic stitch unit over and over to form a picture, rather like a pointillist painting. Some prefer following outlines and filling in shapes using a range of different stitches (of which there are hundreds, at least). Others enjoy the exquisite shading effects they can achieve with needlepainting. Some delve into the engrossing worlds of stumpwork or goldwork, whitework or blackwork, never to be seen again. (Is it just me, or does blackwork look unsettlingly like ASCII art?) And that’s just the amateurs. Contemporary textile artists have taken the concept of “embroidery” and run it to the utter limits of its potential.

I was trying to fit the word “painstaking” into the above paragraph, but then I realised that I couldn’t decide which technique to associate it with – because embroidery is all about the taking of the pains. You can knit a scarf in a weekend, sew a simple skirt in an evening, crochet some flowers in an hour or two. But if you want your embroidery project to come out well, you’ll quite likely be doing all sorts of preparation before you sew a single decorative stitch.

Depending on the technique, this might include mounting your fabric, stitching your guide threads to mark the centres, transferring your design, and so on. Then make sure you’re sitting up straight, with good light (and preferably a magnifying glass on a flexible arm), thread your needle, strip your floss if you’re fussy (I never do this – go on, look down your noses at me now), take a deep breath, and bring the needle up through the fabric at your starting point. Hooray! You are now ready to begin.

Embroidery, I think I’m suggesting, is for obsessive types. It’s rarely a dive-straight-in affair: it requires planning and commitment. Much of the satisfaction comes from the meticulous care that you’ve put into the project.

I love that. But it’s time-consuming – and not entirely compatible with my current toddler-enriched lifestyle. So I haven’t done much embroidery lately.

My grandmother got me into it first. She bought me a preprinted linen tablecloth, with a pattern and threads, and showed me how to do cross-stitch. I was five or six, which makes it relatively impressive that I got through almost a whole corner of the tablecloth before running out of steam. (It’s around somewhere, I’m sure.)

Some time in the following couple of years, I got hold of a booklet with 39 embroidery stitches, and then later on I found one with 100 stitches. I tried every one. I made little rugs for my doll’s house, embellished Sindy’s clothes, presented my parents with a pair of wonky hessian mats decorated in garish wools. I even followed a pattern, once or twice, though I much preferred making up my own.

At college, I broke out my hoops and threads much more rarely – made a pouch for my friend’s Tarot cards, in black silk with a starflower on the flap; added a spray of silver flowers to a ball dress I was making. And since that period, I’ve barely done any embroidery at all. This is such a sad state of affairs that I started a new project this week.

If I were more organised, I’d have grabbed some pictures of that new project – with which I am dead chuffed, I might add – but I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait to see it. There is altogether too much misplaced furniture and masonry dust around these parts at the moment for photography to be anything other than a tedious ordeal (bah – I thought we were through that bit weeks ago, but I relaxed too soon).

Instead, the photo above (apologies for the quality – that’s my second try and it’s still ming) shows some random needle doodling, which I did a very long time ago and found when I went hunting for supplies for the new project. I rather like it. Good job, former self. Of course, it gives the lie to what I was saying earlier, since I remember sketching out the shapes in pencil as I went – but then, it’s not exactly a coherent design.

I’m really pleased to be doing some embroidery again – although I do wonder how I’m going to fit it into my life. I picture myself dividing my attention between my hoop and the TV screen, as the evenings draw in and Niall and I have some downtime (what’s that?) before bed. I hope that’s not wildly unrealistic. We’ll see.

It’s Wednesday! (That is, it was when I wrote this – but then I didn’t manage to get it posted before the Feaster woke up for his night feed. Oh well.) Here is the third in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. The first one is about knitting, and [...]]]>

It’s Wednesday! (That is, it was when I wrote this – but then I didn’t manage to get it posted before the Feaster woke up for his night feed. Oh well.) Here is the third in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. The first one is about knitting, and last week’s is about sewing. If you do any of these crafts, I’d love to hear about how you got started, too.

Ah, crochet. Instead of your two knitting needles, you have one hook, which you use to loop string around and under and between itself in a series of knot-like stitches. Like knitting, you work in rows or rounds, but unlike it, you (generally) have only one “live” stitch at a time.

The above photo – and please forgive its poor quality – is of a little demo piece that I made hastily a while ago to show my cousin how easy crochet is. (It is, really.) It’s just treble stitches and chains. The Oyster plays with it constantly – though I’ve no idea what he uses it for.

I haven’t done any crochet in years, but it holds a special place in my heart. (You know, there are far too many crafts of which that’s true, which is another reason I started this blog.) It’s the first craft that I can remember really jonesing for while away from home – this happens me noticeably often, come to think of it. On a family holiday in France in 1984, when I was nine, I suddenly got the feeling (you know it?) and made my mother find us a craft shop. We bought a crochet hook and two balls of yarn, one in a dusky purple and one in a French blue.

Back at our gîte, I made a strip in each colour, just rows of double crochet (by which I mean what’s called “single crochet” in the US), back and forth, maybe three inches by eight or nine inches. I loved the shallow ridges that the dc rows make when you work them into only one half of the stitch below.

I don’t remember having any plan starting out, but when I looked at my strips I wanted to find some way of joining them. Not having a wool needle, I “invented” the technique of crocheting the edges together, leaving one short side open to make a long, thin bag. A set of chained ties later, and I had a pencil case that saw me through the next several years at school. I wish I knew where it was – probably buried somewhere in my old bedroom at my parents’ house.

It must have been some time later that year when I met Sister Nathi. She was an ancient nun who lived in the rather odd teaching institution where my mother worked. She was often to be found at a reception desk, and she always had crochet in her hands.

But her crochet wasn’t anything like my crochet. No – her crochet was, for me, the stuff of fairy tales: an intricate white froth of tiny lace, the beauty of which I found almost unbearable. She made collars – the traditional kind, that you sewed onto a garment and then unpicked and resewed every time the garment was washed.

She was so old that her eyelids sagged moistly, and her fingers were big and dry. She never showed me how to make the things she made. But she talked to me, and helped me with what I was doing, and inspired me. I nailed my colours firmly to the crochet lace mast – to the extent that I was quite put out when someone suggested that it was also possible to knit lace. What nonsense!

At home, quite incongruously, I found Eithne D’Arcy’s Irish Crochet Lace: Motifs from County Monaghanand looked in my (frankly amazing) collection of inherited supplies for some cotton and a hook.

I worked my way through the book, more or less, skipping or improvising where I didn’t understand the instructions. Funnily enough, although I made countless motifs, I think I may have made only one object – a mat for my grandmother‘s Christmas present (in 1985, I think). It had a central motif, with eight motifs around the edge (two types of rose, alternating), and improvised fillings and edgings. It never lay flat, because I was finishing the final edging as we were being called to sit down for our Christmas dinner, and I made it too tight. (Also, I was eleven – you’re not supposed to make flat mats at that age, right?) So my grandmother used it in her silver bread-basket, which suited its shape perfectly.

After that mat, I think I largely put Irish crochet lace aside. I found my supplies a number of years ago, back when Niall and I were living in our cluttered little flat in Dublin 4. Having snaffled the Eithne D’Arcy book from my parents’ house, I immersed myself again in that fairy-tale froth:

Not for long, though – I’m afraid these have been yellowing in a bag at the back of a drawer ever since. I still haven’t got the hang of the Clones knot, you see, and I no longer have the eleven-year-old’s insouciance regarding wonkiness. I want my mats to lie flat, dammit. Perhaps one day I’ll join the Guild of Irish Lacemakers and sort myself out.

If you like the sound of the book I mention in this post – enough to buy it, maybe – and if you like my blog at all, and if the stars are auspicious and the moon is in the right quarter, please buy after clicking on one of these links (I’ll earn a small percentage if you do):

It’s Wednesday! Here is the second in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. The first one is about knitting. If you do any of these crafts, I’d love to hear about how you got started, too.

Sewing: joining together planes of woven string (fabric) by stitching through them with [...]]]>

It’s Wednesday! Here is the second in my series of personal introductions to the crafts I do. The first one is about knitting. If you do any of these crafts, I’d love to hear about how you got started, too.

Sewing: joining together planes of woven string (fabric) by stitching through them with fine string (thread). That’s all. The fascination, of course, lies in turning the essentially two-dimensional fabric into a three-dimensional object – and all the marvellous refinements you can make to that, in terms of shape, colour, style, embellishment, and so on. (It doesn’t even have to be fabric that you stitch – we started out with animal hides, for instance.)

Look, I know this is a bit gawky and unsophisticated, but I am hopelessly in love with sewing. Shining eyes and girlishly clasped hands and involuntary little gasps of pleasure – the whole shebang. My pulse quickens when I so much as think about it.

I’ve sewn curtains and cushion covers and draught excluders. I’ve made evening dresses and waistcoats and Hallowe’en costumes. I’ve smocked and piped and quilted, darted and boned and buttonholed and bias-bound. I’ve done French seams and rolled hems, welt pockets and covered buttons. I’ve made the flag of an imaginary country as a birthday present for its creator, and I once stayed up all night making a tuxedo (with evening tails, I need hardly add) for a small stuffed-toy frog named Rhadamanthus, so that he could decently accompany his owner to the Trinity Ball.

My introduction to sewing came when I was around five years old. Two of my best friends (sisters) were in the habit of arriving at my house to play and announcing before they got in the door what they’d been doing recently. One day – I remember this so clearly – they advanced up the front steps announcing, “We can sew!”

Anything they could do, I wanted to try. So my mother found us some material – brown with a slight sheen – and needles and thread, and we went upstairs to my room. My friends showed me how to thread the needle and knot the ends of the thread together, and how to do “in-and-out stitch” (aka running stitch). Later the same day, I “invented” backstitch – I even called it that.

I was hooked. Soon I was making clothes for my stuffed animals. I remember making a skirt for Mrs McKenzie, my kangaroo, cutting out pieces and sewing them to each other as I went. I sewed on a button, making a straight cut in the fabric for a buttonhole.

It wasn’t long before I discovered refinements like hemming and seam allowances. I studied my own clothes and other people’s. I got bags of scraps from my great-aunt, a demon dressmaker, and made soft furnishings for my dolls’ house and clothes for my Sindy. When Prince Charles married Lady Diana in 1981, I made Sindy a blue skirt with a five-foot train (this on an eleven-inch doll, you understand), with a lace frill at the end and multi-coloured embroidery all the way down. It was a tour de force – and quite astonishingly ugly.

I graduated to larger-scale sewing when I was maybe nine. My mother and I went to Cassidy’s and bought a skirt pattern and some cotton in a cheerful patchwork print. The skirt had deep pockets and a semi-elasticated waistband. We used the family sewing machine, which I then commandeered until I inherited another one.

I made cushion covers. I made clothes. I made bags. I read everything I could get my hands on (which, without any sort of budget and before the Internet, was a pretty eclectic mix of stuff). I haunted haberdasheries, wistfully. I became mender-and-alterer-in-chief to my family. My first commission – when I was around eleven – was a baby quilt for a friend of my mother’s, made of pre-cut square patches from Laura Ashley. As a teenager I made eccentric patchwork waistcoats and cloth caps. I made my Debs dress – princess-line boned bodice, puffed sleeves and a full, ballet-length skirt – in deep blue silk all the way from Beijing.

I did all of this in isolation. I knew nobody else of my own age who was into sewing (or any needlecrafts, really). My great-aunt was mistress of these arts, and I knew that another great-aunt, whose multiple sclerosis was by then advanced, had been even better in her day. My aesthetic was formed independently of my generation. I read 1940s booklets with titles like “Make Do and Mend”. My aunt gave me a history of fashion when I was ten or so, which I read cover to cover. Sindy’s wardrobe blossomed.

I still feel just a little bit private about sewing. There are few things I enjoy more (I’m really looking forward to my younger son being old enough that I don’t have to worry so much about dropping pins), but I do oddly little of it these days. I haven’t hooked up to the Web scene at all (hence the dearth of useful links in this post – sorry about that). I’ve never bought fabric or notions online, or even patterns. Sewing, for me, seems to be rooted in a golden 1980s childhood idyll. I’d quite like to pull it into the here and now, but I need to be gentle with it. It’s very close to me.

If you’re interested in some more practical tips to get started, Alicia Paulson over at Posie Gets Cozy has two recent posts about sewing, which I urge you to read. She covers the basic what-to-do parts very succinctly in Tiny Yellow Dress, and a Few More Thoughts, which is a sequel to I Sew, where she talks about how she got into it.

Meanwhile, as recent posts here attest, I’m mostly knitting at the moment. But I do have one or two sewing projects in mind. You’ll be the first to know.

First of all, I want to say a big huge HELLO and WELCOME to all the new readers who’ve joined us since I got it together to start actually telling people about this blog. It’s genuinely exciting to get comments and e-mails from you in response to a post I’ve written. It’s what [...]]]>

First of all, I want to say a big huge HELLO and WELCOME to all the new readers who’ve joined us since I got it together to start actually telling people about this blog. It’s genuinely exciting to get comments and e-mails from you in response to a post I’ve written. It’s what this is all about.

A couple of you talked about how you are wanting to take up various crafts, either for the first time ever or for the first time in years. So I thought I might do a little series introducing the various crafts I do. (We bloggers, she said self-consciously, love our series.) Not a comprehensive primer, or anything – I’m thinking more of a personal take. Let’s make it a Wednesday thing for a while, shall we?

(OK, it’s technically no longer Wednesday. But it was when most of this post was written. I’m declaring it Wednesday, so there.)

Knitting, then: essentially, it’s a method of turning string into fabric. (Other methods include weaving, crochet, tatting, and knotting of various kinds.) This is done by looping the string systematically around two sticks. The thickness of the sticks and string together determine the texture of the fabric. (Yes, I’m deliberately making it sound strange. But that’s really all there is to it.)

With very few exceptions, you knit pieces to the size and shape you need, then join them together if necessary – and it isn’t always. Knitted fabric is very stretchy, which influences the ways in which it’s used. Pieces are usually joined by sewing them together, but there are other ways (e.g. crocheting through both edges).

Rectangles are the easiest shapes to knit. You cast on some stitches; you knit some rows, back and forth, in plain or purl or a combination of the two; you cast off. Bingo. If you go on for long enough before casting off, you have a scarf. Four rectangles make the simplest kind of jumper (front, back, two sleeves). Knit two fronts instead, each half the width of the back, for a cardigan.

You can get quite far with just these skills, but of course they are nowhere near the whole story. Increasing or decreasing the number of stitches in your row helps to shape the piece of knitting so that it conforms more pleasingly to the human form. A knitted edging finishes off the garment nicely. A decrease paired with a yarn-over makes a simple buttonhole.

Patterns of yarn-overs and decreases make lace, which can be as simple or as complex as you can handle. Knitting some stitches out of their normal order – again, systematically – makes a cable pattern. Knitting in the round makes a tube – you abandon the row in favour of a spiral. Short rows (where you don’t knit all the way to the end before turning) shape a piece in three dimensions. Entrelac allows multi-directional knitting.

Following a pattern is simply a matter of learning what the abbreviations and symbols mean. Well, and counting. You can count, yes?

I need hardly add that if you want to learn any of the abovementioned skills, there are plenty of online resources to help you – try the extensive archive of free articles at Knitty.com, for a start, or search You Tube for tutorial videos. Better still, find someone who can show you in person. If you’re keen, look for a local group – or start one. And join Ravelry, for goodness sake.

(If you like learning from books, I’ve mentioned some of my favourites in this post over here.)

Different crafts have different rates of production. With some, like plain sewing, you can cover a huge amount of ground in relatively little time. With others, like crochet lace, you labour for millennia over every cm². Knitting is somewhere in the middle, at least among the crafts I’m familiar with.

When I go back to knitting after sewing for a while, my progress seems glacial. It’s actually kind of dizzying to contemplate the sheer number of stitches in a knitted garment, each of which had my attention for a tiny period of time. Perhaps if I were to spin my own thread and weave my own cloth, I’d have the same feeling about a sewn garment. The specialisation of labour insulates us from a full appreciation of the work that goes into such things.

(There’s a parallel with construction here, actually: we’re just finishing up an extension project in our house, and watching the builders at work has made me look at brick walls with an entirely new respect.)

But I love the portability of knitting, the way you can just slip it into your daily life. No big equipment, very easy to put down and pick up again if you’re interrupted, minimally perilous to small children – really, what’s not to like?

The photo above is of the Oyster’s knitting needles and wool. He hasn’t really tried to knit (other than “his way”, which bears only a frail resemblance to the real thing), but I have hopes that he’ll learn in the next couple of years. That would give me so much glee, you’ve no idea.