Confessions of a “Mad Knitter”

Posted on April 30, 2013
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Someone referred to me as a “mad knitter” today and I had to agree with the description. I knit almost every day. On the days when I don’t knit, there’s generally something wrong: I’m ill, or I’ve hurt my neck/shoulder, or my arms and hands are hurting from too much knitting, and so on. And then there are the very rare occasions when I’ve been out all day and simply haven’t had time to knit.

I don’t really remember when I started knitting. I’m pretty sure I was taught as a child, probably by my sister, Andie, and I know my mother encouraged me to take up knitting and tapestry when I was a teenager to stop me from picking at my pimples while I was watching TV (it was an unconscious habit). The first item I remember completing was a jumper I knitted for myself when I was 19 or 20. By the time I finished it, I couldn’t stand the sight of it, so gave it to a friend. I knitted sporadically for the next 10 years or so – the odd item here and there, things for myself that I never finished, or finished but never wore. The serious, daily knitting started (I think) when Mark & I were first going out. I remember his puzzlement and frustration that I could sit and knit while watching a movie – he’s used to it now.

Having children is a knitter’s dream. So many cute, small (which equals quick!) projects to work on! Bootees, little jumpers and cardis, toys … the list goes on. I really hit my stride while I was pregnant with Finn and I’ve knitted more stuff for he and Leila than I can remember. When Finn was little I was more prepared to take on complicated knits but, as the he and Leila have got older and I’ve become used to the fact that most things will only be worn for a year or two, I’ve tended to go for simpler patterns that can be completed more quickly.

I’m often complimented on my knitting at the kids’ school. Being a Steiner school, skill in hand crafts in valued and it makes a nice change from people looking at me like I’m slightly crazy for bothering to knit jumpers and socks for my children, when they can be purchased cheaply at chain stores (where I still buy the bulk of their clothes anyway). Still, I feel like a bit of a fraud when people wax lyrical over something I’ve made. I don’t design the things I knit; I use patterns created by others. As I said above, I no longer try to knit complicated or tricky things, I stick to simple patterns. I don’t knit Fairisle or Intarsia; stripes are as complex as my colour knitting gets. Other than that, I rely on variegated yarns to provide colour variation. I don’t spin or dye my own yarn, or favour hand spun or dyed yarns; I use commercially produced yarns, mostly sourced from Spotlight. I don’t make a particular effort to use pure wool, or all natural fibres; I like to knit with cotton in the warm weather and acrylic or natural and man-made mixes in the cold weather.

In short, I don’t feel like there’s any real art in what I do when I knit. In many ways, I’m simply a machine, reproducing other people’s art.

So, why do I knit? Simply because I enjoy it. It’s become such a habit now that to sit in front of the TV without a set of needles and yarn just feels wrong. I like the way children look in hand knits. I get great satisfaction from finishing an object and seeing it worn. For me, it’s fun.

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Junior Deluxe Editions

Posted on April 29, 2013
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Book cover of Kim by Rudyard Kipling

When I was growing up we had a collection of old-ish books, bought by my parents for my older siblings, that I loved to look at and, eventually, read. There was a red covered set of Australian Encyclopaedia, a blue covered Funk & Wagnells Encyclopaedia (or was that just the dictionary…), a black-covered collection called Lands and Peoples (this set is for sale on ebay US), a book called Great Lives, Great Deeds about famous dead people, and a multi-coloured collection of books called Junior Deluxe Editions. The encyclopaedias are gone, although my mother still has the Funk & Wagnells dictionary and uses it regularly for her crosswords, along with Lands and Peoples (I can still vividly recall the fifties hand-coloured pictures of African women combing their hair). I think Great Lives, Great Deeds is still hiding in a cupboard at my parents’ and I have the Junior Deluxe Editions with me.

Junior Deluxe Editions were sold by mail order as, I suspect, were the other books that my parents collected for the family. A lot of the family library found its way into the house via Reader’s Digest in the days when bookshops were rare and the internet was not even a space-age fantasy. According to this site there were about 90 Junior Deluxe titles in all, and they were issued from the mid-forties until 1962.  The books contained classic stories and collections of fairy tales by authors such as Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stephenson, the Brothers Grimm and so on. We had (and I still have) Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Gulliver’s Travels, and Rip Van Winkle and Other Stories. I have a feeling there were others, but can’t recall them now.

I love these books and they were magical to me as a child. For me, the best thing about them is that each one is different, the design echoing the subject matter of the contents. Each has its own colour scheme, which extends to the end papers. The pages are rough cut in solid paper which discolours beautifully with age. They are also beautifully illustrated. Swiss Family Robinson contains a great picture of a donkey being squeezed to death by a giant python and it’s not at all gory. And, of course, they contain great, classic stories that I desperately want to share with my children. You can see what I’m talking about in the Flickr group devoted to them.

I had never seen any more of these books until I was doing a course for work in the late nineties. On a break I wandered into a second-hand book just down the road from the course venue, and found a pile of Junior Deluxe Editions sitting there for $10 each. The work colleague who was with me thought I was crazy. I bought – I think it was – 6 titles that I didn’t already have and brought them home to join their friends.

These days, thanks to ebay, I have 24 of them. I buy them cheaply, so they are not in great condition, and Emmylou has chewed a few, which are now  in worse condition, but they hold pride of place on the top shelf of our hallway bookshelves. I’ve tried to read some of them to Finn and Leila, but they aren’t interested. I’m hoping that, like me, they’ll discover them on their own one day and fall in love. For myself, my goal is to buy all 90 eventually and gradually buy copies in better condition than the ones I have.

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To Dare Greatly

Posted on April 28, 2013
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“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

I first came across Dr Brene Brown via her TEDxHouston talk about The Power of Vulnerability. I had no idea who she was, but I was struck by her natural, conversational way of speaking and the ideas she shared stayed with me. When I saw her next TED talk on Listening to Shame, I was completely sold on her philosophy of Wholehearted living and needed to read more.

Thanks to my trusty Kindle this was no issue. I downloaded and devoured The Gifts of Imperfection and pre-purchased the Kindle edition of her latest book, Daring Greatly, which takes its name from the Theodore Roosevelt quote above, finishing it recently. Both books are very readable. Brown writes in the same way as she speaks in her TED talks – conversationally and accessibly – while still providing ample, researched support for her thesis.

Her thesis is, as I understand it, that to live a full, “wholehearted” life we have to be prepared to make ourselves vulnerable. Vulnerable to failure, vulnerable to criticism, vulnerable to loss and pain. We do this by being out there, in the arena (as in the quote above), trying and failing, falling down and getting up again and, in doing so, we open ourselves up to the best life has to offer. It is only by risking the negatives in life that we are able to full experience the positives, thereby becoming wholehearted. There’s obviously more to it all, but that’s just my potted summary.

This led to what Oprah would call an “Aha!” moment for me. I realised that I needed to take some risks in life to experience the good things I really want, to take real joy in my life and my family. These are not big, jumping off a cliff-type risks. These are the little risks come up every day, by saying what I really think, going to a school meeting and volunteering for something, or embarking on a new project that has no guarantee of success. By taking more and more of these little risks and being out there trying I enhance my experience of my life and increase my chances of  success – by all the various measures. Accepting that I will be vulnerable while doing this, that I will fail at times, say the wrong thing or bite off more than I can chew and have to back down makes every risk a little easier to take. And with each risk and the associated trip, fall, stutter, loss or win, I become a little more connected to my world and and a little more fully realised as a person.

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