Knitting Calendar
I’ve been working on the piece of knitting for one week, each day I knit a bit, each day I knit with a different colour, The textile piece is consisted of garish bright colours, while the different types of the yarns give it a strange and irregular shape. It is just a piece of textile practice sample which I use to document my knitting practice process, hoping it to reflect my progress in skill (fewer mistakes are shown on the textile) and my dedicated time on the project (reflected through the length of each colour sections).
It is a very badly developed piece of textile, with visible flaws and errors (which you can imagine the clumsiness of the knitter), yarns made of different materials occupy various width and also provides a distinctive surface for touching, some are smoother, and some are tougher.
On each day, I spend my time knitting the piece, it becomes an extension of my daily journal, a record of my daily activity. I found myself knit when watching Youtube videos, I found myself knit when having a video chat or in the intermission of a virtual meeting, I found myself knit when talking to another person in a different time zone. I am a starter in knitting, I can only talk when knit, my eyes and hands are always required to be focused with intention.
Otherwise, these funny flaws come in, these bits where I missed a loop and unable to figure out how to fix (since haven’t been taught by my mother yet), where I used a wrong stitch when paying too much attention to the ongoing conversation, hence resulted in a strange reverse side pattern appearing on the “right side” of the textile.
When I knit, I usually meditate. With the intension of creating a visual record of daily practice through knitting, I think and reflect the day, When typing my thoughts and design practice, I keep think about my knits and find a surprising similarity between typing and knitting: both are built up by small fragments and organised a row after another. The knit is created by the loose yarns and looped by the needles, while the text follows the type cursor and organised from the mess of my mind. Knitting is organising, knitting is creating.
While I knit, I am practising my skills learnt from my mother, another very immature knitter. I recall memories and conversations between us regarding learning and teaching the knitting skills, regarding the unsuccessful hand-knitted sweater she made for me in my childhood. Knitting as a skill and a fragment of memory has gone across the geographic boundary and time zone difference, connect my family and me tighter. The domestic skill passed by my grandmother to my mother, and now to me, maybe from some ancestor we haven’t seen before, has constantly held us together, knitted us together as a piece of textile, maybe just looks like the one week knitted journal I produced, each one has its own characteristics: texture, colour and appearance, but all held together through the needles.
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