Text, Textiles & The Knitted Crazy Quilt Shawl…

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“Text and textiles are woven…”
Ann Hamilton
in the podcast “
On Being”

Yesterday I was sitting at the computer working and writing and decided to stop and listen to my favorite podcast that I listen to each weekend, On Being with Krista Tippett. This week she interviewed artist and professor Ann Hamilton. Hamilton talked about the connection between text and textiles as I sat there knitting. She said, “Textiles are the first house of the body.” I am still taking that in.

What I have been writing about here lately is how I “Knit Without A Destination” when I need to unwind my tightly screwed brain while writing, and here she is talking about the connection between the two. I am going further with my project as I wrote about last time, deciding to join pieces together that I knit, and as I knit without a destination and no pieces will be alike as I sew the pieces together, like above, it will become a Crazy Quilt Knitted Shawl. I am already very excited as I work on the third piece that will go the other side of the red. For now I see knitting lots of pieces and sewing them together and then crocheting between and around all the pieces for highlighting and emphasis, but I never know where my “textile brain” will take me. I just follow it’s lead. I have rarely done a pattern, and struggled with it. Free form knitting and crochet are my preferences, and more to the point kind of “Knitting By The Seat Of My Caftan” as it were.

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This knitting project is such a perfect companion to my zine Pastiche wherein each page is a different color and subject. I might be writing about anything at all from one page to the next, and at the end of the year of The Pastiche Project, 6 issues, I will write a book based on what I have learned while doing Pastiche. All the while I will be knitting and creating these knitted shawls from pieces that I have knitted to unwind my brain and keep me calm and centered along the way, a pastiche project indeed.

This weekend I had a wonderful gift come in the mail from my friend Barbara, a box of yarns from her surplus, and I will put them to good use with these shawls. What fun. It was like an early Christmas present!

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And as I knit, so I write. I will be working on pages for Pastiche today, knitting betwixt and between the writing and making of the pages, text and textiles woven fine, and this is the way I weave my life, one strand of yarn, one word, at a time. Such deep pleasure and tremendous peace…

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