Project Thoughts (Consciousness) — Lucynda N. Scheffer

For me, yarncraft isn’t entirely a conscious act. I mean, I think about it, it’s not like I blink and there’s suddenly a scarf in my hands. But when I’m knitting, I’m not thinking knit knit purl slip knit slip back knit knit as I work. I’m watching a TV show, or listening to a podcast. I go back and count to make sure I’m where I need to be. My mind is so often elsewhere while I work on it.

I try to think good things when I’m working on a baby project. A baby blanket is going to wrap around a child, and if I’ve knotted bad thoughts into the very workings of the project, in my mind that’s like wrapping the child in ill wishes. It’s asking for bad luck when a child’s skull isn’t even solidified yet. That feels too much like tempting fate.

I also try to be in good company when I work. Yarncraft has never been a solitary profession: in the beginning, shepherds spun and knitted as they tended their flocks, usually in small groups of three and four. Later, when yarncraft became women’s work, it was what you worked on in the evenings around the hearth, what you did between quilting bees, what you did when you had a moment of downtime in a life filled with people. Yarncraft patterns are passed through generations, resulting in brilliant variations and local laces, cables, and bobbles. I learned to knit from first my grandmother and then from my older sister. I didn’t learn in isolation; I learned with another’s needles steadily clicking beside me.

Now, the most common time for me to work on a project is during movie nights. I sit on the couch at my best friends’ house, and I have my yarn bag on my lap. We watch a TV show (we’re working through Babylon 5 at the moment, though in the past it’s been documentaries, John Oliver, and Star Trek: Next Generation) and talk politics and life. More often than not, one of his roommates joins us. Ellen will crochet; Annaleigh will write; Sarah will fold origami cranes; Langdon will tap something out on his laptop; Liz will fold laundry. It’s something we do with our hands while we talk and we watch, and it’s become as integral a part of my conscious being as anything else I do.

I don’t think about what we’re watching when I work, usually. I watch, and I talk, and cloth grows from my fingertips, folding up in my lap. But I hope that that sense of community goes to the child the blanket will attend; I hope that child sleeps under that blanket surrounded by the laughter of friends, who talk earnestly and joyfully, and who are content to be with each other.

Is that silly? I don’t know if I believe anything else retains the memory of when it’s made. I know my mom claims a dinner made in a bad mood will always come out burnt. Is that the same as a baby blanket, which takes weeks, months to do, rather than hours? What counts as a bad thought? What counts as negative energy?

I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to put that much thought into it. I just know that when I’m working on something, I don’t feel right if I try in a bad mood. That’s what Candy Crush is for.

This is part of a series on yarncraft written for a nonfiction class at George Mason University. It's being crossposted here for archival reasons.

Original publish date: 27 September 2017, on bittyknittygritty.wordpress.com