The Long Way
The longest swatch of the month so far took four hours.
Two hours in I had reached the halfway point and faced a decision. Stop with what I had, or commit to another two hours to produce something with enough presence to justify the technique. I kept going. What followed was one of the most labour intensive pieces I have made in a long time. Not technically complicated in the way some of the earlier samples were, but demanding in a different way entirely. Patience demanding. Attention demanding.
The work involved ensuring even weight distribution across sections of the knit, checking constantly for missed stitches, removing sections of the fabric from the machine, manipulating them by hand, and returning them carefully before continuing. None of that is the knitting itself. All of it is the knitting. The actual time the carriage is moving across the needle bed is a fraction of what the process requires. The rest is invisible labour, the kind that never finds its way into a price and rarely gets acknowledged in a conversation about what handmade means.
The finished swatch is lovely. You can picture it in a garment immediately. The detail would be considered, quiet, and deeply felt by anyone who knew what went into it. Whether there is a more efficient path to that result is a question I am still turning over.
The last sample of the week did not go to plan.
The machine dropped the work mid progress, not once but three times. Each time I worked it back, reset, and tried again. The third time I made a decision. I packed the sample up, took it home to my Singer machine in the studio, and finished it there. The Singer complied immediately. Sometimes a different machine is simply the right machine for the job. The swatch is complete and it is on the wall and that is what matters.
This is the part of machine knitting that is difficult to explain to someone who has not experienced it. The repetition, the problem solving, the small disasters and the patient recovery from them. It is not a practice that can be rushed and it does not reward impatience. What it does reward is persistence. There is a particular satisfaction in completing something that resisted you, something that dropped and was recovered, something that took four hours when you expected two. The process asks something of you and gives something back in return that a faster way of making cannot replicate.
As I move into the final week of the residency, Tara from Shop Gal will host an opening night for the Cute and Cozy pop up on Wednesday the 27th of May. The Undone Work will be on the wall. The swatches, the handwritten notes, the times recorded beside each one. The full story of the month, visible in one room.
Doors open at 6pm at 248 Johnston St Fitzroy. Come and see it.
