I am attempting to knit a seamless hot water bottle cozy, using five double pointed needles and a cable needle. I was feeling very much like a 'real' knitter indeed, until I realised that I had misplaced a button hole... To frog or not to frog? As it is for me, I have chosen to forge on. I intend to stitch close those nuisance button holes once I'm finished and hide snaps on the inside instead, with a few decorative vintage buttons on the outside. Don't tell anyone.
Sadly, I've all but finished 'The Paper Garden.' There was another paragraph that I felt compelled to share with you. I feel sure other crafters and makers will be nodding along in smiling agreement just as I was.
"Craft is engaging. It results in a product. The mind works in a state of meditation in craft, almost the way we half-meditate in heavy physical exercise. There is a marvelously obsessive nature to craft that allows a person to dive down through the ocean of everyday life to a seafloor of meditative making. It is an antidote to what ails you. At about the age of thirty-six, my mother executed six paint-by-number paintings, three winter landscapes and three exotic jungle-scapes prominently featuring peacocks. She spread the work out on the kitchen table and, over several years, went at it. One can loose oneself, even in paint-by-numbers, and the loss of the self within safe confines nurtures the imagination. To ornament one's existence, even with six paint-by-numbers paintings, is a key to understanding one's personal weatlth - and acknowledging that wealth in others, too."
'The Paper Garden; Mrs Delany begins her life's work at 72,' Molly Peacock
page 288
Meditation, obsessive, antidote, wealth? I feel as if she were talking right to me.
Such a lovely book, so glad I spotted it on Alicia's blog.
I'm joining in today for the first time to Ginny's Yarn Along.
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