In Which I Describe How I Became an Artist

When I listen to music, I always find the harmony. It's a strange (and beautiful) thing that my brain does - it hears the alternate melody every time. To make matters more fabulous, I can sing the shit out of that harmony. When I listen to music, I'm confounded by the mystery of everything - as every musician is, I have to assume. Because everything is right there, being pulled from the ether by one's connection to subtlety. This is why music can bring you to the edge of all feeling.

Not to dwell - though if ever I were going to dwell, wouldn't this be the perfect topic, what with its innate optimism? - but when I listen to music I hear math. Never in a zillion years did I think I could ever make such a statement because, truly, I'm still so scarred by Grade 13 calculus that I swear to God, if you paid me, I couldn't tell you what one uses calculus for. I cannot remember a damn thing about it except that I cried through my entire exam. Quietly. And all of my classmates (all 17 of them) felt terrible for me because they couldn't understand how I could be so far from connecting the dots - interpreting logic. I couldn't understand it either.

When I learned to knit* (for the second time, 8 years ago), I started to feel math in my fingers. Allow me to restate this, to belay any confusion: I'm not that girl who grew up "getting" math and seeing numbers metaphorically scribbled in the air. I avoided math my whole life. Math found me and it found me in the form of art.

Admittedly, it muscled its way in there. My father is a math person. I studied piano, 'cello, voice - all numeric on some level. Cooking and baking are mathy arts (and I have never spent 3 seconds being concerned by this - if that's the price of pretty food, math away). I was always making things, things you could eat or read (ah, cadence). I wanted a chemistry set so badly - until I realized baking was a chemistry set you could use for eating purposes. I'm nothing if not practical. (Also, it didn't freak out my parents the way sulphur would have.)

When I listen to music, I'm enveloped in the vast buoyancy of the creative spirit. It's like when I go to the art gallery. I look at a painting and I feel the brush strokes as they were applied. Don't ask me how I know. I am frequently driven to tears, feeling what the artist felt in her fingers (esp when I listen to piano and 'cello), back-pedaling through the history of human emotion. You may say: Kristin, you have no fucking idea what that artist felt. I tell you, I do. Because it's not a timeline, it's mindline. We've just tapped into the same well, momentarily.

Artists connect with a place that's hidden from many. The reason I love The Mists of Avalon so much is because it explains my relationship with art as magic, magic being its own art. Artistry is a deep, remote plane. I knew I was an artist from the get go. Words would form in pattern. Textures would call to me in a strange language. It's what I imagine "healers" feel. They connect with a vast well of human reckoning. That's what I do, only the energy I reckon with is the beauty of form.

I was out for lunch the other day; you know that Scott is monitoring me carefully and we sometimes go down the block so that I can achieve my daily exposure to stimulus. We went to our place that doesn't stress me out, down the block, a place that we've been frequenting for 20 years. While talking with our server, the convo gradually turned to her life. She's a student at OCADU (our art university in TO), a painter, and she showed me some photos of her work. I was blown away, btw. She's got talent (and I don't go out of my way to say this). I'm going to buy one of her pieces, though I can't say when. Eventually, she asked me what I do. Natch, this is a strange moment for me to be confronted by that question, but - with nary a pause - I said: I'm a textile artist.

I don't where it came from but I was not horrified in the moment when I said this. It was the truth. I no longer feel that calling myself an artist is nervy. The universe has been holding a special space for me in the plane of art and I've refused to inhabit it because, on the one hand, how can I be something if I don't earn money doing it? On the other hand, artists are so very special. How can I put myself in that elevated domain?

Let me tell you how. I work constantly on my art. It starts off mediocrely. I improve it via research and reading and deep observation and becoming, on some level, its form as I make it. I start with an idea and I refine it into an object. I feel it in my fingers before it becomes something. It is a part of me and a part of something much beyond me. But when I make it, for a brief moment, I touch what's beyond me and it fills me with spectacular joy.

I have no idea of what to make of this, but when we talked, we talked the language of art and I was authentic. I will leave parts of myself behind in my work as the women of Shetland did. I will continue to cast spells in all of my garments as I have since the beginning. I will continue to sing the harmony.

* In a huge irony, the woman who taught me to knit when I was 12 - my next door neighbour Judy - was a brilliant high school math teacher?! She also happened to teach at the school where my (longest-standing) friend Hilary's mother taught drama - all the way on the other side of the city. Judy told me about Hilary before I met her at French summer school (our public school learning on the topic was not adequate and we were both joining SCS in Grade 7, so extra school it was). While intense education upended my knitting options in adolescence, I have so much gratitude for Judy who, in retrospect, taught me much more than I ever could have imagined at the time. In another irony, I found myself working with her daughter-in-law 10 years ago - the partner of the baby I looked after in my teens. And this was determined, bizarrely, because my name was written on a piece of paper than France (the DIL) brought home from work and Judy saw. I haven't seen Judy in 30 years. This is what I mean when I say TO is a village!

Nature Vs. Knitter

The reason you haven’t seen much of me around here for the past few days is because I’ve spent every waking moment (not otherwise accounted for) knitting this freakin’ sweater. My child has eaten an array of questionably appropriate dinner foods: hot dogs, take-out Indian, cheese and crackers with carrot sticks. The laundry is unlaundered. My (vaguely old-looking) hands are truly cramped by the time I retire – 2 hours later than I can generally keep my eyes open for – at approximately midnight.

Do you ever play spider solitaire and find yourself unable to quit. If you lose, you think “just one more game; I know I’ll be a winner next time”. If you win, you want to see how long the streak will last. That cycle can go on for a good hour. C’mon, you do that. I know you do.

You’ll be pleased to hear that I don’t gamble. I don’t buy lottery tickets. I don’t go to the track (though, really, it might be just the place to knit!).

My friends laugh (a kind of rueful, knowing laugh) at my type A knitting style. But what can I do? I come by it honestly. Apparently, it’s not very knitter. Apparently, knitters are gentle creatures who sculpt their laid back world views in a woolly canvas. On Wednesday I had the most fun at a knitting night at Lettuce (a veritable hotbed of serious fibre art crafters). What welcoming and friendly women! What gynocracy! Alas, as so often happens, on some fundamental level, I felt removed. And not because I’ve been knitting a week and these women have been doing it for a combined 200 years. (Moreover, who, more than I, loves to talk parenting and politics with a bunch of smart women, drinking booze? Isn’t that kind of like paradise?)

It was when I queried a couple of them about how long they’d been working on their items – for how long they imagined their (many complex) projects would continue – that I felt the encroaching divide. I assume I'm paranoid, but at that point, I think I might have seen the slightest inkling of a questioning look. And I just could not relate to the claims that these knitters couldn’t say, that they work simply according to their natural pace, that time is not really relevant. Seriously?!

Call me a (goal-oriented) philistine, but how the hell does anyone do anything without considering their investment of time?

Let me break it down for you (and I know this because I’m keeping a line-by-line ledger of my every row):

• I started this project on April 30.


• I started over on May 1.


• It took me 15 hours to knit the back of the cardigan.


• It has taken me 7 hours to knit one side of the front – and I estimate another half an hour before it’s done.


• While this is entirely speculative, I surmise that it will take me another 7.5 hours to knit the other front half.


• And probably 5 hours to knit each sleeve.


• I’ve opted not to make the belt – I’d prefer to use another closure – probably one of those wooden knitting pin closures. I’ve always wanted one of those!


• Blocking will take approximately an hour (followed by time to dry).


• Then I’ve got to sew it all together (by hand). I don’t know – maybe that will be 3 hours? (Sewing things up with wool is apparently quite easy). Of course, it could take forever and I’m deluded.

Since no one seems to be able to give me any feedback about how long it takes to knit a simple sweater, I’m going to make my own guess: 50 hours. That’s if all goes as planned (stifle your giggles please). Note: I'm entirely new at this. I'm sure a seasoned practitioner could do this in less time...

Maybe I’ll never be a real knitter (or a real sewist, for that matter) because I’m not doing this for the simple pleasure of working with my hands. I make things because I want to make things. I want to see how they start from nothing and turn into practical and (hopefully) beautiful products. I want to systemize my skills by deconstructing them in notebooks that I can look at again and again. I want to keep lists – to itemize where I’m at. I do not want to work on the same sweater for 6 months, picking it up and dropping it according to my momentary interest or schedule (which secretly and judgementally I see as a code word for “whim”). Maybe that’s eventually how it will go. Maybe I’ll get with that casual (supposedly happy-making) philosophy over time, but I can’t imagine it. Odd as it may be, for me, the joy in craft is in doing it regardless of how time-consuming or overwhelming or scary it is. Call me crazy, but I enjoy those feelings. They make me feel engaged. They give me a rush.

I'd love to hear from the knitters and sewists and those who engage in other craft hobbies. Are you type A too? Do you sense I'm corrupting the artform with my hideous attitude? Can you explain to me how you analyse "crafting at your own pace" (whatever it is for you)?

In the meanwhile, excuse me while I go ice my hands.