Handwork – Page 11 – Deborah Makarios

August 17, 2019

Of Socks and Serenity

There is a serenity that comes with knitting socks. It doesn’t come with knitting large projects, nor with crocheting items large or small. It also, strangely enough, often doesn’t come with knitting socks, either.

The thing about socks is that they’re basically foot-shaped. As a foot is not a simple piece of architecture, neither can the sock intended for it be. And so, like most peaces in this life, the serenity of sock is not always easily come by.
As Stephanie Pearl-McPhee observes, “In the nineteenth century, knitting was prescribed to women as a cure for nervousness and hysteria. Many new knitters find this sort of hard to believe because, until you get good at it, knitting seems to cause those ailments.”

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August 6, 2019

Grand Productivity Experiment: Phase Seven… Well Annotated

My diary for this last week is full of x and o – not hugs and kisses (I don’t generally record those in such detail) but jobs done and events on.

The week went something like this (please feel free to imagine this in the style of Victor Borge’s phonetic punctuation): x*xo—x>ox xxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxxxx>xx oo——o>>!— xø>x>xooo

So as you can see, it was a great week.

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August 2, 2019

What Next?

The Wound of Words (draft 2.2) has now been despatched to the lovely people who volunteered to be beta readers, and I… what am I going to do?

I’ll be carrying on with the Grand Productivity Experiment, but doing less writing work and a lot more house and garden work. Especially garden work.

You don’t catch me using a chainsaw in a tree. Or anywhere else. I am attached to my limbs and I would like it to stay that way.

There’s the redcurrant to prune (at last!), the mighty Balrog to hack back again (the shed porch disintegrated and collapsed under its weight this year), and the dozens of poles shooting out the top of the apple tree like some sort of living candelabra to slice off.

And once I’ve done all that (no doubt with the assistance of the Caped Gooseberry’s superior musculature), it’s on to the potting, the planting out and the weeding.

Inside, for those inevitable days of Much Water, there’s pruning of another sort to be done (aka decluttering), and a truly remarkable quantity of mending to work my way through.

At some point, of course, whether sooner or later, it will have to be decided: what writing project do I work on next?