Monday, March 15, 2010

Thoughts on Knitting, plus, fat baby cookies



My relatively recently acquired knitting obsession is concerning me not because it's an obsession but because it is still an act--a ravenous act to which I am totally and admittedly addicted--of consuming.

I spend almost as much time finding, downloading, hoarding, and printing free knitting patterns and coveting, looking for, and buying yarn, as I do actually knitting--apparently all "normal" behaviors of the typical knitter.

That's not even the problem. You might argue that knitting is also/still an act of creating, but at this point in time, acts of creation, whether they are giving birth, inventing instruments of death and injury (the car being among the top of that list), or designing fashion garments, seem to be more destructive to the planet than they are, in the Grand Scheme of Things, anything else.

To be sure, my rabid desire to buy and own clothing has decreased markedly since I have been knitting, but buying secondhand or making one's own clothing; taking the bus or riding a bike, are still acts of consumption and are neither "ecological," "sustainable," or "environmentally friendly." Everything is relative.

Sorry for the poor alignment of these photos and for the lack of captions. These are photos of the only two completed knitting projects I have photos of, thanks to the generosity of the projects' owners (or project's owner's parent, in the case of the baby sweater).

P.S. I am eating, by the handful, those melt-in-your-mouth cookies that are shaped like tiny little buns and that in my mind are always connected to the fat, bratty Asian kids begging their moms for sweets at the Chinese supermarket. It's probably been 20 years since I've eaten these, and boy are they tasty in that nostalgic baby-food sort of way.