Because I am moving and shouldn't buy too many new things until all my old things are at my house, last weekend I went to the Stuff Redux, a place similar to my beloved Scrap Exchange but in Richmond, VA. Jaime took be there a month or so ago and I'd made an absolute killing, picking up some acid dyes, some alpaca yarn, and a cone of lace weight mohair all for under $20. I'd considered buying up a bunch of knitting pattern books and then someone, in all the excitement, I'd walked out without the books. I spent the last month gnawing on the table and kicking myself for forgetting them. So my first order of business, on arriving in Richmond, was to go get them. I picked up about half a dozen pattern books (for $1 each!) and found a novel by Adrienne Martini.
Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously is a novel that bills itself as the story of her year spent tackling the Mount Everest of knitting... A Fair Isle sweater designed by Alice Starmore. She does this while raising two kids and working two jobs and, obviously, writing a novel. This is the sort of thing I can really get behind and I was super excited. All the other knitting books went into a box but Sweater Quest and I retired to my sofa with a glass of wine and a couple of cats. Ms Martini started strong, discussing herself and why she knits and covered a fascinating chapter about the Alice Starmore drama. I had no idea there was a brilliant and litigious Scottish woman out there, producing and defending intricate colour work!
The topic interested me enough that I went out and did some research. I think the issue is more nuanced and double-sided than Ms. Martini presented in her book but I can't really hold that against her. I can say the book sort of slid off after that chapter. I'm about half way through and it's become a painful slog. It's starting to read more of a who's who in the knitting world as Ms. Martini travels extensively and chats with the big names in our weird little world. Whole paragraphs, even pages, are transcriptions of these chats. She also includes a header on her chapters, listing how much she paid for materials... like, $130 for the book with the pattern in it. And that's where the book started making me really uncomfortable.
Knitting is a pretty self-indulgent hobby for me and probably for a lot of people. This is the first time in my life I've had enough money to spend significantly on a hobby (drawing comics is not a major money maker) so maybe that's part of the problem. I feel a little awkward about how much I spend on knitting and spinning. I'm trying to defray the costs somewhat by selling my dyed wool on Etsy but really... I spend a lot of money on fiber. And that's totally okay! I don't have a lot of responsibilities. I'm a single woman with two cats and a small house. Once we're all fed and the mortgage is paid for, I'm not really responsible to anyone else. Even if I shared my finances with a partner I would have spending money written into my budget and I would totally spend most of it on wool.
But it's super self-indulgent. Especially since I live in North Carolina where we get below freezing weather for all of a month during a bad winter. I don't need to knit to clothe myself or my family. I do it because I love it. And I spend lots of money to do it with unnecessarily nice materials. And that's fine, it's how a spend my spending money budget. But reading about Ms. Martini's year long traipse around the country (remember, this was billed as a book about a woman struggling to knit a complicated sweater while raising two kids and working two jobs), meeting the shiniest of knitters, buying the rarest of yarns really throws a harsh light on the wanton consumption aspects of fiber and tool acquisition. Belonging to the same group as the narrator of Sweater Quest makes me feel worse about myself.
I don't know. I don't leave a lot of books unfinished so I'll probably keep reading this but it's put a really bad taste in my mouth. I need to go do some community service.
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