Handmade things have a life
I do not only mean that it does last a long time. There is so much more to it when you acquire an artisanal product.
Handmade things are being appreciated again and back in fashion. A good thing for us artisans, isn’t it!
Actually, when you buy a handmade creation from an artist/artisan, YOU DO NOT JUST BUY AN OBJECT. What you are getting is hours of experimentation. Hours, weeks, sometimes, months of frustration and moments of pure joy. It is never just a thing.
What you are taking home with you, it is a little bit of our heart, our soul, moments of our life.
And more than anything else, you are buying us the time we need to continue with our passion : CREATION.
Birth of a handmade shawl
When I knitted le châle Newgrange I had just come back to Brittany.
It was during the pendemic 1st confinement. My husband and I put all our possessions in our old van and drove from the South to the North West of France, a mere 500 miles.
It was a surrealist drive, a bit like a post-apocalyptic film! We came across only 3 cars along the whole road, service stations were deserted. The motorway was just for us! The pretrol stations’s bins were overfilled with unsold chocolate bars which had expired on the day… WOW! FREE CHOCOLATE!!! Expired or not, it is nice!
Although deserted, the road appeared to us quite long…
Finaly, late in the evening, we reached our destination. Despite the chocolate, morale was not at its highest…
My parents house (both gone towards greener pastures) was hardly habitable on our arrival.Cold and damp, smelly, in big need of some paint and a good cleaning. So we made room in our vehicle to spend the night, made a bonfire outside and relaxed after a rather exhausting day.
So it is there, sipping a well deserved glass of wine, that I remembered a shawl by Lucy Hague, an irish creator. An avid admiror of her talent and her intricate designs, I decided then and there that it would be my next project.
Nothing better for the spirit than a challenge and a good boost of inspiration!
La vie d’un châle
Handmade sometimes means do and un-do !
With the NEWGRANGE shawl (Lucy Hague was inspired by the prehistoric site of Newgrange,in Ireland) there was a lot of doing and undoing going on… The pattern is not easy to knit and I made a lot of mistakes, but I can be perseverent!
The house was very cold so I did spend a lot of time in the passenger seat of my faithfull old little citroen AX car. There was a lot of sun that winter and it was warm and cosy in there! First of all, I chose my yarn. I had a first go but the result was far from what I expected, so I undid everything…
Some time, patience and impatience!
It took me many hours. More than a whole week of knitting from morning to eve… Indeed, there were a lot of new technics to learn. So those spirals… spinned me into insanity at times! I needed 9 spirals…In reality, I must have knitted at least twice that quantity!
I went from euphoria (eureka! I’ve done it!) to despair (Oh no! I have to undo it again!). I cried and dansed on the spot! If the spirals drove me to insanity, you should see the effect I had on my long suffering Nicholas… Always my companion, throuh comedy and tragedy, he endured…
After multiple adventures, finally, a moment of pure ectasy: the shawl is at long last finished and I am proud of my work! I am satisfied with the result and Ihave acquired new skills.
All those challenges have made this shawl closer to my heart… I wanted, selfishly, to keep it. And I kept it to myself for a little while before I finally decided to put it on sale.
Sometimes, I sell on the local markets. And from time to time I meet people wearing my knits. I remember them and they remember me, I remember the place and the state of mind I was in when I knitted that particular creation. There is always a story behind it, which renders each creation unique;
Maybe one day, someone will fall in love with Newgrange.
And, as a createur, there will be no bigger pleasure than to see it give someone else joy.