Pursuit of Fiber

When I finally landed on self-control as the 3rd and final dress, my advisers were shocking and unsure that a dress about control would be beautiful. They imagined a dress resembling a straight-jacket not allowing freedom at all, because being “self-control” is a negative idea for many.

I felt something would come of my research.  How often do we feel out of control in our lives?  Too much to do in the day? week? month? or even the year?  A stash that seems just too large to ever get through but that you have no love for?  Too many patterns in queue?  Too much to do at work?  Never enough time to do it all in?  Your weight spiraling out of control?  Children who won’t listen?  stuff all over your house cluttering so that you just can’t seem to have others over?

So what do we do with these things?  How do we control them or do we just let those parts of us be controlled by others?  Many people grab different things to control so that they can feel in control.  Keeping a planner full with no time to put up their feet and rest except to drop into bed late at night to fall asleep instantly.  Controlling their emotional pain by cutting or developing anorexia or bulimia.  Following an addiction which seems to allow the person to control things but in fact grips them into a lack of control, because you are no longer personally in control of your destiny.  You have been snared by your surroundings.

In your search for control, you have in a sense lost control. Its a weird balance to control but not to be controlled by the act of controlling. A true sense of freedom. This freedom and control means that we need to own up to our choices, the choices that ensnare and trap us into lacking freedom.  Some of these choices aren’t physical choices but are mental lies that need to be broken.  When you face these things, you most be strong and use the principles of patience and love.  Through facing your life struggles, you gain control, an inner control – true self-control.

In my search for definitions of self-control, I ran across one that mentioned wrapping one’s arms around oneself to hold ones self up. I imagined long arms wrapping around and around the body to control. I created long delicate gloves to be these arms that could be wrapped or rearranged in such a manner to control a delicate control that even when wrapped tightly do not bind.

This was to contrast the unstructured dress which covered simply the body but did nothing to hide or control.  The gloves were useful for control but they also symbolized their ability to get tangled up into the surroundings – the outside world.  At the core of the dress is a “corset” of gauzy silk.  This girds the inner core of the dress.  It strengthens and reminds the wearer to not become entangled by facing your struggles, admitting them and placing them behind you.  Once you confront those things controlling you, you will become truly free because you are starting to exert self-control.

Patience was in reality the first virtue I tackled since I felt patience took time. I had always hoped for, strove for, prayed for patience in my own life but never seemed to attain it. I was always angry and frustrated, but not outwardly showing these emotions to the point that I drove myself deeper and deeper into depression.  The only way I could come up for air and be released from this grip of depression was to release each and every emotion that surrounded my depression.  While I was working on my thesis, I finally was released from my last vestiges of depression.  Now don’t think that I don’t struggle occasionally with feelings of being blue or thinking that life isn’t worth living.  Those will never leave me, but I now know the secret to release my burdens.  I must patiently release them to God, you might release them to a higher power of your choosing or use knittymuggin’s mother’s advice and give it all to a potato and bury it.  Its a regular daily thing that most be done slowly and steady every day.

Instead its better to delay the anger and thus allow the virtue of patience to control and temper it into something less dangerous often times helpful.  The old etymology of patience is long-suffering.  You are to endure with fortitude and character building qualities through whatever it is going on in your life.  So instead of directing my anger inward, I should have been controlling it and using it to shape my surroundings with that passion and frustration.  I’ve since learned how to funnel that anger away and into things.  Sometimes its my knitting, sometimes I need to just organize stuff.

So how did I portray all of this into my finished object, well I took pieces.  Pieces of me of who I am in many different shapes, since there are so many varying bits of me that don’t always fit together.  I took them and laid them out.  I decided to let the process lead me rather than striving for the item itself.  I knit bits, I cut bits, I lined bits and finally they all fell together into what you see on this page.  Not necessarily an easy process to get them all to talk to each other and agree to live in one cohesive space but each piece shows how it plays nice while defining itself.  Its individuality.  I learned patience through the process.  I learned that you can’t just shove it and its all going to work.  You have to sometimes cajole it into working, tweaking this or jostling that.  The pieces will work but sometimes you need to take something off the pieces before they fully fit.

The lace over the stomach is a super fine merino laceweight from habu.  I used it because it was the thinnest yarn in my stash and I knit it with my smallest needles -  US size 0 bamboo needles.  I hated every minute I had to knit this piece.  I didn’t want to do it, but I took that and pushed past that to create a delicate filmy layer.   The body of the garment is hemp/silk fabric that has a definite grain line.  It only likes to bend between hemp threads other wise its crisp and hard.  Many things are like that in that you have to have the time and where with all to find that spot where you can bend something to your will.  Some are harder than others.  Lastly the sleeves are Habu hemp yarn that is knit into a random mesh starting at the wrist and organically expanding to fit the shoulder.  The dress felt incomplete as if it wasn’t finished telling me its story without them.  Once on, I fell in love with the simple beauty of rustic lace over the skin.

I think life is like that things happen that we know have a meaning but we’re not sure what till its almost too late and then you realize how special that frustration or what originally was annoying has become to your central core.  Do you treasure those diamond creating circumstances in your life?  Don’t they occasionally break off bits of you to expose something beautiful, truly stunning that shocks people with how great things are for you.   Can you see the through the darkness enough to know that this too will end and on the other side will be something even better, nay something wonderful?  It might take days, months, years, decades, but it will come.  Mine took 10 hard years of thinking life was finished but now I can’t even believe I felt that way.  I can’t give you the buck up speech or expect you to believe that you will get through, because I wouldn’t have believed me.  Just patiently work through your trials and take one day, one stitch, one thought at a time and once you’re done something will have appeared.  Something that might amaze you.

Just over 4 years I ago, I had presented my thesis and graduated from art school and 5 years ago, I was in the midst of deciphering what and how I was going to express this grand idea.

My thesis centered around the idea of the Fruit of the Spirit – these virtues that all people strive for in life.  Could these ideas be expressed in garment form or were they too intangible?

There are a total of nine virtues are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Whether you have a spiritual faith or not, many of these virtues are what you hope other people have.

I chose 3 of these virtues, because 9 months of work and study would not give me 9 dresses.  I wasn’t that crazy even if there were a few times where I felt at the end of my tether.

The 3 virtues that I landed on were the ones that spoke to me the most: Love, Patience and Self-Control.

I hope to share with ya’ll over the next 4 weeks about each dress and what I plan on doing after this review.