Things that strike me

picture of a handmade lace skirt

This photograph was taken with my phone because my camera is not quite to hand.

I completed a postgraduate diploma in information technology with Dublin City University in 2005, and following that, I started some handcrafts. I have done big pieces of mosaic, some tapestry and lots and lots of crochet. Sometime shortly after that – so at least four years ago I think, in Hickeys on Henry Street in Dublin I found a Twilleys Southern Comfort pattern book and bought it, having decided I really liked the idea of this skirt.

I then had trouble tracking down the thread to make it with. It’s 2 ply thread, very, very fine and most people make doilies with it. My handbag had this piece of paper with the ball requirements in it if I ever happened across it, and one day I did, in the wool shop in Tralee. While I was there, I also bought a few crochet hooks for such fine thread because it gets uncomfortable working with a metal hook all the time. The lady who runs the wool shop there told me she was surprised to see a young woman buying that thread and those hooks because in her experience, only the nuns bought that thread and those hooks, mainly to do laced edges on altar dressings.

The skirt I was making is basically transparent. The model in the pattern is wearing a red bikini underneath it. I couldn’t think of a greater difference between what most people tended to do with that thread (in Kerry at least) and what I was planning to do with it. (make something to make me look fantastically attractive).

The pattern called for more than three hundred stitches for a cast-on row. From there, it only got more. I don’t even know how many stitches there were in a row at the end but I would say 600 is probably a low estimate for it. In addition, many of them consisted of chains. Not too long after I started it, I made some mistake which I didn’t, out of unfamiliarity, catch until I had cheerfully done about 4 hours work. Not only that, I could not find it, and so I put it down for a while. That while was about 2 years.

I eventually pulled it out again about 18 months ago, ripped back as far as I dared -this was something that happened several times – there is nothing like seeing 4 hours work disappearing in 5 minutes. The thread being so fine was prone to tangling quite easily as well. I took it on holiday with me last March, to Inchydoney Island Spa (which is my favourite hotel in the world now) and got quite a bit done, hours, and hours of work every day. Sometimes sitting in the sun, glancing out on the Atlantic.

It was a mammoth amount of work. IF you look at it dispassionately, some rows took 15-20 minutes, other rows took somewhere north of 90 depending on how intricate it was or how tired I was. I stopped working on it if I was tired because I was guaranteed to see hours of work wasted. There are about 90 rows in it, so typically, start to finish, there’s some argument to suggest you could do it in about 120-150 hours. That doesn’t sound like an awful lot but the simple truth is it is very, very hard to work on a single piece of crochet for that amount of time without a) hurting your hands or b) getting very bored. The vast majority of the stitches were the simplest of crochet stitches, chains in the air. There is no way I could have ever done this in four weeks solidly. I would have simply gone mad.

But the thread it’s made from is beautiful. And as it got longer and started to look like a skirt rather than a belt gone wrong, it got easier, and easier to do. And I suppose the experience of doing it had to be making it easier and easier to do.  The last row, which was the most intricate of the entire pattern took about 90 minutes today. Even stitching the last stitch, I cannot quite believe it’s over.