Log Cabin-ing: A Memoir, Not a Euphemism

Heirlooms tell stories. This is the story of the creation of an heirloom.

➰ In 2007 I started to make a log cabin blanket.

It began, as all knitting does, with a single loop.

That loop became a leverage point to make another loop. And I slipped another loop through that.

➰ When the blanket began as a lone little loop I was living in my hometown. I had two part time jobs. One in art, the other in environmental stuff.

You can see where this is going.

A few hundred or many thousand loops later (and a few days or weeks later, or much longer because life happens and the project ends up in some dusty corner for over a decade), and you may well end up with something recognizable. Like a hat. Or a blanket.

Or a little square.

Because it may have seemed like you’ve exerted enough loop-within-loop effort for a lifetime, but what’s emerged is in fact the size of the palm of your hand.

So what’s next? Time for a change.

Now is the time where we flip these loops around. Could be 90 degrees. Maybe 180 degrees. Whatever. As long as it’s totally the perpendicular or somehow contrary to what we were doing before. It’s time for change after all.

That’s a story I know. Remember that part where I was living in my hometown and all that? Partway through making the blanket whose story we’re partway through, I made a turn. I moved 6000 miles away, traded steel toe boots for sensible flats, and lived a new life in a new language. Big shift.

And you know what can happen sometimes, after building and building and after all that choosing to go in a whole new direction….

The background is different. It’s all different.

But also the same.

Turns out that when we turn in a whole new direction to create our new set of loops, it’s the past loops’ foundation that holds the structure together. And there we go again. Still a matter of one loop in front of the other. It’s aiming for a whole new destination, and taking on the same structure.

New direction. Same pattern:

Oh look there’s a loop.

Wherever there’s a loop: stick a needle in it. Make a loop.

Wherever there’s a loop: stick a needle in it. Make a loop.

Wherever there’s a loop: stick a needle in it. Make a loop.

...

And then, time for a whole new direction. Again.

Let’s pause for a moment and explore the impact of how the past affects the present.

Without getting into extreme knitting jargon, let’s just say that when knitting heads in a new direction, things can get weird. Sometimes keeping fabric tidy in the midst of this change is a simple 1:1 relationship of old loop: new loop. Do as was done before, and it turns out alright. So sometimes it’s simple. And sometimes it isn’t.

And sometimes you just might forget which ratio to use.

And that’s when things get weird.

Then comes The Choice:

- Undo those wonky loops and re-create a new set of loops within loops (although any attempt to reverse course and start again does in fact leave traces of the first attempt)
- Plough forward despite annoyance at getting tripped up by looking to the past as a precedent and misjudging how it relates to the future
-Glide ahead. Leave that trail of wonkiness in your wake. Embrace its beauty as the unique dimensional quality that only your very human fumbly hands and very human forgetful mind could create on that day. Treasure the evidence of your imperfection humanity.

Choose your own adventure. One way or another, move on. (Or let the half-finished project fester for a few weeks or months or decades. That’s an option too. Ask me how I know.)

Turns out that something made by looping loops onto other loops means it’s full of endless potential: the “end” can become the foundation for the next set of loops at any time. Keep taking another turn. Keep building on what came before, creating something new and inescapably linked to what came before.

This is the part of the story when I turn back 3000 miles. And then another 3000 miles. Back to my hometown. Back to a job in art and another in environmental stuff. Back to the half-finished blanket. It’s all the same. None of it is the same. Time to add more loops.

The loops link into rectangles. The rectangles envelop one another to form a meta-rectangle. We turn away from one direction and grow. We turn towards another and grow the other way. Crissing and crossing to add perpendicular layers. In quilting terms it’s called a log cabin. Bit by bit, we build something. A chance to blanket ourselves in the warmth we create. A chance to create a layer that balances protection with porousness.

As it grows, the wonky patch remains, but recedes in the distance. And its aberrant quality gets superseded by a much wonkier patch that comes later on. But the whole thing gets grows big enough to recalibrate the scale of counts as wonky.

At some point in these years of loop-making I heard someone say:

It’s not that our problems get smaller. It’s that we get bigger.

If you need me I’ll be making my blanket bigger. While under a blanket.