Saturday 28 May 2011

Playfulness

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood". I read this on a sign in an art gallery recently. It's one of those trite statements that you can easily dismiss - but chewing it over, I thought, "Hey, why not?". My own childhood had a deep fracture running through it and I've spent significant amounts of time discovering and understanding how that has affected me. Now this invitation has enabled me to look back at the particular glass of water that makes up my early years and see it as half-full rather than half-empty. Undoubtedly, two of my best growing up experiences were a vast amount of reading of all kinds, and spending time crafting with my grandmother.

Recreating playfulness with those two sticks of metal, wood or bamboo that we call knitting is definitely one way to reconnect to the happier parts of my childhood. And it's good to know that there will be an opportunity to share this playfulness at the Oxford Summer School 2011 - there are still a few spaces available on my New Directions in Knitting course.