Tatami is A Nearly Finished Object. It is currently stretched over a blanket and a towel, across the back of two chairs. It is wider, side to side, than my armspan and I can nearly wrap the back section alone around my waist! So it’s quite enormous… to give a sense of scale, here it is on the dining room table:

However, when the fabric is dry, the dropped stitches naturally pull in a little and I’m hoping that once sewn together and dried out, this will fit me perfectly. It’s been lovely finishing off the knitting and blocking this; I had to wet it and steam iron it on the dining room table, and then put it across the two chairs to dry as I have no other way to block such a vast item!

I learned *so much* during the project. It has been an ugh! for ages in my Ravelry post about it because I found the huge number of stitches extremely tedious to knit up on 3.75mm needles and the yarn isn’t an exciting colour to work with as it is the same throughout. Muted browns and wheat colours plied together, apparently endlessly. I love the finished colours, but knitting this throughout winter has felt like a massive emphasis of the long dark days and the muted colours of the bare landscape. Tatami will always remind me of the muted shades of the landscape during colder months.

It’s also not a very rewarding process-knit because until you pull out the drop stitches and see the whole thing laid flat, it just seems like an enormous, unwieldy pile of shapeless (and colourless) knitting. For this reason I would urge anyone knitting Tatami to choose a yarn that is really, really rewarding to work with; something variegated for colour interest while knitting, and something with a really nice texture. My scratchy yarn will make, I think, a very beautiful garment but it was REALLY BORING to knit all those stitches without any variation in colour and the repeats are essentially the same throughout… still, quite good television knitting if you are one of those people who can watch TV and knit at the same time! (I can’t.)

Pulling out all the drop stitches took an age because the yarn is very sticky, but I love the fabric that the drop-stitch pattern makes. And I love that I knitted Tatami from wool I thrifted; it took a long, long time to unpick the entirely shapeless man-sweater that I bought for £4.99 in Age Concern. I originally got it because I wanted to make a brown, felt bag. But several runs of my test-swatch through the washing machine proved that this wool wasn’t going to easily felt in spite of its ‘100% WOOL – Handwash only’ warning. So I wound the very bad, homemade skeins into cakes at Katie’s house a few months ago, and after seeing her beautiful Tatami, I decided I wanted to knit one myself. Since I had no destination for the brown wool, and certainly enough for Tatami, it was an obvious choice and I think the colour is beautiful.

I’ve got a big thing for Brown at the moment; it’s an infinitely wearable colour. In spite of whingeing about the darkness and the damp, I do love the interior feeling of Winter and brown reminds me of this. The leaves, dark and wet on the forest floor and steadily dissolving into the soil, nourishing it, are brown. The roots that push on through the earth while everything seems still and lifeless above ground are brown. The rough, muddy exterior of potatoes or parsnips, or the papery skins of onions, are all brown. Peat in the fields in Ireland, drying, is brown. Wood we burn for warmth is brown. Stews are often brown. Gravy is brown. Mushrooms are brown. Cooked, roasted meat is brown. They aren’t the most delicate or feminine of associations, but I am not the most delicate or feminine of people. The skin-like, fur-like nature of brown connects me to a sense of myself as a woman who chops wood and felts wool and makes clothes and cooks stews and runs and isn’t scared to bone a rabbit or skin a deer. When I wear brown I feel somehow more animal, more part of the world and its endless cycles of death, birth, endings and renewals. The colour reminds me of creatures and nature and I love it for that. So in spite of being boring to knit with, the thrifted wool in the original palette of sheep will be a lovely thing to wear… all I need now is for it to dry out so I can weave in all those ends and seam up the sides.

In other news: I am closer to having a studio, and will be selling loads of stuff on ebay over the next few days to raise the funds for the extremely expensive flue I’ll need for my stove. I need a twin-flue to meet building regs and for the stove to be safe, but a twin-flue uses a lot of steel and steel is expensive.