Hitting the Wall - a collaboration, a sock, and some thoughts about... walls.

 

Can you imagine a wall? What does it look like? How does it make you feel?When I thought about writing a post about the inspiration behind the Hitting the Walls socks, it struck me how laden with meaning walls are. Markers of geography, geology, environment, and class, walls are boundaries and intersections. The walls that feel familiar to you might be the coal-darkened sandstone of the North, or red bricks, or pink Malvern stone in the West Midlands and Herefordshire, or the golden sandstone of Bath, or dry-stone walls, or the multi-coloured bricks of Reading, but whatever they are made of, they also hold potential as that in-between space: do they hide a secret (The Secret Garden has a lot to answer for), or a portal to another world (I'm thinking of The Silver Chair, but there are other walls that are not quite walls).

So, it turns out I have quite a lot of thoughts about walls. If you're unfortunate, I'll expand upon them. For now, though, it is the figurative wall that I would return to: when Rusty Ferret Yarn suggested that she was considering dyeing yarn 'as black as my brain is' I looked around me at the room I feel I haven't left in the last 18 months (I know that isn't objectively true), at the wall in the crafting / office room I love, but which I feel I'm banging my head against on a regular basis, and thought - well, that sounds like a collection I can get behind. 

Depressed as shit, you say? Seeing all the people on the 'socials' who have the beautifully tidy homes with period features, or curated stashes, or 'Instagrammable' accessories and feeling like you'll never make the grade? Join the club. Finding it difficult to pull together the energy to get dressed, or washed, when you see no-one? Been there, and there's no judgment here. Why shouldn't yarn reflect the full range of what we might be feeling? And when Leona's yarns are as gorgeous as they are, bring on the darkness! (And good daylight lamps, and my glasses.)

For me, one of the hardest things about *gestures widely* has been the unending and recurrent horrors. No travel? Fine. No childcare? Bleep, but ok. No leaving the house? I can handle that. No change, for day after day, month after month, while being on edge? Not so much. Each time hoping that this quarter it'll be easier, you'll have found your balance, your boundaries, your better habits, and then finding that the wheels have fallen off, or there's another lockdown... that's a wall.

It's also a wall when you're trying thing, after thing, after thing, to feel better, to make progress, to have your skills recognised and your potential acknowledged... and getting no-where. Dusting yourself off, picking yourself up, and finally lacking the wherewithal to try again - even when you 'know' that other's will tell you that if you just keep going you'll find yourself on the other side, and it will be easier? That's a wall too, and no matter how many times you hit it, that brick will still be there, the ledge just too high.

Take a repeating, brick or stone-like, textured, pattern, and create it in knitting, and you have a wall. More than that, though - the texture is soothing to touch, the repeat easy to memorise and repetition itself calming, and the purl ridge every so often gives you a handy stopping point, if you need a daily dose of knitting. Simple, yet engaging, I wanted these socks to be manageable through brain fog; soothing in a crisis. A final detail: an eyelet ladder, for hope. For the friends who keep offering a hand to help us up, for a bit of pretty despite the numbness, for finding a way out.

The Hitting the Wall socks, a collaboration with Rusty Ferret Yarns in Numb, from her Depressed as Shit collection, will be available from 1 September.