I want to relay a story of threads that change size, thickness, and color with every turn. A story that makes sense of knots, yarn, and the literal power of discovering ideas by tying together craft. It’s a fingertip into the nonhuman, nonliving making of the world that turns my head to places that are fun, yet disconcertingly large and complicated to consider. Earth poetics – as the class this paper is from is so deftly called – listens, feels for, and senses otherwise for any story told or not that pushes a strict sense of humanness aside. Here I foray into some of the ideas that well from this perspective in a crocheted collage piece I call Circuitous Sense. I pull on the writings of Donna Haraway, Margaret and Christine Wertheim, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jane Bennettt as each material I use offers their “vital materiality” (Bennett 10) for further consideration.

Acrylic Yarn

Much like the Crochet Coral Reef Project, Circuitous Sense begins with the “introduction of irregularity into the code” (19). Acrylic yarn is familiar to me, even if making a circle is not. I learned from a video how to make the first half a dozen stitches, then I turned it off and proceeded to break that shape over and over as I threw in a random number of half double, double, and single crochets. In some places I almost had to fight to join a new row to its beginnings again and again. While performing that fight somewhere in the third row I skipped a whole fold just to maintain some sort of circular regularity. That fold cannot be seen now, almost like it disappeared in the act, but in pressing down on the finished piece I can find a layered bump. The process reminds me of the thick present Haraway details, where “[t]he task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other” (1). In a way I can see the entire circle, and I can just make out the beginnings and endings of each different material without erasing the end of the material before it. Still, there are skips and folds I made that are not visible per se, but can be felt as a bump. It is thick with unsure beginnings that neither end, nor are expected to end, but instead stick out in some places, where the color of yarn changes or where there wasn’t enough stretch for one more loop through my hook. I take those tail ends and tie them to each other, making room for another connection that doesn’t even need to happen with everything so stuck together.

True to the once-invented connections it is only from memory that I might recall what direction I first went in. Even if I went through the steps to pull reason from my rhyme, I do not believe even a more experienced crocheter could tell if I went to the right or the left. Something about the acrylic yarn helps me come to this belief. From touch I cannot imagine the kind of plastic it was made from, it does not fit with my imagination of what plastic is and what it’s made out of, but spreading the threads that twist together I can see the shine of something different than soft, like the flyaway strands that tend to catch the light at certain angles. Texture is in fact my only clue to direction. Half embedded into Circuitous Sense are the paper clips, which I know is the second material I introduced and so everything else must follow after it, towards the left. However, it does not matter when you look at the middle of the circle. It just spreads, without hierarchy.

Paper clips

I continue my “material play” with paper clips, a material much less friendly to my crochet hook and hands. I began to understand what kind of ‘feral energy’ can grow in this experimental space where anything goes as I struggled with these paper clips. First, by unlocking the smooth half shapes made to be such a convenient paper organizer, done with just my fingers bending them back and smoothing over the bump of their remembered shape until they were somewhat straight. I had originally wanted to twist their ends together, but they were too sharp and strong for me to get a grip on, and the scissors I used did not bite through them, but still slipped from their wiry frames. All in all there are three, one green, one blue, and one yellow and not even their painted casings bear scars from my wrestling with them. It seemed to be going well, in that I could just manage to keep slipping my hook through both paper clip and yarn. It was not until I reached the end of the paper clip that I realized I had not completed an actual stitch the whole way. I finagled my hook out of the mess and there the paper clip was: unwoven and stuck

The three paper clips together seem to snake through the yarn, each in different ways. The yellow slides through the yarn ends I tied together, until it does a complete loop-de-loop through two double crochets of light green. The blue paper clip wraps around the collection of double crochets that shift from green to brown and comes out on the other side to snag onto some pink yarn and finish with a point perpendicular to its other end. The green is barely visible, just two ends and a segment of a loop outside of the place I pulled green and pink into a single thread and topped off that border with white yarn. If you gripped this section of Circuitous Sense, six different paper clip ends jab at your skin at different angles and varying intensity. 

While the Wertheims constantly deal with the question of how to “impart liveliness through different types of material,” (20) I do not use the material to represent something that has another form. In “Matter and Form” Christine Wertheim actively works against Plato’s lingering dichotomy of passive material and agent; that there exists a perfect ideal and everything else, the matter of it all is, “perhaps not even real at all” (91) and art may or may not be on some third rung in the ladder. I posit that in Plato’s philosophy as the Wertheim’s describe it, my little creation, Circuitous Sense, has no ideal form. The paper clips are twisted into loops that do not exactly look like a crochet pattern, but are locked into the rest of the piece as much as the necklace that will not be used for jewelry anymore and the shirt piece that cannot be worn. The material transforms Circuitous Sense, but each material is also transformed. On the matter of being real, I draw on Sedgewick’s understanding of texture as borrowed from Renu Bora, “the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity” (14). Through all of my manipulations with the paper clips I was poked, my fingers protested against connecting the wires. What could be more real than that?

Crocheted Lavender 

The blue crocheted lavender comes from a workshop with an arts and crafts club. The blue decision, instead of the purple acrylic yarn they also had available, came from an idea to make many strings of blue and purple lavender patterns to one day hang from some surface like wisteria. Now the one piece I finished is part of Circuitous Sense. The code for the lavender started with sixty single crochets; I used that base and some brown yarn to connect it to Circuitous Sense. I had to dig through the layers of petals (which are just six single crochets joined to the longer chain with a slip stitch) to get to the base. Those petals are still fun to dig through even though they look more like little nubs now, something growing off of the circle-ish shape slowly but steadily. 

It creates a texture larger than the single crochets its made of, but still informed by their formation, reminiscent of Sedgewick’s shortened definition of texture, "[t]exture, in short, comprises an array of perceptual data that includes repetition, but whose degree of organization hovers just below the level of shape and structure” (16). From the circle, the flower, the petals, the single crochet, the yarn, the thread, the plastic, and on and on I could descend through the degrees of organization, I only know there is so much repetition from what I can count and that each degree is just out of reach due to the layer below. I also know out of reach does not mean divorced from engagement. I can still find another layer by rubbing the petals that appear more like individual loops feeling outside of the mass it is attached to. 

The tip of the inflorescence really sells the perception of individual loops growing away from the rest as two petals in particular tip into the opposite direction of Circuitous Sense, like they are curious to sense outside of themselves. A row of petals remains attached on the lavender’s other side by necklace chain and white yarn. The chain is attached to the bottom portion; I think of it as the bottom of the flower because the chain clings comparatively lightly to those petals, making them broader, fuller. The white yarn takes a row of petals and tamps it down, then jumps back to join with other yarns before becoming ripped tea bags. 

Tea bags

First, I emptied the tea bags of my least favorite tea flavor, green tea and elderberry. It was a gift from a friend that sit under other boxes of tea. I had to be careful where to tear, and found that I only had to open one side of the two-flapped bag and scoot all the crushed plants to one side to discard them. I cut the papery, off-white material into strips lengthwise and tied them together with my fingers. Crocheting this tearable material was a delicate process. Working around the bulby knots was like holding my breath, waiting for them to call it quits at the start of another knot through its roughly held together body. Still, the feel of this soft, gentle, retired tea bag was incredibly satisfying to work through the hook. Everything tells me to immediately reject the pop-up fact I encountered in researching its making; a lot of tea bags are actually made with or sealed with plastic. 

I confirmed that the brand I was using was not one of the brands that used plastic. It is made of recycled materials, expanding the relatively small network of use value this particular piece of ‘trash’ has. My understanding of a tea bag’s network was that it became richer after it was used. A tea bag is used to flavor hot water, maybe more than once if it is especially potent and you are a non-picky tea drinker like me, then it’s thrown away or composted where it can become something new, like compost. The matter I am coding has already been coded, with material sourced from softwood trees that became other papery products. I do not have a real hope in identifying it beyond that. However, this coding does not create a blur between that making and my own, especially as I am imbued with the sense that I am giving these materials a home. 

However, I am wary of crossing the line into this thinking. I want to be cognizant of the mission Bennett tasks herself with, to “name the moment of independence (from subjectivity) possessed by things, a moment that must be there…” (3). While I am undoubtedly delighted by every part of Circuitous Sense because of all the delight I felt making it and looking at the play of colors and textures, it also embodies the existence of ‘thing independence’ through this “impossible singularity” (Bennett 3). I picture now huge and forever growing crocheted creations of discard in the rough shape of Circuitous Sense in every household. A thing where wrappers and napkins and other things super resistant to decomposition can exude its value, and human eyes and hands just happen to be witness for at least a little while.  

Shirt strip

I accidently mirrored this pink strip with the blue strip of crocheted lavender across the stir of randomly configured rows in the middle of Circuitous Sense. They sort of look like mismatched ears when one is facing left and the other right. The shirt cost a dollar. This strip comes from one of the bows it had on its sleeves, which I cut again to make it at least a bit thinner. Still, it was thick and fairly stiff, with tiny ribbed knitted patterns it mocked me with its finer details from a more expert hand or machine that accomplished such small knots. On the piece it dwarfs the columns of double crochet that I made from light green and pink. But more than that, the shirt strip is the material that gives Circuitous Sense an edge, literally. 

A shirt is an act of self-organization. Bennettt develops this idea with an example about the formation of crystals—a process of “thing creativity.” It is also a bolded example of Crochet Coral Reef’s idea that “the properties of the final crocheted piece are determined by the materials used” (4). I would not pull on any of the stitches that were hard-won, but despite this delicate care the thickness, squareness, and sturdiness of the material gives the piece a sturdy appearance. I believe the fact that these are crocheted together instead of tied from end to end or twisted into one or glued onto a sheet of paper also lends a certain durability. Each material decides the properties of Circuitous Sense and will continue to do so as long as the crochet work holds.

Necklace

Between the tea bags and this necklace I was buoyed by sensory delight. The sound of the chain sliding against itself as it moved with my hook was as satisfying as the whisper of tea bags. The necklace is a piece of costume jewelry from long ago enough that it had to be a gift, because it is from a time where I had no money of my own. I know it was cheap, and this makes “narrative hypothesizing” (Sedgewick 13) all the more fun. What pieces of junk came together to make the plasticky jewel so entrancing? Who made links of metal this tiny? In a way, a toy like this is trash even while it is being made. Something to make a child’s desires a profitable source of energy for consumerism with little monetary value actually involved on the wish fulfillment side of the machine. But monetary value was the least of my concerns. It is pretty, even bordering a mess of crochet odds and ends instead of resting against a neck. 

  As I crocheted, I found the middle of each blue petal to be the easiest space to use as an attachment point. It was the thinnest material I worked with but so textured with the small divots between each link that it did not slip out of my hook at all. I was sad to come to the end of the chain, being left with the glittering fake jewel and golden clasp at the end, little charms with little room to dangle. Despite its pretty gold color and the way it catches light easily, it is easy to miss the necklace’s part of Circuitous Sense. It appears to dance over the blue petals, draping in a few places but mostly in a contained line over the uneven ridges of loose nubs. The finished stitches are too tightly woven together to look like crochet stitches, instead appearing as little knots between the petals. It is a piece of costume jewelry junk that can “never really be thrown ‘away’” (Bennett 6).

Conclusion

It is hard to call out which materials are responsible for the ‘bizarre properties’ of Circuitous Sense. After all, “thing power” is acknowledging “that which refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of human knowledge” (Bennett 3). There are the materials themselves, each with different desires, expressed through their leanings and the stories I tell about their transformation. Also present is the irregular code tagging each material connection, like the skip through the acrylic yarn. What started as a circle has edges, some mostly straight and some bumpy; it tends to fold in places that can never really lay flat; the final piece looks like a different shape depending on how it is held and which direction it is viewed from. Is it the stiffness of the shirt and the barely quantifiable hold of the paper clips that causes the hyperbolicity between them? Or is it the acrylic yarn that is so comparatively lax that it slumps in this space between the shirt and wire? Could it be something to do with the tension, or the code I made up as I went? Whatever the reason, I know that they are not just carrying the weight of my decisions or other decisive production processes, but their textured present.