Finishing date: May 2020. Styling by Natalia Salazar and photographed by Katja Malmborg in April 2020.
The never-ending story of the purple cotton yarn: The (hopefully) final chapter. Here, turned into a shirt with braided sleeves and crocheted flowers, so beautifully worn by Jonna and arranged by Natalia Salazar (and in the last photo worn by me, obviously, just to show it on someone non-pregnant).
This yarn in four shades of purple came into my possession after we emptied my grandma’s house more than ten years ago, and it has taken many different forms since. On an excursion in Namibia in 2010, I sat next to my geography classmate Mattias in the back of the jeep, listening to his iPod music through shared headphones, knitting on what became a dress. But the dress didn’t really fit, so I eventually unraveled parts of it and added sleeves. And so the story continued, with partial or complete unravelings, trying to figure out how to make it wearable.
The shirt in the photograph, I worked on while traveling by train back and forth to do fieldwork in different parts of Southern Sweden. And so I feel like it’s gone full circle: It started with a dress made during a geography excursion, and ended with a shirt made during fieldwork for my PhD in sustainability science. It is a bit peculiar – but that is fine. Sometimes, you just have to decide to be done.
Katja Malmborg 