The Pattern Has To Fit

THE FIVE PILLARS OF SLOW STEADYING, PART THREE: DESIGN

There is a short cotton jacket that I wear more than anything else I have ever made, and it began life as a screenshot of somebody else's coat. I had been following Vanessa Cornell, a friendship expert in New York whose work I came across through, of all things, a reel about the benefits of crochet. In one of her videos she mentioned having copied a pattern from a screenshot she took of another woman's duster, and that the pattern was in Russian, which she could not read either. I looked at her grey duster, nearly floor length and very beautiful, and I wanted it.

What I did not want was a floor length duster. I took the buttery cotton yarn I already had in the house, copied the granny squares from what I could see on the screen, and improvised from there until I had a short jacket that suits the Highveld far better than it would ever suit a New York winter. It is not her coat, and it is not really even the same garment, but it is the one I reach for.

In the previous blog we made some space, and this is the pillar that decides what goes into it. Before we get there it is worth saying how the first two actually work, because both of them are usually taken the wrong way round. Most people think of dreaming as a mental activity, something you do sitting still with a notebook, where I would argue that small activities and ordinary tasks are one of the finest ways of sparking a dream and letting it grow. Decluttering is assumed to be the opposite, a purely physical business of boxes and cupboards, and I have come to believe that clearing out thoughts, relationships, expectations and goals creates the mental space first, after which the physical clearing goes far more easily than it ever did before.

Design is where those two meet, because it brings the mental and the physical together and gives you a drawing board for your own reality. It is the third of the five pillars, and it is where you work out what your own version of slowsteading looks like instead of building a smaller copy of someone else's.

Copy the stitch, not the coat

I am all for borrowing, since almost everything I do here came from watching someone else do it first, and I try to say so by name whenever I can, because there is no credit in pretending you invented a way of making jam. What does not travel is the finished thing, and that is the whole difficulty. A technique travels easily, and the idea of a granny square goes perfectly well from a Russian chart through a New York living room to a woman on the Highveld with a hook and some cotton, but the coat itself stays where it was made.

The reason is climate, and I mean that in both senses. There is the literal one, where a floor length wool duster is a gift in one city and a punishment in another. Then there is the climate of your own life, which is made up of how many people are in your house, how much of your day is already spoken for, what your kitchen will actually allow, and what you enjoy enough to keep doing when nobody is watching. Two women can admire exactly the same photograph and need two entirely different things from it.

What I chose, and what I left

There are no goats here and there never will be, and I do not bake every kind of bread or grow every vegetable that would happily grow in this soil. I keep chickens and ducks because I like the eggs and I like the noise they make, angora rabbits because I wanted to spin something I had grown myself, a rooster called Bruce-the-buff who announces the day whether anybody asked him to or not, and a chinchilla called Achilles who contributes nothing whatsoever except company while I write. Another woman would look at that list and find it entirely beside the point, and she would be right to, because it is not her list.

The bread is a better example, because it is where I designed something rather than inherited it. I love sourdough and I have made a lot of it, but the timing of a sourdough loaf does not fit a house where a large number of people leave in the morning and want feeding at the end of it. So I settled on a no knead dough instead, mixed at six in the morning, rested an hour or two, turned four times at half hour intervals, and divided into four cast iron pots so that the bread comes out in time for lunch with the next morning's toast already accounted for. Nobody handed me that arrangement, it is the shape my own day forced on me, and the only reason it has lasted is that it fits.

The comparison problem

I am not going to tell you to stop looking at other people's kitchens and gardens, because I would be a hypocrite if I did. Much of what I make and grow arrived here through another woman's video, and I have said as much to my teenagers even while warning them about how much of their evening those same videos can swallow. Both things are true at once and I have stopped trying to resolve them.

What I do find useful is one question, asked honestly in the moment. Does this make me want to go and do something in my own house, or does it make me feel that my own house is wrong? The first is inspiration and it is worth every minute you spend on it. The second is comparison wearing inspiration's clothes, and the kindest thing you can do is put the phone down and go outside.

There is no template for this

I have been asked more than once for the plan or the list of what a person ought to have in order to call it a slowstead, and I have never been able to produce one. It is not modesty, and it is not that I am keeping something back. It is that a design which fits your life is by definition not one that somebody else drew, and the moment I hand you my arrangement I have taken away the only thing that would have made it yours.

The nearest I will come to suggesting a structure is to name the areas of urban slowsteading that have enriched my own life immeasurably: cooking, baking, preserving, gardening, pets and animals, hobbies and crafts, the apothecary with the making of natural products, and relationship and community, which I very nearly left off the list and which probably belongs at the top of it. That is not a checklist and there is nothing to work through in order, and I would be pleased if you took two of them and left the rest alone for the time being. Everything I have built here has come out of one or another of those areas, and the ones that took hold were always the ones I was already curious about.

What I can tell you is what the good ones have in common. They are built around the hours you actually have rather than the hours you wish you had, and they are made of things you would still enjoy doing when nothing much is going well.

Your first fitting

Think of one thing you have admired, and be specific about it, whether it is a garden bed, a routine, a row of jars or a jacket in someone's video. Now name the single change that would make it fit your life. Perhaps it is smaller, or it happens far less often than the version you admired, or it moves from the garden to a windowsill, or it becomes something you do with one of your children instead of alone.

That small alteration is the whole pillar, and you are not lowering your standards when you make it, you are drawing the pattern to your own measurements, which is the only way anything ever gets worn.

In the next blog we come to developing, which is where the skills arrive, and where I will have to admit to a number of failures before anything started working.

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What have you adapted, and what did you change to make it yours? None of our versions will look alike, and the differences are the interesting part rather than the problem, so do leave me a comment and tell me.