JAMES BAUMGARTNER: Instead of yarn, Lizzy Dargie crocheted her blanket out of 28 gauge steel wire, a little thinner than a spaghetti noodle. She used a popular crochet pattern called a granny square. The squares are about 6 inches on a side, almost floral in design and they’re stitched together with more wire making a blanket that’s about 6 feet long. It has the shape and form of a blanket, but it’s unsettling to see something that should be warm and comfortable but instead is metallic, and cold, and sharp. The wire is stiff, but the blanket is flexible. You could lay it on a twin bed, or you can fold it up and drape it over a couch like an afghan. Lizzy told me that the idea for the wire blanket came to her in September 2020, six months into the pandemic.
LIZZY DARGIE: That was quite a culminating period as people were figuring out how kids were going back to school, if they were going back to school, or not. So much remote versus in-person talk. It felt like a full summer of not normal life and not getting to experience all the normal things and gatherings. I think, also the looming fear of the winter. People trying to predict what was going to happen and what life was gonna be like, and feeling that looming, like, being able to be outside is going to go away and kind of feeling that and so I think it was, it was really a culmination of all of those things that kind of led to that spark, right at that time, at the beginning of September.
JAMES: And as it gets cold, you’re gonna need a blanket, right?
LIZZY: Yes, yeah. And though this one wouldn’t help you very much.
JAMES: I’ve seen some pictures of your hands turned into a metallic color by working with this. Can you tell me a little bit about what the process did to you physically?
LIZZY: While I was testing the different wires out I very quickly could feel what it was doing to my hands. Because when you’re crocheting, usually you’re pulling the yarn through your hands you also have to keep a certain amount of tension. And so I very quickly see exactly where on your fingers that wire is running through.It was immediately like okay, let me try and put a band aid there. Or the anchoring of the crochet hook because it took so much more pressure to wield the wire where that hook was hitting my hand. I was like okay, I actually need a glove on this hand but I can’t wear a full glove because I… You do still need to feel the material. You know, in the beginning, I could only crochet a few squares at a time before my hands were just too tired. And I wasn’t going to let… you know my hands are a very important part of me and I wasn’t going to… I was going to avoid all long-term damage.
JAMES: How is this a reaction to this time?
LIZZY: You know, we had this life plan, we’re all working towards something different. Needing to just kind of continue to soldier on that path, despite all of the dangers and anxieties of the pandemic. But now, we don’t really have the right resources, we don’t either have the safety gear, or we don’t have all of the knowledge of how to keep ourselves safe.
LIZZY: And so, taking that and then using the blanket, the metaphor of that plan, the crochet plan, but not having any of the right resources, those tools, not having that kind of support system. And so the wire representing that, that difference in, you know, normal life being the soft, fluffy, wonderful wool blanket that you want to snuggle up under, and then this wire: cold, sharp at times, no comfort whatsoever, kind of as a metaphor of what the past year and a half has felt like.
JAMES: While Lizzy was making the wire blanket as an art piece, she also made a puff quilt for herself.
LIZZY: It’s stuffed with stuffed animal stuffing so that’s what makes the puffs and so it’s just like a really comforting object to counteract that weight, coldness, hardness, pain of this piece.
LIZZY: There’s such a balance in this piece and and I think throughout this whole time of things being really terrible, but also, there are still good things happening or things that are helping us get through it. And it can be really hard to hold both of those at the same time.
