We live in the readymade and use-and-throw age, that has all but killed creativity and the joys that go with it.

I spent many hours making this cardi. It was no hassle though because I discovered that crochet, knitting, and sewing—the more mechanical, the better—help me concentrate when listening to sermons and audio Bible readings. So things like crocheting granny squares are perfect for this purpose. But had it not been for this reason, spending time on something like this would be a tremendous waste of time. For an unskilled person like me making a cardi like this takes atleast 160 hours, spread over many months. Let’s give me a wage of $5 per hour, and it has cost $800 by way of cheap labour to get this made.

And there is the cost of wool. Granted I used up all the wool that I had lying around the house, but I did buy the dark blue wool (Shepherd Perendale 8PLY colour Alsace) that I used to unite all the squares and put the cardi together. It cost about $8 a ball, and I used nine balls. I bought three balls at a time, because I had no idea of how much I’d need. So taking the delivery charges into consideration, the dark-blue wool alone cost me at least 92 bucks.

Any way, it turned out quite nicely, even if I say so myself. A deep pocket on the inside was an ingenious finishing touch, I thought.

This cardigan has cost about $892. But I can get a perfectly nice cardigan for less than $50. So ordinarily, it makes no sense to knit or crochet anymore. It isn’t as if my work will last longer. It may not, who knows.

A cardigan costing in the vicinity of a thousand bucks is surely worth a blog post.