By Brenda Clough
Having decided on elastic as a suitable cheat, it was easy to knit eyeball housings.  A good snug 36 stitches, knitted tubularly, gets me essentially a sock for a ball, thus: 

It does not show very well due to the overexposure of the shot, but you are looking at the knit side of the tube, and both top and bottom are aggressively curling outwards.  I help the roll at the top on down and sew it in place, and run the elastic through.  This gets me this:

As you can see, the green toy ball fits in lovely.  The elastic at the top will keep it from popping out, unless forcibly removed with the fingers.  And I will sew the bottom edge, which has been slightly widened so that it doesn’t cup inwards, to an appropriate place on the side of the squid head.  Before I do that, I want to make the other eye, so that I can adjust their mutual placement.

This narrow tube-knitting technology — around and around on a very small circular needle — is all there really is to socks and gloves and even hats.  Also it would be how tentacles get made, except that I am going to cheat that as well, with my knitting machine here.   The entire art of Art is to do it the hard way if you have to — but to seek out the most efficient way to get the result you want.  There’s even a Piet Hein grook (his term for a very short poem) about this art, which I am going to quote in its entirety:

There is

one art

no more

no less

to do

all things

with art

lessness.

A manic obsessiveness with detail and authenticity gets you craftmanship.  Creativity gets you the volume of work, to be crafty with.  But artlessness — mysteriously, that’s what gets you art.

My newest novel Speak to Our Desires is out exclusively from Book View Press.

I also have stories in Book View Cafe’s two steampunk anthologies, The Shadow Conspiracy and The Shadow Conspiracy II, as well as in BVC’s many other anthologies, including our latest, Beyond Grimm.