A Half-Knitted Net Coat and a Small Wet Boot Print in Majorna

The coat hangs from a hook on a steel beam. It has a body, a collar and a right sleeve. The left sleeve is a bundle of orange cord.

Under it, on the concrete, a boot print. Child size. Wave tread, heel deeper than toe. It is wet.

The studio is a former rope shop in Majorna. The door faces the quay and the floor slopes slightly towards it. Elin Lindqvist-Roque says she chose the room for the slope.

The net comes from the harbour mouth. A dredger crew pulls it up in tangles and sells it by the bag. Three hundred kronor a bag, up from nothing last spring. One coat takes about six hundred metres.

She knits it on pine needles as thick as broom handles. One row takes a minute. The body alone took eleven weeks. The finished part weighs fourteen kilos and smells like a cold cellar.

Three weeks ago a girl from the next building came in asking for a toilet. She was about eight. She crossed the floor in wet boots, stopped at the coat and put her arm into the open armhole, up to the elbow. Then she said thank you and left.

Elin put the needles down. She has not picked them up for the sleeve since.

She did not mop. Every morning at nine she wets the print again with a plant sprayer. It takes four pumps. The water spreads to the edge of the tread and holds.

A sleeve decides who a coat fits, she says. Right now the coat fits someone with one arm and someone with a short one. She does not say this like a problem.

The orange cord of the missing sleeve hangs to the height of the print. It does not touch the floor. She measured.

A buyer came on Tuesday, from a shop two streets over. He offered 48,000 kronor for the coat as it stands, minus the print. She asked if he planned to mop. He said he would send someone.

The coat is still on the hook. The sprayer sits on an upturned crate beside it. It cost 39 kronor and is the only thing in the room she has finished paying for.