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Food

Threading the Noodle: Woman Knits Ramen into Works of Art

This isn’t her first ramen-centric art project.
Photo via Top 10 News

It sounds like a misunderstanding from a late-eighties sitcom, a line Danny Tanner would've said with a shrug and a smile: "You said knitting needles? I thought you said knitting noodles!" But no, Cynthia Delaney Suwito definitely said knitting noodles. The Singapore-based artist spends hours on her projects, which turn the contents of the average Top Ramen cup into impressive, scarf-like tapestries.

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Suwito's process starts with selecting the noodles from her local supermarket, boiling them and then allowing them to cool. After that, she presumably trades the seasoning packet for a pair of knitting needles and starts to work. It takes her between three and four hours to complete each eight-inch segment. "A lot of people in this world want things [to be] very fast, very instant," she said in a video published by Top 10 News. "So not just in food or instant noodles, but also in their lives."

Her website reinforces her commitment to turning something we rely on for instant gratification into a painstakingly slow process, one that may or may not ever be finished. She says that she will "keep on slowly knitting it to perfection," which certainly leaves things more open-ended than the instructions on a ramen package do. Because what is perfection? Who defines it or decides it?

READ MORE: Another Tokyo Ramen Restaurant Has Earned A Michelin Star

This isn't her first ramen-centric art project, either. She has also undertaken something called "Noodle Confessions," which involved collecting stories and memories of people's instant noodle experiences from around the world. Those recollections were then printed on stickers which were pasted on actual packages of—what else?—instant noodles. Another of her installations, "Instant Noodles – Specimen," presented each noodle sample as an artifact that was discovered by a future archaeologist, along with the assumptions that those imagined explorers might make about our world.

A photo posted by Cynthia Delaney Suwito (@cynthiadsuwito) on Dec 30, 2016 at 1:31am PST

As it stands, Suwito has been knitting noodles since late 2014 and she insists that she's not at all sick of them. (She still eats a lot of them, too). If you're interested in trying this at home, she recommends knitting with the Indomie or Nongshim brands. You're on your own for the rest of it—including making the Dad Jokes.