Artist Cynthia Suwito knits with real ramen noodles as a reminder to slow down

While you were busy trying not to burn yourself pouring hot water into your instant ramen cup, Cynthia Suwito was knitting noodles into scarves.

The artist, from Singapore, first allows boiled noodles to cool before threading them on to her needles, with which she patiently stitches each curly strand to create a unified piece.  

Suwito's craft is more than some quirky hobby: She's making a statement about human's desire for instant gratification, and the importance of slowing down.

"Instant noodles being something that is supposed to be very instant, I'm doing something very slow to it," she said in a video posted by Top 10 News on YouTube. "So by using this instant thing I've actually made the process of knitting slower than it should be." According to the artist's personal website, the project took place in 2014. The YouTube video was recently published, however, and excitement over Suwito's creative work is resurfacing.

On her website, the artist writes:

It contrasts the concept of the preciousness of time. Putting an object that symbolize the need of having a fast or even instant result but needing a long time to create such result and keep on slowly knitting it to perfection. The project aims to slow viewers down.

The whole concept is a clever one. Suwito takes a material intended to be instant and ephemeral and makes it last. It takes the artist three hours to knit a piece reaching a little less than two feet in length, according to Top 10 News. 

Suwito has used instant noodles as a medium in several other projects, including one called "Noodle Confession," in which she collects stories about people's personal noodle experiences, and "Instant Noodles - Specimen," a project that imagines how archaeologists would analyze people of the past when discovering old noodle artifacts. Pretty neat.

You can watch Suwito rock her noodlework in the video below: