Tag Archives: Knitting

Funny-looking objects

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World, I gotta tell you, there’s a new baby boom headed your way and it’s originating in this middle-sized city at the bottom of the world, namely, Melbourne, Australia.

When the boom arrives on your shores you’ll know the babies by their outfits. If I have anything to do with it, they’ll be wearing one of the knitting world’s most covetable patterns, a knitting pattern so famous it has its own acronym.

The BSJ, or Baby Surprise Jacket to the uninitiated, was created in 1968 by the very droll Elizabeth Zimmerman. There are thousands of sites on the internet dedicated to the knitting of this garment. Holding the pattern in one’s hand is akin to handling a recently unearthed ikon, coming as it does via only one route: snail mail from deep somewhere in the American prairie.

And it’s unlike any other pattern I’ve read. Here’s Elizabeth at about row 10:

Work will start to look very odd indeed, but trust me and press on.

Here she is a little later:

Hope you are still with me.

And when you get to the end, there’s this:

Funny-looking object, isn’t it?

By which she means an object looking a bit like my first 20 rows above, only bigger and curlier and even less baby-jacket-like. Still, after 44 years of cult status, I’m prepared to believe the object does somehow turn into a baby-jacket. By which time, she says,

The baby will probably be unmoved by this offering, but the parents may well be charmed and your friends will be amazed.

***

Yarn is Sirdar’s Sublime, Baby Cashmere Merino Silk in Shade 0124 which is a lot more aqua than it appears in the photo.

These obscure and unobscure objects of desire

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Dearest iPhone, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

No, no, maybe not.  Too much like another hymn to Apple and its tiresome CEO.  Too much fetishization of the gadget, not enough genuine delight.

So, forthwith, genuine delight.

The iPhone is the handiest thing I own.  It knows what I want to do before I do, it never makes me read the f – - king manual and it takes photos like these, turning a simple weeknight dinner at a friend’s house into an artistic event.

Of course, it helps if said friend has lovely, obscure objects to share.  For example, what do you think this is?

And how about this?

Or this?

And what about this?

Here’s a hint or two.  The top three concern knitting, the bottom one, playing.  All are made from bakelite.  Answers in an update tomorrow.

*****

People of the sock

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Last year I started a community project called A Walk in the Park. The project was about having pedestrian crossings installed at six locations in my local neighbourhood to encourage people to give up some of their car trips and start walking.  The project was a great success: we got our local Council to sit up and take notice, we created a community of people committed to the neighbourhood, we contributed to the just-launched Pedestrian Strategy for Victoria and built all kinds of links between organisations, government and residents. Even today, 18 months after the key rally, I still get enquiries and encouragement from people interested in the project.

Now it’s time to start another community project and I’ve got a beauty in mind. It’s going to be called People of the Sock and it’s about bringing together sock knitters and people who are homeless (I dislike the term “homeless people”; people aren’t their housing situation). The project is to hold a sock knitting workshop and create 100 pairs of socks which are then distributed to the people who sleep near the Princes Bridge at Southbank.

The project is dedicated to my lady of the toadstool who gave me the clue, and to my father.

My lady of the toadstool told me she knits socks for Father Chris Riley in Sydney who distributes them to people who are homeless. They are particularly valued because socks (and scarves) are both warm and easily portable.  As my lady explained, when not wearing the socks, a person who is homeless can easily stuff them in their pocket for the day, unlike the gift of a blanket which the person has to carry around for the day or hide somewhere.

*****

I have no idea how the project is going to happen, but it could look like the following …

The workshop is late November in a place like a public garden with a big video screen.  Hey, Federation Square just popped into my mind!  Perfect.

We invite everyone who wants to learn to knit socks, including people who are homeless.  They know about the event because we’ve had a story published in The Big Issue and The Age and we’ve been on radio talking about it.  We have 20 to 25 experienced sock knitters working the crowd of wannabe knitters, casting on for people, teaching them how to hold the 4 needles, easing them over those painful first few rows.  On the screen we have the most famous sock knitter in the world, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka the Yarn Harlot, beamed in from her home in Canada.  She’s cracking jokes, talking about beer and sharing secrets.  From time to time, she shares the screen with the sock pattern beamed in from the depths of my knitting bag, and a supremely competent and entertaining compere ties the whole lot together.

All the sock yarn has been donated by Opal in Germany or Heirloom in Italy, and Knit Picks has donated all the double-pointed needles, size 2.75mm.

Now here’s the tricky bit which I can’t even envisage. Knitting socks takes time and it takes navigation of the heel.  We can teach people to start a sock and knit it for an hour or so, but at that point they won’t be up to the heel.  So how do we teach them to start a sock, knit a sock and turn a heel — a sequence that would take a day or two of normal, interrupted knitting — in one session?

Anyway, someone else will work that out.

A few weeks after the knitting workshop — say, mid December — we gather together again and distribute the socks to the people by the river. Just in time for Christmas.

The possibility of the project is spreading the joy of making.

What do you think, dear uncrazy readers?  Could it work?

PS. My toes don’t really look like that. They’re usually beautifully pedicured.  Yarn is Heirloom’s Jigsaw which knits up tight and smooth after a splitty start. 

*****

Knitting for waiting and grieving

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I’ve never really doubted the value of knitting.  But if I had, going through Dad’s death would have dispelled the doubt forever.

When I flew up to Sydney to the hospital I took a half-finished sock and one ball of Opal sock wool.  And during the long days by his bed, in waiting rooms and the all-too-familiar cafe my mother and me knitted.

I kept on with my sock, and she, coming back to knitting after many years away doing other crafts, started on the matching sock.  I used the yarn from the outside of the ball; she used the yarn from the inside of the ball.  And this one ball of pink and orange sock wool kept us going for days.  Through awful stress and worry, right up to the morning of his death when we sat in the intensive care waiting room at 5am as the machines were turned off.

The hospital too had no doubts about the value of knitting because the waiting room had its own basket of wool and needles with an invitation to others stuck in that horrid limbo to start a “square”.

Neither did the old woman we encountered in a walk round the hospital parking area one day, sitting on her zimmer frame contraption knitting away like queen of all she surveyed.

I’m 80, how old are you, dear?

she asked peering at my mother, as if anyone not yet 80, and most especially anyone not knitting, was not to be taken seriously.  “I never go anywhere without my knitting,” she confided, before leaping off her toadstool to uncover her stash under the seat and telling us the pattern of the squares she was knitting for Africa.

What is it about knitting, especially in hospitals?

Readers may have their own ideas, and if you do I’d love to hear them.  For mine, it’s about the simple, rhythmic movement; the repetition; the tiny sense of accomplishment at the end of a row; and the lulling, affirming effect of this on the spirit.

As my mother said,

I don’t know how I would have got through it without the knitting.

*****

Thank you to all for your messages on my father’s death.  I appreciated them very much.

A short cultural history in yarn

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Some people attribute the earliest examples of knitting to Christian Coptics in Egypt in the 3rd or 4th centuries; others consider the earliest knitters to be Muslims working for royal families in Christian Spain in the 13th century. (note 1)

Partly, it depends on whether you consider items like those below to be knitted. They are socks from the 3rd or 4th century, designed to be worn with sandals. They were excavated in Egypt and are now part of the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London.

They were made by the process called nålebinding. Technically, nålebinding is regarded as a forerunner of knitting because it uses only one needle, and involves knotting the yarn rather than looping it. Still, compare the heel section of this ancient sock to the heel section of the sock I’m knitting at the moment and tell me what’s different.

Whenever knitting started, it was roaring along by the doublet-wearing age of Elizabethan England.  With all those bare legs shooting out of short trunks, knitting must have been widespread and essential. Elizabeth I was a fan of knitted stockings, but only if they were made of silk, not wool.  The ones below — dating from the 1640s, and also held by the V&A — are beautiful enough to have belonged to the glorious monarch herself.  For it’s rumoured that:

Stockings [belonging] to her still exist, demonstrating the high quality of the items specifically knitted for her. (2)

Of course, this was long before the Industrial Revolution, and all knitting was done by hand, and mostly by men.  In the 1400s in Europe knitting guilds were established which were “exclusively male and with structured apprenticeship systems.” (3) Even a shepherd could knit while watching his flock.

Outside the guilds, “knitting schools were established as a way of providing an income to the poor.” (4)  And if the income of the poor depended on their output, then speed and efficiency were of the essence.

According to the wonderful Judith, the woman who runs the Craft Clinic at Morris and Sons, this meant the style of knitting they used would have been quite different to the one I use, for example.  The hands would have been held low and unobstrusive, with a ruthless economy of movement. This economy of movement would have applied regardless of whether the knitter was using the “English style” or the “Continental style.”

Throwing vs Picking

English style, also called “throwing,” is where the yarn is held in the right hand and it moves back and forth when wrapping the yarn around the needle.  Beginners tend to use English style with their right hand on top of the needle; more experienced knitters use English style with their hand underneath the needle. Continental style, also called “picking,” is where the yarn is held in the left hand, and the right hand, on top of the needle, does very little. Compared to English style, Continental style is deadly. Utterly pragmatic, silent, swift.

Judith’s version of English style is a remnant of this earlier imperative to economy and, no doubt, the Continental style in which she first learnt knitting in her native South Africa.  Sitting side by side with Judith, my style in comparison could be called the English Gothic.  It’s the style that evolved, Judith says, around the end of the 19th century in England with the reign of Queen Victoria and the rise of parlour pastimes for women.

In this version of English style, the yarn is held in the right hand as with all English styles, but unlike Judith’s English style, the whole hand — minus the little finger, which is fetchingly cocked so as to be “more ladylike” — moves forward and back.  It’s a very showy style, and as profligate of movement as befitted Victorian ladies wanting to demonstrate their leisure.

Despite the name, and the fact that prior to Victorian times there were more economical versions of the English style, the Continental style must also have been used to some extent in England.  Because, according to Wikipedia, Continental style fell out of favour in English-speaking countries with the advent of the world wars as it was associated with Germany.

It’s only recently that Continental style has been re-introduced to the US, for example.  With Judith’s help, I’m giving it a go too.

***

Notes

1. Wikipedia

2. Wikipedia

3. Knit a Square

4. Wikipedia

The yellow bathmat

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Finally, I finished the yellow bathmat. Not quite before the Olympic flame went out, but soon after. And after consulting the IKOC (International Knitting Olympic Committee), aka the Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, I decided I did qualify for one of these.

As Stephanie said:

I’m proud of everyone who gave it a shot and fell short,  whether you finished or not you are now the sort of person who tries a challenge. I think (and I’m not just saying this because I’m that sort of person) that people who sign up for life have a way better ride.

And what’s more, as she also said, the “beautiful gold medal” designed by the “esteemed Mr Franklin Habit” …

has a vaguely naked man on it which was frankly, more than I had hoped for.

Over 4,000 knitters participated in the Knitting Olympics.  Some, like Stephanie (well, actually, maybe only she), completed something mind-bogglingly complex.  As befits a knitter of international fame, it was the phenomenally technical fair isle sweater she’s modelling below.

During the Oympics she managed to run the challenge, speak on radio about it, blog about it, do it and even steek into the bargain.  Steeking is the arcane knitting procedure whereby neckholes and armholes are cut with scissors.  Purely on her ability to do this without fainting, I’d award her a degree of difficulty of 9.999.

In comparison, my yellow bathmat had a degree of difficulty of about 0.85.  Yet, I reckon it’s a 9.2 for usefulness and a round 10 for rusticity.

*****

Not working, knitting

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It’s 1:00pm on Monday afternoon and instead of working I’m knitting. Because the closing ceremony of the Vancouver Olympics is only hours away and the border of my putative bathmat needs to be twice as wide before the flame is out.

Trying not to brood on the hours I lost last night having to rip back several rows when I got mesmerised and merrily kept K1-ing when I should have been P1-ing.  Back soon. I hope.

Needles on a plane

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On Christmas Eve, Australian knitters got the Christmas present they’d been waiting for.  The Australian Government finally removed knitting needles from the list of items prohibited on a plane.

It’s been a sore point for many years that famous knitters in North America like Stephanie Pearl McPhee could swan on to a plane with an armoury of steel and bamboo implements.  While we in the Antipodes were having a little cry at check-in for all the wasted hours ahead when obliged to relinquish our project to the hold.  How was the heel going to get turned down there?

Knitters would scheme endlessly at ways to outwit the authorities.  Which just goes to show they’d got us knitters exactly right: we were not to be trusted. 

One woman on a blog speculated about using a bamboo circular to hold her hair in a bun while getting past the x-ray machine.  Which was clever, yes, and probably could have worked, only I did wonder a tad how she was going to explain the woolly mess on her tray table on the “final rubbish pick-up.”

And then — would you believe it? — we Australian knitters had been celebrating for a mere 24 hours when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a US plane with chemicals in his underpants.  We’ve all been vwerry vwerry quiet ever since lest the Australian Government again put 2 and 2 together and get 5: knitters + Australian planes = terrorists in the US.

*****

Of all the needles worth getting caught for smuggling on to a plane it’d be my Clover 4mms made in Japan from the finest bamboo, or the acknowledged Rolls Royce of knitting needles, my 5mm Addi Turbo circular, made in Germany from nickel-plated brass.

The Clovers are as pleasing to look at as they are to use.  They’re long and light and strong with – really there’s no other way to say it — the most sweetly shaped knobs at the end.  The Addi Turbos claim to be the fastest in the business and they are.  Hollow little torpedoes, they move the yarn smoothly and silkily from one point to the other with a lovely airy click.

Both of them are shown in the picture, along with my unloved Casein needles and my current project.  The Caseins are the white ones and that’s because they’re made of milk.  Yes, milk.  Don’t ask me how a milk protein – Casein – ends up as a stick but it does.  They’re probably designed to imitate the antique needles made of ivory, yet given ivory was the ultimate covetable material I can only think it’s a rather poor imitation.  Because the Casein feels plasticky, and too cool and inert to my hand.

My current project is, wonders, not a sock.  It’s a short cardi-bolero-thingy from a Jo Sharp pattern.  This one’s definitely a “product” knit, not a “process” one.  Can’t say why but it’s boring to knit.  Only way I’ll be smuggling it on a plane is by wearing it.

*****

Images: Jo Sharp (top); by me (bottom)

Socks and jocks

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Well, the car’s half packed, the wine’s chilling, the presents are wrapped and the socks knitted.  Here’s the pair I showed you before, all ready for my brother (no need to worry about spoiling surprises; no-one from my family and few of my friends read this blog).

My brother’s not usually on a first name basis with yellow (I was thinking yellow would give the illusion of warmth when he was in New York for the northern winter, only he went and changed plans on me, and now he’s back under the too-yellow sun of Sydney), yet they’re so his era.

Then there’s this pair for my friend, Jane.

And this which I received from my friend of over 30 years, Theresa: a “knit one, sip one” coffee mug.

*****

Thank you to all who’ve read my blog this year and commented and encouraged me.  It really does make a difference when I’m wondering what’s the point, or when I feel as if I’ve got nothing to say. Thank you in particular to my three star commentors:

  • the redoubtable Mr Phillip S Phogg, Esq,  a truer and more stalwart commentor a blogger never had; Phoggy, your curiosity, wide knowledge and thoughtfulness have greatly enriched this blog
  • the host with the mostest and best-selling author, Mr Andreas Kluth; Andreas, your warm and enquiring mind is a pleasure to be in
  • my good friend, Mulberry; dear R, your grace and empathy are an inspiration to me.

May you and all my readers have a happy Christmas, and a year of joy and satisfaction. SGxx