needled

More munro knitting, this time atop Buachaille Etive Mor, the huge pink granite “shepherd” of Glen Etive, towards Glen Coe.

After a rocky scramble of an ascent and a few minutes across the moon-like surface of the tops of Stob Dearg we were up in the clouds. I worked on a sock:

but could only manage a few rounds before I had to stick my gloves back on:

chilly! But a fantastic walk….

among my treats this morning were these:

34 wonderful skeins of appleton’s crewel wool. Aren’t they lovely?
off for a walk in Glencoe…

Lela Nargi, ed., Knitting Memories: Reflections on the Knitter’s Life (Voyageur Press, 2006).

Now, I don’t want to be churlish. There are some great things in this book of short essays edited by Lela Nargi. Elanor Lynn’s piece, for example, really gives a window on her idiosyncratic creative process and the particular sense of place, space and connectedness her knitting defines. Local attachment is also a theme in Eiko Berkowitch’s lovely account of making and change over time as “learning to live with the slow process.” Both of these essays really showcase the aesthetic sensibilities of their authors while also being written with a certain committed modesty. But the quality of the rest of the book is variable. The writing in some pieces is much better than in others, and quite a few were the source (for me) of minor irritation (Lily Chin’s grumblings about the terrible hardships of ‘knitting for a living, for example).

But it is the overall effect of the collection that I found most troubling. This is why: one of the most interesting things about contemporary knitting (and the fibre arts in general) is its lively sense of community. While knitting is an activity most of us engage with in private, many of us wouldn’t be doing it at all if it wasn’t for the world of other knitters: for that vibrant, sociable, argumentative network of shared expertise and collective experience that is behind every object that we make. Knitting groups all over the world have returned coffeeshops and pubs to being linchpins of the public sphere.* Boards, kals and ravelry have created other kinds of spaces for learning, inspiration and discussion. In a very profound sense, knitting today really is about knitting in public: it is about being a knitter in a community of knitters, about making within the context of other’s making (in the broadest sense).

What surprised me was how far these public resonances of knitting were absent in Lela Nargi’s collection. The meanings of knitting here, in fact, are resolutely private. In most of these essays, knitting is predominantly associated with individual obsession, family life, acts of sentimental gift-giving and (most disturbingly) with conservative domesticity. Overwhelmingly, knitting is represented as a retreat from the public sphere, rather than as a sign of participation in it. For example, in Robert Cowley’s essay, his wife’s knitting is a retreat-within-a-retreat: an escape not just from the world outside, but from the domestic chaos that surrounds them after the birth of their child, perhaps too (his anxious subtext) from the marriage itself. Knitting here seems a way of not engaging with the public: of shutting oneself away and shutting it out, of denying the public might even exist.

In some of the essays, this denial takes on the features of pathology. For example, one writer mentions that she started knitting following Kennedy’s assassination (for her, an anecdotal coincidence rather than a conscious act). And forgive me for groaning at another author’s account of her grandmother’s knitting as a sort of silent, internalised response to 911. These well-known moments of collective experience are not occasions for engagement with the social or public, but rather prompt rejections (through knitting) of the public altogether. Across the collection, there are few accounts of the pleasure or productivity of creating communally, little sense of what can be gained from an activity that is also associative and shared (beyond the world of the familial or domestic).

In Betty Christiansen’s essay, the author’s sister tells her to get rid of an old sweater which is “screaming the ‘80s.” To me, this book was screaming the ‘80s in that it seemed to encapsulate the privatised, inward-looking sensibility characteristic of that decade. Depressingly, the collection’s predominant focus on subjective experience and domestic identity called to mind that familiar Thatcherite dictum “there is no such thing as society: only individuals and families.” For the majority of writers in this collection, there is, indeed, no such thing as society: only individual knitters and their families. Of course, it could be said that a collection of conservative, private knitters in itself constitutes a kind of knitting public. But this 1980s assemblage seems a long way from the contemporary world of disputation and debate, of participation, association, encouragement and support that energises and inspires much knitting in public today.

*See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962; 1989).

Arose yesterday with the intention of fashioning something jolly with this

I had an empire line and big floral pockets edged with red bias binding in mind.
But it being a cold, grim, dreich sort of day I ended up making this instead

the antithesis of summery. Nice father’s day gift, though - the Alpaca mix will be toasty when Dad’s out in the wintery garden.

Pattern: Kim Hargreaves ‘cool’
Yarn: Rowan plaid
Needles: 7mm

I’ve also completed the front and back of ‘Aimee’.

It has a nice, springy feel to it and I think it’s coming up lovely. That said, I’ve not been enjoying it as much as I thought I would: the pattern isn’t demanding enough to reqire full knitterly concentration, but executing those simple lace repeats in kidsilk haze is surprisingly tricky while watching ‘The Wire.’

Wendy Keele, Poems of Color: Knitting in the Bohus Tradition (Interweave Press, 1995).

I had been looking forward to the Bohus book for a while, and I was not disappointed. What a wonderful resource Interweave and Wendy Keele produced when they published this book in 1995. I was utterly gripped with the story of Emma Jacobsson and the knitters of Bohus Stickning, and blown away (as I knew I would be) by the designs. Even the spooky resemblance of the sweater-wearing model to a despised former colleague (whose psyche and style seemed perpetually stuck in 1983) did not put me off. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is a thought-provoking read for anyone interested in the culture and history of hand knitting, and for those whose bag is colourwork and design it is completely inspirational.

The “wild apple” yoke on p.37 is breathtakingly beautiful. And, in the context of reading Keele’s carefully researched narrative about the designers and knitters of Bohus Stickning, I found the image in and of itself really quite moving.

Rendered in that wonderfully hazy, buoyant, angora yarn, the colours are so luminous and jewel-like. There’s something both whimsical and assured about it. It has a quiet confidence which really speaks of the skill of the knitters as much as the talent and creativity of Kerstin Olsson. This yoke seemed to me to embody what Bohus Stickning accomplished and stood for in terms of design—certainly a poem of colour.

The book also prompted me to reflect again on something that we contemporary knitters all too rarely consider—the history of the meaning of what it is we do. We like to think of hand knitting in terms of ‘tradition’—a word which suggests the imaginary continuity of grandmothers and great-grandmothers, the wisdom of the hands of former generations seamlessly bound up in our making. But the happy world of homespun that is called up in the word “tradition” disguises particular histories of poverty and wealth that are much more messy and discontinuous. “Tradition” can bury away the economic necessities of women’s work, as well as the status of knitted items (and indeed yarn) as luxury commodities. One of the best thing about Keele’s book is her straightforward and frank account of how the emergence of Bohus Stickning relied (on the one hand) on the impoverishment and desperation of Sweden’s provincial women and, on the other, on the canny understanding of one elite individual (Emma Jacobsson) of the potential market for hand-made luxuries.

From Susanna Hansson’s collection. See her site for more wonderful Bohus garments and information)

Bohus garments were so popular and desirable precisely because their complexity and excellence was impossible (before mid-century) to cheaply reproduce. Their protected designs, quality yarns, and impeccable construction bespoke their exclusivity—they were knitted bling. Like the Fair-Isle sweaters popularised by the British royals and aristocrats of the 1920s, Bohus garments were luxury commodities made by the very poor for the very rich to wear.

The twentieth-century history of Fair-Isle knitting is hardly an easy romance of tradition. It is rather a grim tale of economic exploitation in which the skilled labour of women was first woefully poorly recompensed, and then debased by innovations in industrial textile production and the caprices of the global market. The grotesque inequalities between the labour and the luxury of Fair Isle knitting have only recently been redressed by projects, such as Thistle and Broom’s (ensuring that Shetland women, formerly paid 50 pence (around a dollar) per hour, now receive a fair two-thirds of the profits from the sales of their work)

A bit like Fair Isle, then, the exceptional quality of Bohus Stickning is itself a sign of the inequality knitted right into and through its garments. The decline of the popularity of the brand reflected the decline in the market for hand-knitted luxuries—perhaps also a decline in the association of hand-knitting with luxury—as well as the ability of the women of 1960s Bohusland to find work that was much better paid.

Now hand knitting is really a different kind of luxury. It is something that occupies the leisure time of the wealthy, as much as the labour hours of the poor. And we luxury knitters wrap ourselves in fuzzy notions of domestic continuity and tradition, consume mountains of expensive yarn, and somehow still manage to pass off the results as utilitarian and homespun rather than extravagant. Wendy Keele’s super book is a reminder that perhaps more of the labour of our luxury should be spent according proper value to knitters like those of Bohus Stickning.

Note: am I the only one to see in Kaffe Fassett’s hydrangea design in the latest Rowan magazine an obvious echo of Emma Jacobsson’s “Large Carnation”?

Two knitting books turned up yesterday: Jennifer Stafford’s DominKNITrix and Wendy Keele’s Poems of Color: Knitting in the Bohus Tradition. I spent a most enjoyable evening with them both (more on the Bohus book later). Now, I am suspicious, as you know, of Stafford. I really didn’t warm to her when interviewed, couldn’t see the point of the whole Dominknitrix thang, and even found some of her lengthy reminiscing mildly offensive (For her, Europe seemed a whacky ol’ themepark designed solely for expatriate American delectation. Rural Slovakia is, like, medieval! Istanbul looked like a scene from the bible! &c &c).

However, her book is actually more interesting than I imagined it would be. The real point of the book it seemed to me (and certainly what I found most engaging about it) is Stafford’s integration of techniques more commonly used in sewing to handknitted design. She avoids some common knitting shortcuts (3 needle bind off makes an inflexible seam &c &c) and goes out of her way to make her patterns flattering and appealing through careful attention to shaping, detail, and a very professional finish. Patterns feature zips and facings, pockets and edgings and are carefully constructed with body shape in mind. This is refreshing. One of the things I am often disappointed with in, say, Louisa Harding’s lovely designs is the lack of shaping. Here are these fantastically feminine-looking sweaters…then when you check out the pattern, they are made only to fit a generic sack of spuds! (I was particularly struck by the lack of shaping in her Winter’s Muse collection). I realise shaping can be a designer’s worst mare when it comes to accommodating a pattern for different sizes, but still, no woman is a rectangle, and designing rectangular sweaters really seems a bit lazy. This is not the case with the best patterns here. I spent a good while with the Lil’ Red Riding Hoodie, for example, and found it ingenious and thoughtful. Here is Stafford at her best—every element of the garment is constructed with care. The pattern shows her evident interest in what knitted fabric really does when made and worn, and reveals a generous awareness of the possibilities of knitting and the realities of the body.

The book does have some shortcomings, though. Some of these are probably just a matter of my personal taste (intarsia? aigh!….and there is a lot of intarsia) but there are other things too. One problem is that there are not really many substantial patterns in here. The best patterns (city coat, lil red riding hoodie, and the elfin bride (which is not included in the book, but can be downloaded from Stafford’s website) are clearly those Stafford designed with herself, and her own curvaceous 6 foot form in mind (enviable, eh?). She has clearly made valiant attempts with the sizing, but the difference in attention to detail between these (few) patterns and those which pad out the rest of the book, is really quite clear. Limiting the book’s appeal, too, is it’s ‘dominating’ aesthetic. I still fail to see the point. How do vague sexual innuendo and instructions rendered as ‘commands’ add anything to knitting? Please tell me, what is the connection between knitting, and a popularly rendered, nudge-nudge, wink-wink version of sado-masochism? Far from being intelligent or witty these features of the book’s packaging and contents are more often just embarrassing. The sheer emptiness of the style calls to mind the hollow populism of Athena posters, or the way that the politics of punk have been so watered down, so completely decontextualised, that they can now be a ‘funny’ or ‘ironic’ feature of a line of children’s clothing (an infant with a mohican! ho ho ho!). This aesthetic also has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that Stafford might not take herself or her designs seriously—and this clearly isn’t the case. For me, the most interesting person in this book was Jennifer Stafford, a designer whose concern with process, shape, and finish makes her (like Teva Durham) really quite distinctive. The Dominknitrix I can take or leave.

Here’s the completed baby jacket

Seems a shame, given its fashionable A shape, that I don’t fit into it meself. But I am sure it will be better suited to the ‘new arrival’ (infant parlance) when it arrives. Helen kindly asked about the buttons: they are made from fimo soft clay, cooked at 220 degrees for 30 mins, then varnished.

I suppose it all depends on what you mean by “public”… In any case, my contribution to worldwide knit-in-public day (June 9th) was to take a project (something I am knitting for the Rowan exchange) to the top of Ben Lomond and knit it there.

Here I am.

The weather was fantastic — just a few swirling clouds at the top. We had views across Loch Lomond to the Cobbler, and north to the highlands proper.

We came up across the Ptarmigan - a nicer and more varied ascent than the usual route. I found knitting at 3,000 feet strangely exhilarating and now have a vague notion of knitting my way up all 284 munros. Whadaya reckon?

did I mention I was enjoying knitting the baby cardigan? I have now completed all edgings and the collar:

and have made some tasty buttons. Here they are before:

and after baking:

they were meant to be ladybirds, but I found sculpting ladybird faces a bit of a challenge. Though now merely suggestive of my original idea, I think they still look pretty good. I’m very pleased with them, as well as with the collar and edging. So pleased, in fact, that it seems a shame to have the latter repeatedly stretched out of shape around the buttons as the cardigan is done up, and undone. The solution is for the buttons to assume a status purely decorative, and forgo the buttonholes. Snap fasteners will be discretely hidden on the cardigan edging in place of buttonholes. I hate buttonholes. My yarnover buttonholes always look, well, like holes, and the single downside of this pattern was that it included three nasty little buttonholes of the YO/k2tog variety. Bah to them. In any case, I think the snaps are probably more practical on a garment for a young baby, and the buttons will now be able to stand proudly and securely on the front edging.

Tomorrow I sew.

progress on the Debbie Bliss baby jacket. I’ve been working on it while out and about round Loch Lomond this weekend - - it will have an interesting collection of Scottish locations knitted into it. I enjoyed the yoke construction, and like the way the raglan shaping shows off the stripes.