needled

My favourite Elizabeth Zimmermann book is the Knitter’s Almanac. When I first encountered it a few years ago, I remember being very struck by the passages on reading while knitting (in the ‘April’ chapter). At the time I thought this was utterly remarkable — combining two activities simultaneously? Two activities requiring two very different kinds of concentration? Surely it was impossible! I have since discovered that this is not the case, and that reading and knitting actually complement each other rather well. Clearly one should always trust EZ. In fact, I now find that knitting serves to focus my reading in quite a weird but useful way. I tend to read quickly and impatiently, but knitting makes me slower, more careful, and much more methodical. At the moment I am catching up with a backlog of books for review. One has to take one’s time with those. This is just the right kind of reading to knit to.

This is what makes the whole thing possible.

I am very fond of this bookstand, which is made of a lovely old piece of oak. It gets a lot of use, and in fact I tend to treat it rather brutally — it usually sits on my desk overloaded with a few too too many books and scribbled notes. This is probably all too evident from its battered appearance, and the several places where it has been fixed and glued.

In terms of the knitting, I just needed a project that I could go either round and round, or back and forth with, in a relatively simple manner. No cables or lace. I found such a project . . .

. . . and both the reading and the knitting zoomed by at a ready pace. Yesterday I wrote up my reviews, and in the evening sewed up this:

A bolero jacket from this collection by Debbie Bliss.

It hasn’t been blocked yet, and I think it probably needs it, but the slightly uneven (would others say ‘rustic’?) appearance is at least partly a feature of the yarn its made from — handspun cashmere that I bought at Teo’s on Skye last summer. Knitting with this stuff was amazing. I can only compare the feeling to running ones hands through a bowl of sifted flour of a very fine grade. Ah me. The gauge was quite difficult to approximate because of the way the yarn behaves — it wasn’t sure from one row to the next whether it wanted to be aran or chunky. But I trusted my instincts and Debbie Bliss, and it worked out just fine. I knit it on 5.5mm needles, rather than the 6.5 the pattern calls for, and this has produced a shape that’s reasonably tailored on someone with narrow shoulders like me. Not a Spring jacket, by any means, but just right for now.

Can I say that several hours of careful, focussed, and stimulating reading while knitting cashmere at the same time probably constitutes my ideal working day? A shame that writing while knitting is a complete impossibility. . . . or is it?

Pattern: Bolero Jacket, Debbie Bliss “Simply Soft”
Needles: 5mm (for ribs) and 5.5 mm
Yarn: Teo’s handspun cashmere, 450g.

what is this untidy looking fabric bundle?

its a fold-away grocery bag!

ahem.

I liked the wee pouch in this simple pattern, which can be found over at Burda. They suggest just overcasting the edges, but I added some binding too. The fabric is very sturdy furnishing stuff bought at Abakhan in Manchester at the end of last summer. I knocked it up very quickly.
It is a lovely, sunny Sunday morning.
That is all.

I nipped out this lunchtime to visit the Edinburgh Quilt Show. I spent quite a bit of time with the themed exhibitions, among which I saw several quilts, all of them nice variations on the same sampler design, made by students of Mandy Shaw.

This is how these quilts were described:

I confess I was rather puzzled by this. For starters, 2007 did not mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, but rather the bicentennial of the British government’s abolition of the slave trade. Slavery itself persisted in the British colonies until 1833, and was not abolished by the United States until 1865. And there were other anomalies to puzzle over as well. Here were quilts, made by British quilters, commemorating the moment when the British government decided to stop exchanging human beings as commodities. Yet these quilts were not about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade at all, but apparently told the story of Harriet Tubman, an African-American woman rightly famous for her political activities and work with the ante-bellum underground railroad. So the quilts did not actually commemorate Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807, but were rather about a moment and a culture four thousand miles and half a century away.

I noticed (and was disappointed by) a similar sort of historical mis-quilting, in the TAFF quilt exhibited in various venues last year:

This quilt is an amazing — and deeply moving — collaborative achievement. It carefully and beautifully documents the geography of the Atlantic Triangle and the conditions on board slave ships; explores several different ways of claiming and representing historical African identites, and accurately illustrates the activities of black and white British abolitionists. But while a block on the left meticuloulsly reproduces the text of the 1807 act to abolish the slave trade, an identificatory block on the right wrongly associates the quilt with the “200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery”

The TAFF quilt simply made one factual error — an error which I have noticed being corrected in depictions of the quilt in recent magazines. But the mis-quilting in the “Harriet Tubman” quilts I saw today was more worrying, and, I have to say, more pernicious as well. For it is not simply a case of a minor historical inacuracy — an inaccuracy that one might excuse as understandable given the (often confusing) ways that the bicentennial was ‘officially’ celebrated in Britain last year. Rather, associating Harriet Tubman with the abolition of the slave trade is incredibly misleading, and in fact performs a certain harm to the memory of both the important African-American woman and the long-overdue British parliamentary act. It is the same kind of wrongful harm that, in a recent edition, illustrates the narrative of Harriet Jacobs with the portrait of Phillis Wheatley — two completely different, completely unrelated, African-American women writers.

In illustrating the work of one woman with the portrait of another, this bizarre book cover has the effect of suggesting that black women writers are somehow interchangeable, that they all, in essence, tell the same story — the terrible story of Slavery with a capital S. But while they may both be women of colour, a hundred years, very different experiences of slavery, and a whole aesthetic world divides Wheatley from Jacobs, just as the Atlantic ocean and a completely different abolitionist culture divides Harriet Tubman from the British parliamentary act of 1807.

I don’t doubt the good intentions of Mandy Shaw and her students in making these quilts. But, particularly at this moment when the associations of quilts and slavery are so contested and so controversial**, one really has to ask oneself what political work these quilts are doing. It is simply not OK to remember one thing (the abolition of the slave trade) while actually remembering another (Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad). Rather than forming (as I’m sure they were intended to do) a thoughtful and powerful act of historical commemoration, these quilts are actually disguising history, falsely covering it over, neatly wrapping it up rather than bringing it to light. And in doing so, they add another quiet, but nonetheless significant act of falsificatory violence to slavery’s numerous, different, and particular violent histories. The textile practices of a specific cultural and historical moment are here wrongly appropriated in the service of the wrong story. At least the TAFF quilt was trying to tell it like it is. But these quilts — in a manner dangerously sentimental as well as historically misleading — do a disservice to contemporary quilting practice by telling it like it never was.

** For a careful and thorough account of the racial politics of contemporary quilt scholarship, see Shelly Zegart’s article “Myth and Methodology,” in Selvedge (January 2008).

East Linton is finished.

I am very pleased with it indeed.

Apologies for this next shot, in which I appear to be thanking the god of felted tweed . . .

. . . but you do get to see more of the yoke and the neckline.

I really like knitted dresses, but, like a lot of people, was concerned about knitting a garment with a tendency to hang and sag. For example, I thought Rannoch in Rowan 42 looked amazing. I was considering making it, but then saw a baggy and badly fitting version worn by a disgruntled model at the Knitting and Stitching Show, and had second thoughts.

Still looks lovely pictured up there on Rannoch moor, though.

The problem with this dress when I saw it, it seemed to me, was that it was worked in an un-springy yarn (kid classic), at a loose-ish gauge, and it drooped simply because there was an awful lot of it. Or perhaps it was just too big for the miniature model who wore it. In any case, I decided that my dress would have less skirt, and hence less droop; would be worked at a tight gauge; and would be reasonably close fitting. I knitted the felted tweed at 6-and-a-bit stitches to the inch. This has produced a nice firm fabric. I was brave with the fit, and worked the sleeves and the body at a size smaller than usual, with hardly any intended ease. The result was a slim fitting, not-at-all droopy dress.

As well as the East Linton landscape, I must also acknowledge the influence of Lene’s nocturne in the dress’s design. This lovely sweater was knit in a yarn I’ve never encountered but which, in its combination of alpaca and viscose, seems quite similar to felted tweed. I loved the muted palate of nocturne, and its stripey sleeves.

The design is based on EZ’s seamless yoke, with help from Ann Budd with the sizing, and Barbara Walker with the shaping. It has a turned hem, for stability, and picot edging at the neck and sleeves. It uses 6 colours of felted tweed - whose yardage really is pretty amazing. It took under 4 balls of the main colour, and there is over a third of each ball of the contrasting stripe colours remaining. Perhaps I could make matching stockings. But then I really would look utterly ridiculous.

Anyway, I love this dress. It is warm, a great fit, and really easy to wear. It took a whole lot of relentless stockinette, but, oddly, I’ve found knitting it quite comforting over the past few weeks. I also find it incredibly evocative of the landscape of East Lothian, and, weirdly, its light as well. But this is probably just me. I now realise, however, that this is the fourth time in less than six months that I’ve made myself a seamless yoked garment. Does this count as an EZ addiction? Time to move onto something new.

The lads and I just wanted to say thanks for your good wishes and messages of support. They have been very touched by all of your comments. Making Belle’s quilts is going to be difficult, though worthwhile, and I’ll post about the process over the coming weeks.
thanks everyone x

I am wary of posting about something so painful and personal, but feel it is important, so here goes.

A few weeks ago, my mother-in-law died. Her death was unexpected, very sudden, and very sad indeed. Belle was only 64, was looking forward to retiring, and, in fact, would have done so this week. She worked as a cleaner at a local school until the day she died.

Belle was a warm, generous, funny, and truly lovely woman.

Losing Belle is utterly awful, and especially so for her three sons.

There have been many painful moments over the past few weeks, but some of the most difficult and emotional have concerned Belle’s things. I am sure anyone who has lost someone knows exactly what I mean. In all the stuff she had around her, Belle is very vividly present and her presence in these material things makes her absence all the more powerful and terrible. She is there in the chance placing of objects all over her house — the scribbled note of train times; the pebble she kept in her handbag as a souvenir from Malta; the hyacinth now sprouting on the kitchen window sill. Every new discovery of an object in which her hands, her actions, are apparent deals another blow. And somehow it is the smallest things — the things that seem most incidental and unimportant — that are the worst of all. A swimming costume still damp in a bag in her car; a forgotten earring left on a bookshelf; a pair of gloves hastily placed in a pocket against the cold.

The shock of the materiality of Belle — of her presence in her absence — was particularly hard when preparing the outfit that she was laid out in. We selected a beautiful suit — one she had recently worn at a wedding — and I packed a case for her. Selecting her underwear, her cosmetics, the hair-rollers she referred to as her “space helmet”, I felt very much as if I was caring for her. But I would never have the opportunity to care for her again.

Belle’s was a very material life. Her job was hard and physical. At 64 she was still lugging around heavy bags of rubbish and scrubbing acres of school floors. She spent every day dealing with the stark materiality of other people’s mess. But she also liked to make things:

. . . and to make things grow

. . . and she was always a woman of style.

Yesterday, Belle’s sons and I began to sort through her lovely things. This was a task of terrible intimacy. It felt as if we were erasing Belle’s materiality, removing the her-ness of her from the rooms that she lived in. But we decided that instead of discarding all her stuff, we might make it into something new, and, in so doing, attempt to transform her loss into a material memory. So over the next few weeks, I shall be making three quilts — one for each of her sons — out of Belle’s clothes and her fabric.

Making is, of course, no sort of compensation for the material fact of Belle’s death, but I hope it will be an act of meaning and memory at least.

I just found this in the bathroom:

Perhaps Jesus (the cat) drew it himself. Or perhaps it is the work of another hand. Either way, I was distantly reminded of the story of the origin of painting, which, according to one popular myth, begins with portraiture and the Corinthian Maid’s tracing of human (rather than cat) features on a wall. I particularly like this depiction of the story by Joseph Wright of Derby (1782-4).

I really do. For about a month or so I have been knitting myself a tweedy dress. Because some knitted dresses seem to sag rather sadly, I am working it at a reasonably tight gauge and it has been taking a considerable time. But I am enjoying the slow process of the knitting because felted tweed is such a wonderful yarn to work with. There is just something inherently wintery about it. It is also ever so slightly nubbly, marvellously soft, and a dream on the needles. And the finished tweedy fabric is a lovely thing to behold. I have been very struck by it’s pleasing matt, velvety, and slightly hazy quality in the many examples of Eunny Chang’s tangled yoke that I’ve seen on ravelry recently.

Anyway, the body of my felted tweed dress is knit in plain greeny-grey stockinette, and the sleeves and yoke are coloured in stripes, like the furrowed coastal landscape of East Lothian which inspired it. Having found a stripe sequence I liked, I then realised this involved either working with six colours at once, and stranding ‘em in, or breaking the yarn and weaving in ends every few rows. Horrors! The colour work I’ve done before has generally involved using two shades simultaneously, with the addition of a different accent for maybe a row or two. Handling three balls of yarn is manageable and the weaving in of a few ends is not a particularly terrifying prospect. But six balls? Hundreds of ends? I am full of renewed respect for those who attempt complex intarsia patterns. They are made of stronger stuff than I.

I couldn’t face the ends, so decided to work with the six balls, stranding the colours in turn up the work as I went. To do this with minimum tangling, I devised The Kebab.

You see here the felted tweed kebab, and a half-finished sleeve. The balls are skewered on a fat 15mm needle, and are used in turn, moving from one end to the other. It’s a three-row sequence, and I’m knitting in the round, so I have to rotate the work anti-clockwise three times at the end of each stripe, to untwist the non-worked yarns, before returning the ball to it’s place on the skewer. The yarns not in use are stranded singly in turn up the work at the start of each round. They don’t bunch up or pucker, so this is working out fine. And best of all, the kebab is portable and can come with me on the train. As I say, this is the first time I’ve encountered this problem and I am intrigued by how other knitters solve it. Do they really weave in hundreds of ends? And what about working in several colours with a tangly mohair yarn? The mind boggles. . .

Here’s a quick pic of the finished blanket:

In the end I tied it — theres no batting to move around inside it and the test quilting I did looked completely pants on top of the pattern of the fabric, which is already quite busy. It looks better lying flat though, it has to be said. It is tied in the corners of each square with dark red wool, resembles a futon from the back, and is very, very cosy!