congrats

It’s Dollheid prize time! Congratulations to ten randomly-selected commenters: Celia, Luisa, Arndis, Lillicroche, Yulian, Maaike, Lizzi, Pat (J) and two Marias (one German, one Canadian) to whom I’ve just emailed a copy of the pattern. And thanks for all your comments, everyone, which I enjoyed reading: I was thrilled to discover that dollheid translates into Dutch as ‘frolicky madness’, and particularly liked Kristi’s tale of her psychedelic dream knitting — a phenomenon strangely familiar to those of us who Dream in Wool.

For those of you who are interested, here’s a little more about the design. The shaping is that of a traditional tam, but with a greater number of crown-points than is usual (eighteen dolls = eighteen points of decrease). I began with stitches to fit an average head circumference of 21 inches (those with very wee heads might knit the edging on a 2.5mm rather than a 3mm needle). The brim edging is worked in corrugated rib, and then stitches are increased rapidly to the finished diameter. Despite the relatively long areas of colourwork, I didn’t weave my strands at all — and found that the yarn stabilised quickly at the back of the work (warning: this will only work with a very even tension and a pure-wool yarn!). My finished dollheid is ten inches wide and eight inches deep – a roomy fit that would enable you to wear this tam in a slouchy fashion on the back of your head, as well as pulled down over your ear-tops (as I like it). Knitting towards the top of the crown, paired decreases are worked in the spaces between the dolls, and then in corresponding sets up through the crown pattern, until three stitches remain, which are finished as an i-cord stalk. Finally, I blocked the tam by pinning it out — rather than stretching it over a plate. This is simply because I find that putting a tam onto a plate over-stretches the ribbing, and I like my ribbing to stay as ribby as possible.

Well, dollheid is now “live” and if you are interested in the pattern, you can find it here or here. But I want to conclude this post with another congratulations — to Tom, who ran the Islay half marathon on Saturday in a speedy personal best.

Look at him go! More about our weekend on Islay shortly.

dollheid – prize draw!

Its amazing what a wee break from the daily commute can do to one’s all-round productivity. I’m happily working on several research projects at the moment, as I always do at this time of year, but I am also finding the spare time and energy to devote to designing. Can I just say how much I am enjoying it? Well, I really am. Here is the first of several forthcoming colourwork designs: Dollheid. Heid (pronounced heed) is a colloquial term for head in these parts, and the dolls are self-explanatory. Here is my heid in its dollheid:

Despite the expression, let me assure you that I love this tam deeply. I knit two other prototypes in different yarn, trying out different shaping methods, before this one was finished. With this incarnation – size, shaping, yarn, colour – I am totally and completely happy. I love the dusky tones of the yarn, and also love the way the yarn behaves. There’s no need for me to tell you how I feel about Shetland, but it really is the best stuff for stranded colourwork, and the Jamiesons relaxes and blooms really beautifully after blocking.

You will see that I have taken many of the design features of the paper dolls sweater — peeries, i-cord cast on, corrugated rib — and have incorporated them into the tam. All these things worked really well. Another thing I am pleased about is the way that the dolls have achieved a sort of geometric integrity quite apart from any representational qualities they may have. (Um, did I really just write that sentence? Lets try again:) What I mean is that one of the reasons they look so pleasing is that, when arranged in a circle around the crown of the tam, they suggest one abstract shape as well as eighteen dolls.

(Norah Gaughan writes about this geometric arrangement gubbins far better than I can). Anyhow, after some enjoyable wrestling with illustrator (one can produce such deluxe charts if one works at it! I’m amazed!) I am happy to report the pattern is just about finished (hurrah!), and I will release it on Monday. But before I do, I wanted to say a small thanks to all of you — for your encouragement and support of my designs — and I thought I’d give away ten copies of the pattern to ten commenters on this post. So, if you are interested in a free copy of the dollheid pattern, just leave a comment here, and I’ll pick the winners at random on Monday morning, August 3rd (my time) before I put the pattern up for sale.

Pattern: dollheid (by me)
Yarn: Jamieson’s shetland spindrift (25g Mooskit, 25g Peony, 25g Old Rose)
Needles: 3mm circs
Ravelled here

paper dolls

I’m glad the early mornings are becoming lighter, otherwise I (or rather, Tom) wouldn’t have been able to take these speedily snapped shots of my new sweater. Spring is definitely on its way . . .

Did I mention that, undoubted tweeness notwithstanding, I heart this sweater? I love the velvety braf yarn (particularly the semi-solid pale blue colourway I used for the corrugated rib). I love the ridiculous dancing doll figures (a modified version of a chart in the 1950 edition of my trusty Odham’s Encyclopedia of Knitting). I love the icord edging (O the wonder of producing that edge from those three knit stitches!). I love the light feel of the sweater (the yardage of bowmont braf is pretty amazing — even with the doubled-layers of the stranding and corrugated rib, this sweater weighs just 160 grams); I love the colourwork (wot fun it is) and, well, you probably know already that I love anything with a yoke. . .

In fact, the only shortcoming of this sweater (for me at least) is that there are a couple of places where my blue weaves show slightly through the cream fabric on the front. The legs of the dolls are 11 stitches apart — too far to carry the yarn — but if I knit the yoke again, I think I may manage to avoid this by alternating the spots where I place the weaves, rather than stacking them up (silly me). Still, I am really pleased with the general structure of the yoke, and with the effect of the colourwork overall.

The basic design of the yoke is a bit like the owl sweater, in that there are no decreases until 4 inches have been worked. But the back of the neck (which you can see here) is more structured and shaped than the owls, using a gazillion short rows, which I have hopefully calculated correctly. There is also some gentle waist shaping, but no bust darts. I am going to wear this lots this Spring! Now I just have to write up the pattern. . . .

Pattern: Paper Dolls (by me)
Yarn: Bowmont braf 4 ply in natural, indigo, and ‘ocean mist’
Needles: 3mm circ
Ravelled here

Oh, and here’s some obligatory throwing of shapes. . . .

EDIT! Pattern is now available here

twee

twee, a. Now only in depreciatory use: affectedly dainty or quaint.
(Oxford English Dictionary)

I’ve just knitted something that is undoubtedly, incredibly twee. But I am really hoping it falls on twee’s acceptable side. Because however “affectedly quaint” it is, I love it! I have had a serious thing about patterns that feature repeating figures since I bought this fabric last year . . .

These Madeiran dancers look like paper dolls to me. And there’s just something about the flatness, and the repeating geometry of paper dolls that I find incredibly pleasing. And as with all dolls, there’s also something a little bit sinister about them too. They have a clone-like quality, as well as the suggestive potential of repetition, self-generation, usurpation . . . like those unruly brooms in the Sorcerers Apprentice. . . .

. . . Anyway, I was unable to resist incorporating a string of paper dolls into the new sweater I’ve now made for Spring. Given my current fondness for — nay, obsession with — Bowmont Braf and stranded colourwork, this sweater features both. It is also finished with corrugated rib (I love it!) and lots and lots of icord. Since I made those fiddlehead mittens I have developed something dangerously close to an addiction to icord — it produces such a neat edge! I just had to use it for every cast-on and bind-off.

The sweater is blocking now, but I couldn’t resist showing you a quick peek before I put it on and (no doubt) run about in it, throwing some foolish shapes:

This really is one of those instances where knitting makes me stupidly happy. Clearly I have also been bitten by the designing bug, as I thought I’d write this up into a pattern to fit anyone from 4 years old to full-grown woman, who doesn’t mind sporting something just a wee bit twee.

Annie’s room

If you’ll excuse some trumpet-blowin for a moment, I have a piece in the current issue of Selvedge about the doll-art of Tabitha Moses. I find Tabitha’s work incredibly suggestive for many reasons, especially her thoughtful engagement with stitch as both process and mark. I urge anyone who’s interested to have a look at the catalogue from her superb exhibition at Bolton Museum, The Lost and the Found, in which Alexandra Wolcowicz’s photography goes some way toward capturing the powerful effect of objects like ‘Untitled’ (2006).

Anyway, in the course of researching the piece, I rediscovered Annie’s room. For those of you who do not know, Annie’s room is a talking point of the Edinburgh attraction Mary King’s Close, which has opened up the fascinating world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century streets hidden beneath the Royal Mile. Many tourist attractions in Scotland seem to feature a wee Annie as a matter of course, but this particular Annie is particularly interesting. In 1992, just after the rediscovery of Edinburgh’s hidden city-beneath-the-city, Japanese psychic, Aiko Gibo, visited a tenement in Mary King’s Close and in one room reportedly felt the tugging hands of a girl abandoned there to die in a plague year. Gibo comforted the restless ghost with a tiny tartan doll, leaving her a curiously nationalist playmate.

(The doll originally left in Annie’s room by Aiko Gibo)

Since then, numerous visitors to what quickly became known as Annie’s room have done the same. While the original doll is now dusty and showing signs of age, she has been joined over the years by hundreds of new companions. There are Barbies and beanie-babies and several Raggedy-Anns. Stuffed animals jostle alongside plastic infants; painted wooden soldiers smile up at porcelain princesses.

(miscellaneous gifts in Annie’s Room)

As well as toys, visitors also leave money for Annie (which is charitably donated by Mary King’s Close, and which, in the last year alone raised a staggering ten-thousand pounds for the Edinburgh Sick Kids Hospital). So what are we to make of this shrine, this spontaneous memorial to the ghost of a girl no-one remembers? Are we moved or repelled by Annie’s room?

When, as a tourist myself several years ago, I first visited Annie’s room, I remember that I was most definitely repelled. The shrine seemed completely grotesque to me. Lying in that cold tenement for a decade or more, some of the toys had taken on the appearance of textile objects abandoned at a landfill site. They were ugly things, making an interesting space, an historic site, ugly too. And my immediate reaction to the story behind the shrine was to regard it as a laughable testimony to a ludicrous superstition. I have no truck with ghosts or saints, a world beyond or an after-life, and the impulse that would lead someone to leave a commemorative object for the ghost of a child who probably never existed seemed to me odd and incomprehensible. Why even bother?

But when I recently enountered Annie’s room again, I discovered that my reactions had completely changed. I’m certainly not saying I suddenly believed in Annie’s ghost, or even that I found anything remotely admirable or appealling in the strongly-held belief that a ghost innhabits that room. I still think that’s all superstitious nonsense. I also continued to find the shrine ugly, both as object and as space. But even though I do not really understand the motive for the placing of the objects, there seems to me now to be something particpatory, celebratory, even radical about Annie’s room. It is a spontaneous act of commemoration, a popular and populist and incredibly democratic act of making in which everyone might play a part. Annie’s room is perhaps folk art at its best, a thing in process, an object in a constant state of becoming, being made and re-made anew every time another visitor adds their contribution. The whole ghost business now seemed weirdly incidental. . .

(the shrine)

. . . and what’s interesting when one begins to look closely at the piled-up array of gifts in that dark tenement is their many different associations. Some have been left with evident care (a pricey bébé) others with apparent thoughtlessness (a screen wipe). So many of Annie’s toys seem just misplaced or random: plastic binoculars, a Westlife CD, an enormous grinning bear. Together, though, these things have transformed a space that is supposed to be terribly spooky and lent it a spectacular ordinariness. Annie’s room has a materiality in which there is a pathos that exceeds, or defies, the uncanny. Like the dolls of Tabitha Moses, the toys in Annie’s room are, in the end just part of the everyday world of things.

(thanks to Lisa Helsby of Mary King’s Close for the tour and the chat)