I is for Inspiration

How do you represent inspiration? as a letter? number? picture? symbol? What does inspiration actually mean, anyway? I’ve come across lots of books—and particularly knitting books—that invoke the words “inspired” or “inspirational” in their titles. Inspirational seems in that context to refer to something abstract, untouchable, awe-inspiring (there it is again!). For me, inspiration is spark. I devote a fair amount of thought to contemplating sources of inspiration and have a pretty one-sided view of it. I consider inspiration a central part of my motivation from day to day. And when I don’t allow myself to be inspired, I don’t get very far. But in this post, I’m thinking about what inspires me to knit and to allow my knitting to have a life of its own. I love to see great designs, but I like even better to make them work for me, which usually means taking inspiration from the visual world outside of knit stitches.

Everyone has particular preferences for images and ideas that give them great ideas. Some people react creatively to songs, poems, news, even emotions. My creative switch gets activated by visual stimulation—flora, color, moss, geological formations, water—and by very old, well-crafted things. Here are a few examples.


Inspiration-seeking project
Another great source of inspiration is raw materials. A really great yarn is often the spark that ignites the idea fire. A couple of weeks ago I was in New York City (not usually a place to find nature or old things) and had the opportunity to go to Habu Textiles (storeroom, right), unfortunately only about ten minutes before they closed for the day. This place is astounding; it’s full of all kinds of material for knitting (and, of course, for other fiber arts), from spun stainless steel to paper (yes, knittable paper) to raw silk roving. With little time to look closely for the perfect project materials, I took advantage of their grab bags to get a great little bag full of extraordinary fibers. I don’t know precisely what they are, but oh, how tasty!

To the best of my flawed fiber-detection ability, the yarns are:
* pink & purple space-dyed, lace-weight mohair/silk blend
* black slubbed nylon
* gray lace-weight merino
* magenta cotton ribbon
* silver crimped acetate
* black lace-weight mohair







I also bought a skein (?) of raw ramie. I tried to knit with it, but it was a bit too fine—sort of like knitting with hair. It’s really better on its own, but I’ll give it another try soon. It calls to me the way birds’ nests do. Maybe I’ll make a nest.


I’m trying to combine as many of these disparate fibers as I can into one wearable project: a fairly simple scarf, to allow the fibers to shine. It is very, very light and airy, and I chose an eyelet pattern in keeping with the “I” theme. It is so lightweight, in fact, that it’s hard sometimes to feel anything but the weight of the needles. I tried using three or four different yarns together, but they really seemed to muddle in combination. I’ll post pictures of the finished project, but for now, I’m just really enjoying the touch & the cloudiness of it all.

Inspiration(al) Bib (some of which I have previously listed)

• Gaughan, Norah. Knitting Nature: 39 Designs Inspired by Patterns in Nature (Stewart, Tabori and Chang Craft/Melanie Falick Books, 2006)
• Gschwandtner, Sabrina. KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2007)
• Tellier-Loumagne, Françoise. The Art of Knitting: Inspirational Stitches, Textures, and Surfaces (Thames & Hudson, 2005)
• Moss, Jean. Sculptured knits : 48 Timely Designs Inspired by the Decorative Arts of the 20th Century (XRX Books, 1999)
• Lavold, Elsebeth. Viking Patterns for Knitting: Inspiration and Projects for Today’s Knitter (Trafalgar, 2000)

Inspiration(al) Blogs

• Colour Lovers, Inspiration category
• & as inspired by knitting
• Needle & Hook

Etc.

• Flickr pictures tagged with Habu + knitting
• as a slide show
• Habu Textiles Flickr group
• Habu Knitalong

•  

H is for History

There are so many kinds of history—social, economic, political, art—but what I want to explore is literally material history: a sweater’s history. I firmly believe that things—in this case, sweaters—have lives that evolve and that their experiences leave legible traces. Their real meaning changes along with them as they lead valued lives. This particular excursion is inspired by a book I bought last weekend: Annemor Sundbø’s Invisible Threads in Knitting (translated into English by Carol Huebscher Rhoades). It is itself a history—a charming history of Norwegian knitting and cultural traditions—but it also explores garments and their individual histories. Sundbø owned a wool recycling factory in Norway, and saved countless mittens, socks and sweaters from the shredding machine. Each piece of knitting had been made lovingly by hand, then re-fashioned into new garments. Socks and sweaters that had begun to unravel were re-made into mittens, slippers, even underwear, and when they finally reached the end of their useful lives, were consigned to the wool stripper to become shoddy, and to be made into batting for comforters.

Somehow, it’s easier to let go of a machine-made sweater than it is to give away a handmade one (particularly when you know or are the person who made it!). We live in a society that discards useful things quite readily; which I suppose makes those things made by our friends’ and our own hands seem so much more valuable. It’s nice to know that something useful can be treasured and renewed in this purge-happy culture. It seems rather important to hold onto the belief that something made by hand should not be jettisoned.

I suppose I’ve always believed that the lives of objects are not static. One of my favorite stories as a child was Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” (1838), in which a tin soldier falls from a window; is discovered in the street, placed in a paper boat and set afloat; finds himself in a gutter; is swallowed by a fish; returns home inside the fish and is rediscovered by the family cook; is summarily cast into a fire, where he melts alongside his paper ballerina love; together they form the shape of a heart. A translation can be found here. Very poignant, and probably much more sophisticated than my young mind was able to appreciate, but I so sympathized with the soldier; I had no trouble at all imagining him as animate.

So now I want to explore the life of one of my early knitting attempts, and consider what new life it might now assume. My first attempt at color knitting was a Kaffee Fassett pattern, which I was seriously under-equipped to master, but having supreme confidence and not knowing any better, I dove in headlong. I had fallen in love with the yarn on a trip to England and this seemed like a great way to showcase it. It was a mess: I ran out of that lovely yarn; the sweater was thick enough to insulate a house; the wrong side looked like a child’s pot holder. I could never have worn it. So I cut it up and made it into pillows. I still have a bit left (see above), which I think will make a nice felted tea cozy.

But that’s not the sweater I want to explore. It was—is—Annabel Fox’s pattern, Mosaic Cardigan, which I believe was published by Rowan around 1990, and it was my next attempt at color knitting. But the important point for this story is that it was a pattern I had chosen for myself. I had scraped together the money to buy the yarn (not easy for a grad student!), and really looked forward to wearing it. When I finished knitting the pieces, it was enormous; looked more like a huge sack than a cardigan. It was more or less the right length, but my gauge had been tremendously loose and produced a very wide overcoat. Still, I loved the design motif and colors and even found the perfect pewter buttons. Since I am a complete failure when it comes to sewing, my dear sister-in-law agreed to help me cut the cardigan down to a smaller size and stitch the pieces together on a machine. This operation was quite effective and although the cardigan was still roomy, it was certainly wearable. About two minutes after I had decided that I could really enjoy wearing this imperfect sweater, my father came along and admired it. Then he tried it on. Not only did it fit him perfectly, it looked great on him. Really great. His silver hair really set off the colors and he clearly loved it. How could I refuse him? I didn’t. It was clear that the cardigan had found its right home. He wore it all the time, and took great pleasure in it.

When he died a few years later, my mother gave it back to me, quite holey and its pockets full of cookie crumbs. I haven’t been able to bring myself to wear it, but I love thinking about how happy it made us both. I think the time has now come to give it a new life. So I’m taking a lesson from Annemor’s book and am contemplating its new life: pillows again, I think, or some kind of a lap rug. It needs to be a more visible feature of my daily life. And I don’t want to wear it because it was his. And I don’t want to felt it because I want to recognize it as his.

I looked long & hard on the web to find traces of Annabel Fox’s mosaic cardigan pattern, and discovered that someone else had blogged about it, and had similar plans to “re-purpose” it.

More Annemor(e):

• Sundbø, Annemor. Invisible Threads in Knitting (Kristiansand, Norway : Torridal Tweed, 2007)
• Review of the book from the store where I bought it.
• Annemor’s web site
• Apparently, Invisible Threads won a major Norwegian literature prize in 2006.
• Some of Annemor’s patterns can be found in Terri Shea’s book, Selbuvotter: Biography of a Knitting Tradition (Seattle, Wash. : Spinningwheel LLC, 2007)
• Terri Shea’s web site

Annemor has written two other books

• Sundbø, Annemor. Setesdal Sweaters: The History of the Norwegian Lice Pattern (Kristiansand : Torridal Tweed, 2001). Translated by Amy Lightfoot.
• Sundbø, Annemor. Everyday Knitting: Treasures from a Rag Pile (Kristiansand : Torridal Tweed, 2000). Translated by Amy Lightfoot.

Recycling & Knitting

• Recycling Sweaters for Yarn (Dawn’s My Virtual Sanity Blog)
• Recycled Yarn Tutorial, by Ashley Martin
• Judy Furlong, “Knits Unravelled: Reuse, Recycle or Re-knit?” a guide, in Knitting Magazine (Issue 48, March 2008): 32-35.
  
• Images in Flickr tagged with Knitting + Recycled
• or as a slideshow

G is for Gansey

The gansey is such a paradigm for knitters. It is the ursweater. A fisherman’s garment, it was as essential to fishing life as nets, hooks, even boats. You don’t say “gansey sweater,” just “gansey.” Its simple name conveys at once its nature, history, design, construction, and use. Gansey, apparently, is a Scottish version of guernsey. The OED gives the first published version of the word as 1886, in J. J. H. Burgess’s Shetland Sketches: “He rubbit aff da shute wi’ da sleeve o’ his gansey.” By 1922, the word was so well known that Joyce used it in Ulysses to describe Bloom’s fantasy through his fashion sense: “In workman’s corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap.” Gansey is certainly also a version of the word guernsey, from the name of a famous Channel island, and is likewise used to describe the guernsey shirt.

The most famous ganseys come from the Yorkshire coast: Filey, Scarborough, Whitby, but were also made extensively in East Anglia, especially Sheringham. Frank Meadow Sutcliffe devoted much of his career as a photographer to the fisherfolk of Whitby, and his nineteenth-century images feature a kaleidoscope of ganseys in action. In addition to the many pictures of fishermen at work, Sutcliffe also took some wonderful portraits that offer us some great close-ups of gansey designs. His works are still within copyright, since he died in 1941, so I can’t post any, but several are available elsewhere online (see below).

What makes the gansey so fascinating to knitters (at least to this one) is its construction. Full of challenging and interest-grabbing techniques from the get-go, the gansey begins with the Channel Island cast-on, incorporates side welts, textured pattern blocks, underarm and neck gussets, and shoulder-to-cuff sleeves into an all-in-one knit unit. Most of the features have very practical purposes: cast-on edges are strong, underarm gussets allow much more freedom to move (and haul in nets!), raveled sleeves can be re-knit from the cuff (where they get most wear), and because they are a solid color, there are no fussy ends to darn in. I love the thought that a fisherman could repair his own sleeves (by the way: don’t miss Sarah Orne Jewett’s story, “Along Shore,” from Country of the Pointed Firs; there’s a wonderful scene of an old fisherman knitting a sock—not British, perhaps, but still charming).

My favorite gansey tradition, not suprisingly, is the practice of knitting the wearer’s initials into the otherwise plain area towards the bottom of the sweater. Texture in ganseys is achieved almost entirely through knit-purl combinations or through judicious use of relatively small cables. It is often suggested that particular towns developed very specific and identifiable combinations of textured patterns, so that one could identify a fisherman’s home town simply by looking carefully at what he was wearing.

I’ve only knit one gansey, and it was for my very dear nephew whose name conveniently begins with G. I chose Beth Brown-Reinsel’s pattern, snakes & ladders, as I thought the recipient would appreciate the snaking cables and color, which he certainly did. His little sister, who fits it perfectly now, would prefer pink and ponies, but I can’t quite bring myself to do that. I’d love to make a proper gansey at the fine gauge (9 stitches per inch) and in some of the lovely 5-ply, high-twist gansey yarn that is available now on the market. The yarn knit at that gauge makes all those textured stitches stand up and shout. The problem is that it really hurts my hands, so I’ve never really progressed further than swatching (above). So a child’s sweater at a slightly more manageable 6 stitches per inch is probably the closest I’ll get for some time. Except that, now that I think of it, perhaps the pink princess might be willing to wear lavender hearts...


Frank Meadow Sutcliffe

• Biography, from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• Australian Sutcliffe Gallery
• Official Sutcliffe Gallery
• Hiley, Michael. Frank Sutcliffe: Photographer of Whitby (London, Arts Council, 1974)

Flamborough Marine, Ltd. History of the Gansey

Shetland Museum & Archives (thanks, Ruth!)

Guernsey Yarn’s general directions for knitting a “guernsey” sweater

British Gansey yarn available in US

• Friends of Wool
• Schoolhouse Press
• Wooly West

Beth Brown-Reinsel Gansey workshops


Gansey Bib

• Brown-Reinsel, Beth. Knitting Ganseys (Interweave Press, 1993)
  
• Starmore, Alice. Fisherman’s Sweaters (Trafalgar Square, 1993)
  
• Thompson, Gladys. Patterns for Jerseys, Guernseys, and Arans (Dover, 1971)
  

Gansey Patterns

• Beth Brown-Reinsel Ganseys, especially “At Sea,” from Knitting in America
• Bosch, Ann, “Lighthouse Gansey” pattern from Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill
• Bunny Hop Gansey (Crystal Palace Yarns)

Images tagged gansey in Flickr

(or as a slideshow)