One Plain, One Fancy

Last month I wrote a piece for Lion Brand Yarns that mentioned an almost century-old pattern that I've had my eye on. This is it:



Look at that collar. Gorgeous, and perfectly practical for a pencil-neck like me who is prone to agonies of stiffness if I get even a whisper of draught down my back. I saw it, I want it, I'm going to make it.

Mind you, I'm going to change it. It's too long, for starters. As written,* it would hang to halfway down my thigh. Not pretty. I'm adding shaping in the torso, too–a taper from chest to waist.

It'll be gentle taper, because a sweater like this is meant to be a smidge loose. You put it on at home, in your study, when you've finally taken off your jacket and loosened your tie.  It's not for the office. It's for quiet solitude. However, should somebody drop in on my solitude, I'd rather not have it hang on me like I'm wearing daddy's old bathrobe.

So, the Product Knitter within wanted to knit the sweater in order to wear the sweater. The Process Knitter within–which is dominant–wanted to try out the pockets.

Here's a shot of one pocket.



As you can see, not much else happening for acres and acres of stockinette but that pocket. Marvelously smooth opening, no?

You make it by knitting to the point at which you want your pocket opening to lie. Then–without breaking the working yarn–you work only on the stitches that will form the interior of the pocket, knitting and purling back and forth on them until you have a strip that's twice the intended depth of the pocket.

Then you line up the live stitches of this strip with the live stitches you left sitting on your needle and–again, without breaking the working yarn–resume knitting across all your stitches. The strip, now folded in half, forms the interior of the pocket. It's very neat, and just requires seams up the sides when the piece is finished.

Here it is in hasty scribble form.



And here's what the actual pocket (finished except for side seams) looks like from the wrong side.



I like it. The opening is, of course, seamless. The method is straightforward. You must plan for your pockets in advance, of course–so the devil-may-care atttiude I enjoy when putting in afterthought pockets is replaced by the smug satisfaction of knowing that part of the work is done, and I can just motor on toward the front-and-back shaping.

The yarn is proving to be a perfect choice–LB Collection Organic Wool. It's soft (without being so namby-pamby that it'll start to pill before the sweater is complete), it's springy, it's cuddly as a puppy wrapped in polar fleece, and the rustic texture is a welcome accent for a piece that's otherwise so plain.

Really, really curious about the collar, since to be blunt I haven't the faintest idea of how it's going to work after reading the pattern fifty times. Sometimes you just have to buckle on the parachute and jump.

How I Got This Way

Speaking of Lion Brand, the most recent essay I wrote for them–"Inheritance"–talks about creativity running in families–though often your creative family tree will include folks who aren't necessarily blood relations. I enjoyed writing (and drawing) this one...and my mother left a comment. That was a good day.

Turning Weaving Into Knitting

Quick update on the bag that card weaver John Mullarkey and I are collaborating on, using HiKoo CoBaSi. John sent along four band designs to choose from. He'll use the band as the basis for the strap.



I settled on the second from the top. What he wove, I'm going to try to interpret (not necessarily copy) in knitting for the body of the bag. Joy of joys, it's swatch time! I'm thinking mosaic might be the way to go, for the highly scientific reason that I've never tried it and it looks interesting. But first, we chart.

More to come.

*If you want it, the pattern is in the facsimile edition of the 1916 Lion Yarn Book that is available here. Facsimile means it's an unaltered copy of the original–so you'd be working from the period pattern, just as I am.

Baby Got Back

I don't know if you'll have missed me, but I sure missed you.

It's been some couple of months, kids. Between work (happily, lots of it) and family tragedy (sadly, lots of it) something had to give; and ultimately the something was the blog.

Dwelling on the past isn't much fun. Dwelling on knitting is. Let us commence to dwell.

During the hiatus I turned out some fun stuff. There was this early twentieth century Uhlan Cap for the Deep Fall 2012 issue of Knitty.com,



In the same issue, I consulted with Mercedes Tarasovich-Clark on the design of this sweater, Shoreside,



which was based on the Edwardian Child's Middy Jumper from the previous issue. (My friend Abigail agreed to serve as an appropriately aristocratic and languid model for the photographs.)

I started writing a monthly column with cartoon for the Lion Brand Yarns newsletter, which has been giddy fun as they let me run amok on the page. You can see the first four installments in the archives here, here, here, and here.

And there was a whole lot of teaching, which meant time with knitters. Even at my lowest, time with knitters was wonderful. Knitters, they are good people. Knitters know how to comfort and knitters know how to laugh.

There wasn't much time for personal knitting. Just one small piece. A friend of mine–she lives just across the alley–has had a baby. Her first. She is three things–a friend, a good person, and a knitter–which meant she was eligible for a knitted gift. The only question was what to make.

Hat? No. Too simple. This is the woman who showed up, after my grandmother died, with a home-baked pie and a gallon of coordinating artisanal ice cream. She baked me a pie when she was eight months pregnant. She gets more than a hat.

Blanket? No. Not enough time; and even a baby blanket takes up a lot of room while you're working on it. I've spent most of the time since that entry in July away from home, traveling. I needed something portable.

Sweater? Bingo. Interesting, substantial, portable. But designing something was out of the question, so I needed to pick somebody else's pattern.

That's when the postman arrived with a large, heavy packet covered in British stamps and smelling excitingly, even through the wrapper, of old paper. A kind reader in England had decided to send over his collection of vintage British patterns, 1920-1960.

There are times, that being one of them, when the only thing to do is collapse on the settee and marvel at the kindness of relative strangers. The packet's arrival coincided exactly with my grandmother's final trip to the hospital, which was followed by an agony of watching and waiting as she slowly, slowly slipped away. I put the stack of patterns next to the bed and read them at night when I couldn't fall asleep. When I left home, I took a few with me to read on planes and in hotel rooms.

In booklet from Lister & Co. Knitting Wools, Ltd. of Bradford–which had lost its cover but looks to be from the late 40s or early 50s–I found the cardigan I wanted to make. I already had the wool to hand–dear, old St-Denis Nordique–and the classic style was a perfect match for mother's taste.

Here's the finished specimen.



I loved working it. It's flat, in pieces, sewn up–a method I am beginning to appreciate more and more. I'd never entirely give up working in the round, mind you, but there are occasions when seams are the better option. More about that in another entry.

The design had several nice grace notes–indicating a level of attention to detail that's often sadly lacking in modern baby patterns. For example, working the ribbing at the hem and cuffs with a smaller needle. Such a small thing, yet the result is a garment with a better shape and a more elegant finish.



Then there's the main stitch pattern. You think it's cables, right? Looks like little cables.



Well, it's not. It's an increase, plus a slipped stitch passed over–listen, if you want, I'll jot down the exact pattern in the next entry–and on the right side it ends up looking cabled. But on the wrong side, just check this out.



It looks like ribbing. Nice and neat. No weirdness. This stitch pattern is new to me, and I like it very much, and I think it has enormous potential.

On the other hand, there was also the usual rigmarole about button holes on one side for a girl and on the other side for a boy. That drives me batty. I am not a fan of shoving tiny kids into gender-specific clothing in the first place, and why infantine genitalia should have anything to do with buttonhole placement is beyond me.

Ultimately, after giving the pattern's honestly rather dismal two-row buttonholes a fair shake, I ripped back and decided on loops of I-cord.



I am painfully enamored with the buttons. Had an interesting time picking them out, though. I went to Vogue Fabrics in Evanston–a wonderful place, and I'm lucky to have it–because of their immense button selection. I was hunting around, finished sweater in hand, when I was accosted by the world's pushiest button salesman. The fellow absolutely would not leave me alone.

"What sort of button do you want?" he asked.

"I'll know it when I see it," I said.

"To go on that sweater?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Oh," he said. "Baby buttons are over here."

He indicated a wall of blue duckies, pink kitties, day-glo plastic daisies. You know, the usual. Fine in the right place, but not on this piece.

"No, thank you," I said. "I don't want baby buttons."

"But it's a baby sweater," he said.

"I know," I said, "but I don't want baby buttons on it."

"But they're real cute," he said.

"But I don't want them," I said.

"What kind of baby sweater has adult buttons on it?"

"This baby sweater will."

"You're not a father, are you?"

"No," I said. "I'm a mother."

Whereupon he disappeared, swiftly, into Ribbons and Trim.

Before I sign off, I have to show you a couple of photographs from the pattern book. I got all kinds of flack once for including a picture of a scowling baby in one of my Knitty columns–as though babies are born with fixed smiles on their faces, and to suggest otherwise is tantamount to child abuse. Seriously, people sent me hate mail for it.

It's true that modern baby models are usually sanitized to the point of inhumanity, but I don't care for the practice and refuse to cater to the Anne Geddes set.

I prefer the bébé vérité approach of the art department at Lister and Co. Knitting Wools, Ltd.  They showcased old-fashioned English infants who look, as they should have, like little Winston Churchills. The one who modeled the pattern that I knit was obviously having a fit of pique, unimpressed by the fuzzy toy the photographer's assistant was shaking at her.



However, there are limits. Had I been the editor, I would have drawn a blue pencil through this page, which includes what I dearly hope was an accidental juxtaposition of photograph and spot illustration (click to embiggen).



I giggled madly, I admit. But I would not have wanted to deal with the letters that followed.

How Green Was My Bottom

I must be spring, because Knitty says so. The new issue is up.

I'm ready for spring. We have had a shockingly mild winter in Chicago, by Chicago standards. Mild, in our case, means there have been multiple winter days during one has been able to step outside without bursting into tears which immediately freeze to the side of your face.

Listen, you want to know how crummy winter is in Chicago? Winter in Chicago is so crummy that when I told a bunch of Icelanders what our January is like, they gaped at me.

"No," said one of them. "I think we are not calculating this correctly."

I repeated our average January low, and he whipped out an iPhone to confirm the converstion from Farenheit to Celsius. There was a collective gasp.

"This is inhuman. This is like Greenland. How do you stand this?"

Yup. A typical Chicago winter is shockingly cold to people from  Iceland.

And please don't start in with the "Oh, but you can wear all your wonderful sweaters and hats and mittens and...". One of the reasons I love being a knitter is that making my own winter gear gives me a false but comforting sense of being in control of the season, but I hate, hate, hate being buried under 16 layers of clothing. Do you know 16 layers of clothing do to a short, broad man? Do you? They make him look like a laundry pile with boots, that's what.

When it's time to retire, kids, I'm moving to the desert and I'm never going to wear anything with a #@$*! sleeve on it, ever again.

So, as I was saying, this is a blog post about the Spring 2012 issue of Knitty.

My contribution is an antique pattern, as usual. Voilà.



It's a bag in the shape of a pineapple. Of course it is.

Pineapple purses were a bit of a fad for part of the 19th century, probably because the fruit–being tropical and therefore exotic–fit perfectly into a more general mania for All Things Oriental, with the "Orient," in this case, encompassing pretty much everything from Japan to North Africa.

One of the most pleasing things about knitting a pineapple is that it's like knitting cables. The whole world thinks you've pulled off the most amazing feat of virtuoso yarn-based legerdemain, when actually all you've done is have a whacking great time with a very bewitching pattern.

Believe it or not, there's more going on in a plain vanilla sock than there is in this pineapple. The whole thing is based on one stitch motif, 16 stitches wide. Once I got going, I absolutely flew through the leaves and the fruit.

Then came the bottom, which is written out thus in the original:

P6, A all around.

Plain, all around.

Repeat these two rounds till the bag is almost closed, then draw it together with a needle.

Translated, this means:

Round 1: (Knit 6, sl1-k2tog-psso) around.
Round 2: Knit.
Repeat rounds 1 and 2 until you have a bag instead of a tube.

But there's a wee hitch. You're starting out with 320 stitches, and the first round is asking you work a repeat of 9 stitches evenly around it.

320 divided by 9 = 35.555555555555556. For those of you non-knitters reading this,* that's a big negatory.

So what to do?

In this case, we have to find a way to close the bag that a) works and b) will be as close as possible to what Jane Gaugain intended.

However, we cannot call, text, e-mail, Tweet or otherwise harass Jane Gaugain to find out what she intended, because even the worms that devoured the worms that devoured her mortal body have long since gone to dust.

We cannot reverse-engineer from the picture, because there is no picture.

We can have a look at a few photographs of extant examples of pineapple bags, though frustratingly few show the bottom and all are obviously knit from patterns that, while similar to hers, are by no means identical.

And we can guess.

We can consider the practical requirements of a bag, such as that a flattish bottom will be more practical than a long, conical bottom.

We can consider the aesthetics of the bag, which is heavily sculpted for three-quarters of its surface and would probably look best with a bottom that matches.

So, we begin by listing theoretical solutions.

1. What if, instead of beginning with 320 stitches, we began with a near-ish number of stitches into which 9 would divide evenly?
2. What if the use of "A" (for the double decrease) in Round 1 is a typo? Did Jane mean to put in a T, her symbol for for k2tog? The repeat would take up 8 stitches, and 8 stitches does fit evenly into 320! Ooh!
3. What if the "6" in Round 1 is a typo? If we substitute a 5, the motif uses 8 stitches, and 8 stitches does fit evenly into 320! Ooh! Ooh!

With a little testing–by which I mean calculations that make my head hurt, followed by a great deal of knitting and then a great deal of ripping out–these three solutions proved unworkable. They all assume that there is some combination of plain stitches, followed by a decrease,  that will close up the bag in an attractive fashion.

As it turns out, no there isn't. Or if there is, somebody who is not trying to meet a Knitty deadline will have to find it. Some of the test-knits did begin to close up the bag, yes; but the closure looked like ass. (In this case, "ass" and "bottom" are not synonymous.) The math never worked, either. There always came a point at which the number of stitches in the repeat no longer fit evenly into the number of stitches remaining. Further adjustments could be made at that point, but it would have meant a set of decrease instructions so convoluted that they seemed way out of step with the succinct nature of the rest of the pattern.

Plus, did I mention it looked like ass?

The next option is drift further from Mrs G's two-round instructions. They look so elegant on the page–but if they don't work, they don't work. Hey, it happens. Then, as now, sometimes the instructions aren't just a little off, they're completely broken.

I decided to see what would happen if I had another shot at both Theory 2 and Theory 3–but instead of maintaining the same number of stitches between decreases, I'd have 1 (or 2, in the case of double decreases) fewer stitches between them in every decrease round. This is, of course, the common method for decreasing the tops of hats.

I started with Theory 2, and yup, the bag began to close. Slowly. Slooooowwwwwwwwllllyyy. I looked at the theoretical numbers again, counted the number of rounds they required, and realized I'd end up with a plain green cone, three inches deep, at the end of my pineapple. Not pretty, not practical, and way out of line with the look of the rest of the piece.

Rip.

Finally, Theory 3, plus consistently reducing the number of stitches between decreases, yielded this:



If that ain't what she meant, she's welcome to come back from the dead and tell me so. I love it.

I don't love her final finish, though, with the bunch of green silk satin ribbon.** That's coming off and I'm replacing it with a tassel–Lisa Souza's yardage in a hank of Sylvie is so generous that I have plenty left.

I may even knit a mini-pineapple with the leftovers. (It's easy. Pick a multiple of 16 as your cast-on and go for it.)

*I'm not fooling myself. There are no non-knitters reading about how to troubleshoot the decreases at the bottom of a pineapple. I know.

**I dyed that flippin' ribbon myself because it was hard enough just to find silk ribbon, let alone silk in a green that matched. I want extra credit for that, dammit.

Yeah, I'm Working on Another Column For Knitty

Dear Anonymous Nineteenth-Century Designer,

Often, as I wend my way through your patterns, I wonder who you were and where you lived.

I imagine what it would have been like to meet you face-to-face; and ponder what you might have tried to say to me as my fingers closed firmly around your throat to choke the life out of you.

Love,
Franklin

Pachydermia

The First Fall 2010 issue of Knitty is live, and my contribution to the potluck is Flo, a little elephant with an interesting history.



My inner six-year-old is unable to look at that picture without feeling compelled to share some of my very favorite elephant jokes. (Please set aside your juice boxes before proceeding.)

How do you stop an elephant from charging?

Take away his credit card before he goes into the yarn shop.

Why did the elephant cross the road?

To get to the yarn shop on the other side.

Why do elephants paint their toenails red?

Because they need something to do while they wait for the yarn shop to open.

What did the grape say to the elephant?

Nothing–grapes can't talk! But if grapes could talk, the grape would have asked for directions to the yarn shop.

If you see an elephant in your car, what time is it?

Time to drive the elephant to the yarn shop.

Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair

My inner six-year-old is also busting with anticipation because next week (July 16-18) is the annual Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair in Grayslake, Illinois. Have you been? This year I get to not only go and wander around the market, the art show, and the exhibits, but I'm also teaching.

The problem with teaching, of course, is that I can't also take classes, and my friends Edie Eckman (the knitting and crochet sorceress who taught me intarsia without killing me) and Carol Rhoades (of Spin Off and PieceWork magazines, et al., and on whom I have the most uncontrollable schoolboy crush) are also in the line-up.

Fancy a Shag?

Those of you who are too young to have experienced the 1970s can never fully comprehend them. The cultural débris it left behind like a retreating glacier–Qiana, est, "Three's Company," the BeeGees, The Poseidon Adventure, Watergate–is easy to sneer at. From a distance, through eyes jaded by experience, it appears hopelessly naïve, tacky, excessive, ridiculous.

Yet it was an exciting time. A time of experimentation, free thought and gleeful rule-breaking. Take the matter of carpet, for example.

Yes, carpet.

For centuries, carpet had been something you mostly put on the floor. Sure, the odd Renaissance muckity-muck might use a nice bit of Turkish in lieu of a tablecloth,



but for the most part, carpet = floor covering.

In the 1970s, this practice was called into question. I know it was, for though I was a mere child (having arrived in January of 1971) I recall distinctly the happy excesses of the Cult of Shag Carpeting.



Devotees of the cult, who included (or so it seemed) all persons responsible for decorating airports, airplanes, public schools, upscale homes, fashionable hotels, retail showrooms, and cocktail lounges, felt that shag carpeting–though hardly a new invention–was the wave of the future. It was a magic wand, a panacea, a sure cure for all aesthetic and architectural ills.

According to some estimates, between 1970 and 1979 as much as 62% of the surface area of the United States of America may have been covered in shag carpet.

In many rooms, shag spread across the floor and then, like a moss that fed on patchouli and disco music, jumped the skirting board and ran right up the wall. It obliterated the boundaries between floors and walls, even between floors and furniture. My kindergarten classroom, in what was then a brand-new and forward-looking Arizona elementary school, had almost no chairs. We sat on tiny cubes upholstered with red shag carpet, arranged in a circle upon a floor covered by red shag carpet, surrounded by walls swathed in red shag carpet. Indoctrination at an early age was of paramount importance.

The stuff was so popular that fashionistas even carried it as an accessory. Sound incredible? Take a look at this striking image from a booklet published in 1973 by Coats and Clark.



In 1973, nothing said "comfort" and "style" like a handmade shag carpet muff. You could work it colors to match your polyester mix-and-match wardrobe, or your favorite faux-Tiffany swag lamp.

It kept your hands warm on the way to the singles bar; and once there, it allowed you to flirt shamelessly, yet coyly, with the leisure-suited airline pilot two seats down. The next morning, after you'd had a "meaningful connection" on his Broyhill waterbed, the 100% acrylic muff could be hosed down and drip-dried before your next outing.

What's that, youngster? You're sorry you missed it?

You should be.

Personal History

When I was a junior in college, studying art history, my tutorial group of six drove from Boston to New York to have an in-person look at several pieces large and small, including a visit to the Frick Collection.

Our tutor had connections of some kind there, and so the six of us were met at the door by a very tall, thin woman who introduced herself to me by saying "My name is ________.* My great-grandfather was Henry Clay Frick, and he is responsible for the works of art you see around you."

I shook her hand and said, "My name is Franklin Habit. My great-grandfather dug coal in a Frick mine for most of his life, and so is he."

I am pleased to report that the august lady's response to this piece of impudence was a hearty laugh and an arm around the shoulder. Times do change.

The Fricks have their museum, and now my great-grandfather (and great-grandmother) have theirs, though not on quite so grand a scale. A couple years ago, a group of volunteers from Smock, the coal patch where my grandmother grew up, got together and turned the company store building in the center of town into the Smock Heritage Museum, a set of rooms dedicated to the memory of patch life during the "Coal and Coke Era" of 1884-1943.

I've wanted to visit the museum ever since it opened, and on this trip I finally got the chance.

Family history has always fascinated me. Although my grandmother left school after fourth grade, she has an astonishing gift for vivid description and recollection of detail. Under other circumstances, she would no doubt have become a novelist or a journalist. For as long as I can remember, a visit to her meant perching on kitchen chair and peppering her with questions about how she lived as a child, then listening as she peeled potatoes and told stories. I still ask questions, and she still has new stories.

I was always particularly interested in the details of household life–how people in the patch cooked and slept and spent their days–and the newest features of the museum (which Grandma hadn't yet seen) are re-creations of the four things found in every company house: the back porch, the kitchen, the sitting room, and the bedroom.

That's all a miner's house had, really. A porch, a kitchen, and two small bedrooms. Whether you had no children or (as one Smock family famously did) fourteen, that's all you got. At one point, in my great-grandparents' house, there were two parents, four unmarried daughters, a couple of unmarried sons, and one married daughter and her husband, and their baby.

I asked grandma where they all slept. "Where we could," she said. Cozy.

The model patch house rooms were put together by volunteers using items donated by families who'd lived in Smock, with most of the work being done by local Boy Scouts as part of their Eagle Scout projects. How well they did is probably best gauged by my grandmother's reaction. When we walked into the kitchen, she just about burst into tears.

For my part, I was dumbstruck. It was like finally, after all these years, standing inside one of her memories.

I distinctly recall my grandmother saying that every self-respecting woman in Smock filled up her house with needlework, and evidence of that was everywhere. There was very little knitting, however. The only piece I found was this jacket (with matching crochet hat), made for a little girl named Eleanor Vandigo by her mother. The museum has it on display next to a school photo they found of her wearing it.



If the number of surviving objects is any indication, crochet was far more popular. In the patch bedroom, I found this nightcap displayed with the bed jacket (trimmed in filet crochet lace) it was made to match.



There was also a delicate pair of crochet gloves; Grandma remembers these as being reserved for extremely solemn occasions.



Embroidery was everywhere, worked from patterns either drawn by hand on the fabric or purchased from the local company store. Grandma says every house in the patch had one of these comb-and-brush holders over the kitchen sink–the only source of running water in the houses until after World War II.





Embroidery brightened up other everyday items like bedspreads....



...as well as special occasion pieces like covers for the basket of food taken to church on Easter Saturday for a blessing.



This one was hard to photograph, but just like the one Grandma has (made by her mother) the florid inscription is written in Slovak.

The museum has two sets of three-panel portières. Portières hung in every home in the doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room. They were a prominent showpiece, embroidered on both sides and embellished with crochet lace and medallions.





Most of the mining families in Smock (including ours) were some flavor of Eastern European. I was fascinated to see that a lot of the colors and designs were reminiscent of the folk art from that part of the world. I asked Grandma whether she knew if the commercial patterns were shipped from abroad or created domestically for the immigrant market, but she couldn't say. All she knew is that it all came from the company store.

Most households had several sets of these, and also several sets of window curtains. Both had to be taken down every month and washed, because the air pollution from coal dust, ash-paved roads, coal burning kitchen ranges, and the the adjacent coke ovens for the mine, soiled everything so quickly. It must have been an absolute nightmare to keep house under those conditions, especially using a hand-cranked washing machine or (if you weren't so lucky) a washboard and tub.

It was good to see a monument, however humble, to the people who lived and raised families in the patch. It was a hard life, at times desperately poor, but my grandmother remembers it as being on the whole not a bad way to grow up.

If you're interested in a visit, the museum has a Web site. If you go, see if you can spot my great-grandfather in the photograph of the band that used to perform at weddings and dances. Here's a hint: five of the six men are tall and the other one is shorter than the body of his bass fiddle.

Yeah, that one.

*No, I'm not going to tell you her three names. I'm a gentleman.