Mrs. Ramsey's Stockings

Inspired by the socks Mrs. Ramsey knits in the opening pages of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I've designed a pattern that honors the English fishing tradition with a gansey-inspired stitch pattern and that uses a traditional yarn--Jamieson and Smith's two-ply Shetland.  This sock is sized for a women's medium, in calf-length with a deep cuff.   The pattern is available in a free pdf link below:
Mrs. Ramsey's Stockings

A Knitter Named Vengeance

In my Ravelings column in the Fall 2011 Interweave Knits, I write about knitters in literature.  This is by way of an addendum.


Les Tricoteuses

Whenever I’m reading a book in an airport, my fellow travelers give me a wide berth.
But when I bring out my knitting, the vibe changes.  Suddenly, the empty seats beside me are occupied by the curious and the sentimental swept up in memories of grandma knitting, Aunt Bee and her crochet, Mama and her quilting.

Women knitting in public did not always invite such happy reveries, however.  In fact, a couple of hundred years ago les tricoteuses, the knitters of Paris, were demonized, condemned as dangerous subversives, handmaids of Lady Guillotine.

The knitters were the first to rebel in the 1780’s when living conditions for the working people of France became unbearably severe.  Marching to the palace at Versailles, the women demanded bread.  When Marie Antoinette suggested they eat cake instead, the French Revolution was ignited, and the brave working-class women of Paris were celebrated as heroines.

During the Reign of Terror, however, with the revolutionaries in power, the market women continued to protest in favor of the poor.  The new regime found them an unwelcome irritant and made it illegal for them to attend government meetings.
In protest, the women gathered at the public site of executions, standing for hours witnessing the beheadings, knitting silently through them all, refusing to disappear from public life.

Some observers of the Revolution claimed les tricoteuses had been hired by the executioners to fill the role of witnesses to their ghastly work, and other accounts described them as gleefully celebrating the deaths of the wealthy and privileged.  That’s the version Dickens relied on when he created his immortal character Madame Defarge who knits implacably through A Tale of Two Cities.

Late in the novel, in a chapter entitled “The Knitting Done” we learn that Thérèse Defarge is a revolutionary spy who eavesdrops on conversations in her wine shop, recording the names of her enemies in her stitches.

The “terrible woman had knitted when he talked with her,” remembers Sydney Carton, “and had looked ominously at him as her fingers moved.” She brings her knitted ledger along as evidence when she testifies against the novel’s hero, Charles Darnay.

Sometimes, when I’m knitting at the dentist’s office near a wheeler-dealer shouting all his financial details into his cell phone, I enjoy a little Madame Defarge fantasy.  What if I recorded all these numbers into my fair isle pattern?  No one would suspect a sweet little grey-haired lady of corporate espionage. As Agatha Christies’s Miss Marple shows, a woman knitting can pick up a lot of information.

In fact, Miss Marple is just another version of the tricoteuse.  Acting as witness, prosecutor, and judge,  she holds court from behind her needles and pink wool.  Listening and observing, she stays out of the mischief going on around her, recording and assembling her evidence until she lays it all out in a scene at the end of the novel, like a lace knitter blocking a shawl, when the tangle of threads opens into a complex geometrical design.

Every time we sit in a coffee shop or a park with our knitting, we bring history with us.  There’s a node of timelessness wherever we station ourselves, and the world, like a kid on a skateboard, sails by, glances at our quiet motions, and careens on its path.  In any setting, the knitter is a silent witness to the moving scene, focused yet open, listening, connecting one strand to another as she contemplates the intricate loops that hold the world together.

Hands On Color

A week ago I drove up through northeast Alabama to Monteagle in the mountains of Tennessee.  The sky was clear, and even though twisted billboards and splintered tree trunks gave evidence of the recent deadly tornados that tore through these valleys in April, the road side meadows showe no signs of nature’s abuse.  In fact, Queen-Anne’s-lace, pink bindweed, yellow daisies and purple joe-pye weed bloomed in clumps all along the way.  No landscape designer could have scattered the colors more artfully. 

Cloister at Dubose Conference Center

All this color was a great introduction to my destination, Lynne Vogel’s Hands On Color spinning workshop at the Dubose Conference Center.  Beside the residence hall, the cherry tree was filled with ripe, slightly tart cherries, the rose bushes were in fragrant bloom in the little cloister garden, all presages of a weekend of rich color.

Once I arrived, I checked into my room, and settled in with nine other spinners to learn new skills and revel in Lynne’s world of rich, complex color spun into art yarn, those amazing skeins of luxurious, textured yarns that are featured in yarn stores like Tiffany jewels, and Lynne’s yarns, displayed near a sunny window, glowed like jewels with their multi-faceted textures in coils, locks, and even beads and fabrics. 

Spinners always turn out to be fascinating people.  Over the course of the weekend, as we got to know each other, I was amused, impressed, and touched by every person in the group.

Art yarn by Lynne Vogel

Some had been spinning for decades, others only for months, but each spinner had a palette of colors all her own, and by the end of the weekend, each had created breathtaking skeins of yarn. 

Lynne introduced us to a wide range of techniques, from spinning thin-and-thick singles to coil wrapping and coilless wrapping, auto-wrapping and introducing diverse fibers by creating “mini-batts.” 

Lynne's art yarns

So many techniques that I have had to go back this week and practice the ones I didn’t get a chance to master during the weekend.

My goal was to learn how to spin fatter yarns and how to introduce texture.  I did learn to do both.  I also had the good fortune to peek over their shoulders at nine other spinners, as well as Lynne, who was generous in demonstrating every technique on her own wheel.  All the workshop skeins were stunning.  Each spinner had a palette of rich hues and tones particular to her own color vision.  Greens and blues like a tropical paradise contrasted with deep, mysterious reds and purples. 

On the last morning of the workshop, Lynne and Jan Quarles laid out an enormous assortment of fibers on a long table.  Each of us selected a “fiber salad” made up of fibers of our choice.  We blended the mix on drum carders and spun up our salad batts.  Amazingly enough, the random salads blended with our other skeins.  Each of us was drawn to the same group of colors. 

This time, my palette was earth tones of pinky, purply browns with pale blue and lilac accents.  Looking at my sample skeins, I recognize a sea-change in my color sense.  I have shifted away from the jewel tones I favored before.  These are more complex, more reflective of the summer season fast approaching, or maybe reflecting some seismic shift inside of me.

After a good fiber workshop, I’m left with the existential question:  how to I integrate all of this into my work?  What kind of yarn do I want to spin?  And why?  And for what kind of final product? 

I have lots of happy spinning ahead of me in the coming months.  Techniques to master, fibers to learn about, yarns to treasure, plans to make for sweaters and scarves, hats and cowls.  I’ll be back next year to see my new spinning friends and revel for two days in hands-on color.

Stitches and Time

When I was nine years old, I was obsessed with an obscure corner in the Detroit Institute of Arts.  In a tiny gallery on the basement level, far from the harsh glare of sunlight, I found a display of needlework made in seventeenth-century Spain.  Pressing my nose to the glass, I loved to study the meticulous loops, the tiny knots, the satin-stitched petals and delicate chain-stitched stamens in white threads on fine white linen, the long stockings knitted in silk at a gauge of at least thirty stitches to the inch.  Thousands of stitches, hundreds of hours.

Later, in college I discovered that these impossibly delicate, almost invisible stitches were made by privileged matrons, spinsters or widows of imperial Spain, women relieved of mundane duties like laundry, housecleaning, and cooking by a fleet of servants. When powerful men were getting educations and conducting wars, their sisters and mothers passed the long hours with meticulous, time-consuming needlework, delicate luxuries for bridal trousseaus and infant layettes. These privileged ladies had hours, weeks, years to fill, and only a few activities to fill them with—music, reading, writing letters, and needlework.   One member of their group would read from poetry or a popular romance while the others quietly stitched away.

Today, we divide our lives into discreet units—the half-hour television show, the ten-minute coffee break.  We expect answers at the click of a keyboard.  We learn of events on the other side of the globe seconds after they occur.  But once in a while, we get a chance to tap into that older experience of time as a kind of quiet pool that expands around us as we enter its depths.  At the end of a workday, when the dishes are loaded in the dishwasher and the laundry is folded and put away, I sit down for a half-hour to knit, and time stills. I count rows and pattern repeats rather then minutes.  My heart rate slows as my hands and eyes focus on the next stitch, the next crossed loop.  As I get into the rhythm, time settles, like the surface of water after a pebble’s dive.

This week, during my Spring Break, I join a group of knitters who are designing and knitting jackets following Barbara Walker’s top-down method.  As we gather around our hostess’s table decorated for St. Patrick’s Day, in the warm aroma of corned-beef wafting from the kitchen, our jokes and small talk gradually give way to periods of silence.  We are finding our places, picking up the thread of our progress. 

Bright early-spring sun pours into the room through lace curtains.  We knit contently.  The conversation slows, and then, in softened voices, slow-paced, the stories emerge, the ones that are deepest and most urgent, the stories we hold in our hearts, most important but most difficult to share. We are quiet in our sympathy.   There’s no rush to comment or offer solutions.  We knit one stitch after another, together but separately, and we listen and feel together another’s trouble. 

             After a couple of hours, one by one, we fold up our work and wish each other farewell, not because we’re watching a clock, but because we seem to arrive collectively at a moment of closure.  I don’t check the time until I’m back at my car, back to the twenty-first century world of digital displays of minute and seconds.

Who knows what stories were shared on those sun-drenched afternoons in Barcelona or Seville, what tales of wars or shipwrecks, of dropsy or St. Vitus’ Dance, what recipes, what scandals?  Did the Spanish ladies pause one afternoon to gaze at their completed masterpieces, the stockings and handkerchiefs, nightcaps and collars?  Did they tuck each item into a trunk with lavender and their hopes for a young couple’s long and happy life?  Little did they know that their work would travel far from their hands to unfurl across the centuries, the long, patient strands of nameless women who had all the time in the world on their hands, to inspire a little girl growing up in the Motor City searching for something old, something strange and beautiful as her dreams.

After a long, cold, snowy winter, Alabama is exploding with pent-up color. Carefully tended gardens are brimming with tulips and irises framed in brick-edged beds, but the wild thickets by the side of the road are rioting.  Wild invasive wisteria vines are blooming in huge untended mountains of purple, their pendant blooms spilling over the country roads.  Redbuds that blossom along their trunks and limbs have turned a violent puce, as if they’d been electrified overnight.  Oak-leaf hydrangeas, their blooms the size of soft balls, fill shady corners under the pines.  Park your car anywhere outside and when you return in an hour, it’s covered in lime-green dust.

In all of this profusion, there is one element of Shaker simplicity, one slender note of absolute purity—the wild dogwood.  Deep in the shade of pine and oak, a white glimpse of unglazed porcelain floats in the upper branches.  Beginning in early March as pale green flickers, then a soft fawn, dogwood blossoms finally turn a bright, creamy white, as if a smudged sheet of paper were to turn spotless.  Five flat white petals with a deep red center.   They don’t droop or spill, but float in the air as if resting on long arms.

This spring I’m knitting a cardigan for summer, the Pinnate Cardigan by Amy Christophers (Pinnate Cardigan).  About a month ago, I chose an organic cotton yarn in a pale shade, nearly white, with flecks of what spinners call “vegetal matter.”  It wasn’t until the dogwoods opened this month that I saw the connection.  I’m knitting with the same creamy white I see outside my window.

My pattern has a lacy leaf motif in panels along its length, and as I add leaf after leaf to my sweater, I can see that spring is doing the same.  Every day another bare, grey tree leafs out.  The weeds spring out of the lawn as if to get a headstart on the mower.  The days lengthen, and I see that yet again in my herb garden the mint has survived the winter and is setting up outposts in the future territory of my basil and thyme. 

Thoreau, when spring came to Walden Pond, wrote in his journal, “there is nothing inorganic.”  This year, I think I know what he meant.  The skein of cotton yarn, neatly coiled in my basket, bound by its paper label, comes to life with the dogwood’s petals,  the weeds and wisteria, and like me, at my knitting, hearkening to the mockingbird’s whistle and thrum.

Grannies and Granny Squares

My granny taught me to crochet when I was five or six years old.  Since I am left-handed, she had to transpose the instructions for me.  I don’t know how she did it, but it must have been a gentle, easy process, because I don’t remember any struggle or confusion, just the joy of acquiring a new skill.  I crocheted granny squares, and then I found patterns for doilies and Irish lace and I crocheted lots of things, fascinated by the geometry and the patterning, mathematics dancing before my eyes.

My mother crocheted an ambitious granny-square afghan before she was married.  Large enough to cover a queen-size bed, in dense, three-ply wool in bright, rich colors and bordered in black, the afghan was my childhood sick-room comfort zone, wrapped around anybody recovering from a stomach-ache or a bad cold. 

I still treasure that afghan; I still haul it out to comfort the couch-bound.  Though it’s seen many years of hard use, its colors are still bright and fresh.  The heavy, bright wool is comforting to the cold and feverish.  The wool seems to press down on you, to embrace you, it seems stronger than you are, firmer, more solid.   It seems to stand guard over your shivering frame until you recover and kick it off, when, folded back into its place in the linen closet, it awaits its next call to service.

                                    

The granny squares make the perfect entertainment for the convalescent eye.  Edged in a deep, warm, glossy black, each square is made up of one, two, or three bright colors, sometimes a whole square in one color, just to soak in its richness, a scarlet or emerald green or a bright yellow.  Other squares join complements—green and red, or blue and orange, while others show more thoughtful experiments:  a line of pink around a tiny square of red, a row of yellow shading into orange, then burnt umber.

I look at those squares now and I see my mother in her twenties, the youngest child and only girl, last to leave home, living with her parents in their newly-built house in the outskirts of the city.  I think about the faded color photograph where she holds a dinner-plate-sized dahlia up to her face so her dad could beat his neighbor in their annual dahlia competition.   Their new garden produced giant tomatoes, rosebushes with huge, round creamy blossoms, massive peonies, six-feet-tall sunflowers.  All of the garden’s richness and color, along with my mother’s dreams for her future life, seemed to migrate into my mother’s afghan.

Granny squares also remind me of  the 1970’s when they suddenly became hip.  My high-school classmate Judith Killeen started a business making granny-square purses. She earned enough money so that she could hire a dressmaker to sew her clothes.  I was deeply impressed with her enterprise, and not surprised at all when Judith went on to engineering school, one of the first women to enroll in the early 1970’s.  Her innovative spirit was easy to spot even in high school, as she found a way to exploit the possibilities of the humble granny square.

Crossing Central Park West in New York City one spring day a few years ago, I passed a woman in a scarf made of tiny granny squares, crocheted in a yarn finer than lace-weight, in a bouquet of soft pastels.  I was smitten, and ever since, I’ve thought about making a similar scarf, even though I know I couldn’t match the delicacy of the one I glimpsed on the street.  I’ve thought about using up all of my crewel yarns, perhaps, or using Rowan’s Kidsilk Haze for a soft effect.  So far, I have amassed a few of the squares.  Much crocheting is still ahead. 

                                                                       

But every square takes me back to my sixth year, sitting beside my granny on the side of her bed in her sunny bedroom on a side street in Detroit, watching her skilled hands, fingers bent inward with arthritis, gently moving her crochet hook in and out, as I hold mine, our heads bent over our work, until I tire of concentrating and rest my cheek against the starched rick-rack at the top of her apron strap, watching as she finishes one more square.

Valentine's Day Boot Socks

As a Valentine my readers, I'm offering a free sock pattern for these cushy boot socks.  Just click the link below for the pdf. document.  Happy Knitting!

Valentine's Day Boot Socks