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The World of Illusion Knitting

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PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

1999 was a year of enormous changes. I gave up my permanent job so that at least one of us would be able to follow up any invitations. I didn’t give up teaching altogether. I work as a Supply Teacher, in the same school where Steve still teaches. There aren’t many days when there isn’t someone away, on a course or through illness, so I go and hold the fort, more successfully in some subjects than others. Sometimes I respond to a desperate phone call part way through a day or chauffeur Steve to school in the mornings when they may or may not need me. If I need to be somewhere else I have no commitments to the school and no guilty conscience about having to leave classes. It is an ideal arrangement for me and the school. There are days when we both need to attend an event and there is no problem with Steve being away for a day, provided that he leaves work for his classes and the event organisers are willing to pay for another Supply Teacher to be in charge of those classes. Relinquishing my permanent job meant that I acquired more time, even on the days when I was working in school. There were no after school meetings, no lesson preparation and no training days. We produced a lot of afghans in that year.

We now had so many afghans they were threatening to bury us. Drastic measures were called for. The solution was to buy a four-storey Victorian terraced house. It has lots of room but, more importantly, many of the ceilings are ten feet high giving us enough wall space to be able to hang around twenty-five afghans at a time. We solved the problem of how to store the rest by raising the legs of the bed leaving enough space underneath for a wooden platform on wheels, where they can be stacked.

It is a strange house, being the end of a terrace on the top of hill. Between the front and back doors it drops by one storey. The rooms in the cellar are at street level at the back of the house. Originally these had been the kitchen and cook’s sitting room but nothing had been modernised. However, these rooms had great potential as workrooms and storerooms and a place where we could run our own courses if we ever wanted to. Fireplaces, plumbing and dangerous wiring were removed and we eventually acquired two large workrooms. It is a wonderful luxury to have a space where works-in-progress can be left without having to tidy up the table ready for dinner or because visitors are coming. Shelves are stuffed full of books, materials, cushions, toys, scarves  and many other things. There are large sinks for dyeing (which we have still to try).  There is space for sewing machines and rarely-used knitting machines, and in more recent years, a screen-printing table.

Over the next three or four years we spent a lot of time working on the house. It still isn’t finished but hasn’t received so much attention recently. Looking back now, I don’t know how we fitted so much into that year. Everything had changed, including our approach to the methods we used. We were able to go back to all the old favourite maths books, looking at them in a new way. Ignoring our original rules, ideas came thick and fast.

We weren’t finished with mazes yet. One of the books had a picture of Chartres Cathedral Maze. It was circular so not feasible in knitting but a relatively simple shape to achieve in crochet. The method I chose for making it relies on increasing twelve times on each round of crochet to make the shape stay flat. This holds true whatever the size may be. This results in a twelve-sided shape. In knitting or crochet this isn’t noticeable when the shape is small but it becomes more pronounced as it grows.

I deliberately varied the placement of the increases so that they were staggered, giving the effect of a round shape rather than one with several sides. The walls of the maze were applied to this background with a thickly textured yarn. Little did we know then that this would not only be attractive to small children who liked to run toy cars along the paths between the walls but also to blind and partially-sited adults and children who could follow the paths and walls very easily on the textured surface.

Just before this was completed we found a picture of another maze, known as Walls of Troy. The only difference between this and the Chartres maze is that the background shape had twelve sides. That shape I had tried so hard to eliminate was exactly what was needed now. The second version joined the first. Making the backgrounds for these was a laborious job but the thrill of adding the walls was like nothing that had gone before. In a very short time the dull plain background turned into a intricate, twisting maze.

Click here to see more about Chartres Cathedral Maze
Click here to see more about Walls Of Troy

16a. AMAZING CHANGES