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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

The workshops were fun. The dinners were more fun. A great deal of effort had gone into organising dinners where at least one of the hosts was able to speak the language of the invited scientists. Consequently there were several dinners taking place simultaneously in various homes across the city. For most of these ‘homes’ is an understatement. I would never have imagined that we could be having dinner in such amazing surroundings on an equal footing with the rich and famous.

After the dinner on the first evening we were ready for anything. It was in the home of the wealthiest Genoese family. It felt like I imagine Colonial India to have been with the family servants, dressed in high-buttoned white tunics, ready to fulfil every need. All of the dinners took a similar form where guests were able to collect food then sit in any room, with any companions they chose. At the first dinner, for some reason we will never know, an American lady called us to sit with her and from then on we were so engrossed in conversation we hardly talked to anyone else. Her name was not known to us, even though she is a well-known anthropologist, but we soon found out that she had even more well-known parents. She was there to give lectures about her father’s work. But it was her mother’s name, Margaret Mead,  that was known to us as the author of very important books that we had both used as part of our training in Education many years before. Aided by an unlimited supply of wine, we spent the whole evening putting the world to rights. I am able to  drink very little (alcoholic or otherwise) and I enjoyed watching Steve get louder and more argumentative and Ms Bateson pausing longer and longer before she was able to formulate sentences to express her ideas.  Some of the silences spread into minutes but Steve didn’t seem to notice. They put the world to rights, not least because it happened to be US Presidential Election time.

Other dinners were equally amazing. One was in a very dilapidated looking building in the heart of the city. From the outside it barely deserved a second glance. It was difficult to find the way in and we had to go past a modern barrier and a service yard to reach the main door. We later discovered the reason that it looked so old was because it had been built in the fifteenth century. The apartment we visited was another with gilded and painted ceilings of great artistic importance. It taught us to look beyond the crumbling exteriors and after that we glimpsed wonderful painting through many windows in the older parts of the city. The hospitality at all was faultless and the company was inspiring.

There were faces and names we recognised and some which meant nothing. At one event we were introduced to someone who, we were told, had recently been knighted. We were not told why he had received this honour. Earlier that day we had visited the aquarium in Genoa and it was unlike any other aquarium we had ever been to. We were very excited about it and, as is my nature, I had to tell everyone, including this gentleman, about it, and the hilarious behaviour of the sealions. It was rather a shock to discover that he was the President of the Zoological Society of London, having recently taken over from Prince Charles, and was one of the greatest experts on aquaria.

We did a lot of sightseeing and attended many of the other science events. All in all it was an unbelievable week – all because of knitting. We had reached a very high point, having our work recognised in this way. The original question was, ‘How do you know when you have arrived in knitting?’ I don’t think I even know what it means any more. We were certainly in a very different place from where we began but arrival seems to suggest the end of a journey and our journey hadn’t ended.

We got home to the reality of having to go back to school and just a few days later there was a phone call to say the book had ‘the green light’. Contracts were signed, and deadlines were set. It had been decided that ‘the projects’ would be at the back of the book, and that they were to be designed by someone else. My original plan was to have them interspersed throughout the book so each could use a technique explained in the previous section. There were to be three batches of pages, to be completed in February, April and May. The writing for the first batch was completed just after Christmas but the yarns chosen by the book’s designer had not yet arrived. I was frustrated and so was the editor who was still trying to get the yarns from the manufacturers. In mid-February time was getting short and yarns were sourced from elsewhere. I was told there were to be three palettes and only one palette should be used on each spread. Two palettes arrived. They were labelled green and beige. The third, blue, palette never materialised. I’m glad they were labelled as I found it a little difficult to comprehend why both palettes contained blue and pink in addition to the named colours. I followed the instructions using the colours as logically as possible.

The second and third batches were completed ahead of time and both were dispatched by the end of April, ready for publication in Spring 2006.

25f. ADDING MORE STRANDS continued