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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 parental home was now house number 4. It conjures up no memories of me knitting but it is firmly associated with memories of my mother’s ‘knitting’. This house was very close to the centre of the small mining town where we lived throughout my young life and where my mother still lives now. It adjoined the Police Station and was known to me as the ‘house built to keep the monkeys in’. The Police Station was in a large house that had originally been owned by an eccentric doctor. It was a wonderful building with lots of doors and corridors and outside it had a stable-yard and stables. The stables were occupied by stray dogs and, sometimes, a patrol car but they had originally housed zebra that had been used to pull the doctor’s carriage. Behind the Police Station there had been a menagerie. The remains of the cages were still there. Apparently there had been a big problem trying to confine the monkeys and the solution had been to build two houses to front the road, filling the space and leaving the monkeys no means of escape. These houses were built as tall as possible which perhaps wasn’t high compared with other towns but this was a mining area and there was a limit to the height allowed due to the risk of subsidence. The reason for the houses being there is irrelevant. All that is important is that this was very close to the town centre.

About one hundred yards away was a dark and dingy men’s outfitters that sold wool. It wasn’t at all an exciting shop and I certainly didn’t know at the time the impact it was going to have on me about thirty years later. My mother and I would trundle off to this shop and she would buy two ounces of navy blue double knitting wool. Policemen in those days were allowed to wear plain navy pullovers or slipovers under their uniform jackets. This wonderful new double knitting would make it so much quicker and easier to make a pullover. I told you my mother was never the world’s greatest knitter so about two months would pass by before those two ounces were knitted up. When they were finally used we would set off again to the shop only to find that the dye lot had changed in the meantime. In those days dye lots were far more variable than they are now. The current version bore no resemblance to the previous one. Had she been knitting a lady’s fashion item she might have got away with subtle striping and, perhaps, convinced the world that this had always been the plan but that just wouldn’t wash for a policeman’s uniform. The only solution was to buy another two ounces and start all over again. I can’t tell you how many times this scenario was played out. I could be doing her an injustice but it is my belief that Mum never finished a pullover. Fortunately for me, and for reasons best known to herself, she never threw away those oddments. The beginning of each new pullover was pulled undone and the balls stashed away.

It was a similar situation with anything she ever tried to make for me, with the added complication that I had always outgrown the planned item before it was even halfway finished.

On to house number 5 and this is where it all began to happen. I was eight years old when we moved there. We couldn’t have been there long when Dad bought a knitting machine. I remember little about the machine itself except that it came in a green leather-look case which I now strongly suspect was strong plastic-covered card and must itself have been very basic. I don’t know where it came from and maybe it’s best not to know these things. Dad approached knitting a cardigan in the same way he would make a doll’s house or a garden swing – make pieces that fit together to give you the shape you want.

He knitted a cardigan for Mum. It was bright red and white. Jumpers and cardigans were still close-fitting shapes and this certainly fitted. I was intrigued by the bands and edgings which were of the type made by knitting twice as much as you actually need, folding it and hooking the bottom edge onto the needles. This concept was fascinating and is an idea I have since used in hand and machine-knitting many times with the same degree of fascination. I’m sure Dad must have had a pattern, or manual, for this part of the process. It’s not something anyone could stumble on when using a knitting machine for the first time.

The cardigan was red. It had large white Norwegian-style stars running around above the bottom band. Dad made several wooden pushers to select the correct needles for each row of the pattern for the stars. It must have taken longer to make those selectors than it would have done to select the needles by hand. Having made them, he decided to try something else and set to work on a hat. It would have seemed perfectly logical to take a head measurement, divide it by four, and knit four identical pieces. The four pieces were triangles and everything looked fine until they were stitched together. The hilarious result was a pyramid. Knitting his own plain navy pullovers was child’s play.

It’s surprising how little I remember about my early knitting life. Try as I may, there are very few items I can call to mind. Those that I do remember are linked in my mind with a little Paton & Baldwins booklet but I can’t be sure which items were really in there. There was a garter stitch scarf with a slit in the centre so that the other end could pass through and keep it in place. I thought it was the cleverest thing I had ever seen and it was so easy to make. I also made the mittens that went with it. There were bedsocks so I made bedsocks. Everyone got bedsocks. Did anyone ever wear bedsocks? I didn’t care. I knew how to make them so I did.

This was still the age of tea cosies and they were equally intriguing. They always had some way of making them more dense than just one layer of knitting and a whole range of techniques were discovered there. On the whole they were flexible enough to fit any teapot so there was no real consideration for having to work to a particular size. Were people obsessed with keeping things warm? Hot water bottle covers were another big item. Bri-nylon had just put in an appearance and I knitted a cover in a very pale shade of green. Green has always been my least favourite colour. Perhaps that originated here (or even earlier with the pleated skirt). That cover was used and, as was the way of Bri-nylon, it never looked quite clean. It was a disappointment but it served a purpose.

By the age of eleven it was house number six and the local Grammar School. At home I was knitting much of the time when not doing the obligatory homework. School was a different matter. Because I was considered to be intelligent, I was in the top class and, for those in the top class, practical subjects were considered too frivolous. We had to learn Latin instead. I often wonder what might have happened if I had been allowed to follow a Needlework course and, on balance, conclude that even though I hated the Latin it did have a beneficial effect in later years. Needlework could only have been detrimental. There would have been no place for a maverick and I could well have been pushed down the lines of someone else’s thinking rather than being able to develop unconventionally.  New ideas and new designers, in any field, can only evolve if they are able to break free from the expectations of the system.

I knitted and knitted. Every new baby we knew got a matinee jacket and/or mittens and bootees. These tiny items were ideal as they were quick to make and it wasn’t a major disaster if improvisations went wrong. Mittens, scarves, and bedsocks had similar advantages.

Round about this time I realised that the only way to get the most recent cardigan Mum had started for me was to do it myself. It wasn’t much longer before the tables were turned and I was knitting for Mum, the difference being that these items actually got finished. Then, as now, I couldn’t start something new before the previous item was finished. This doesn’t mean that everything was successful but if it was an obvious disaster it had to be ripped from the needles and wound into balls ready for use at some later date. I could not leave an unloved project festering on the needles.

4. THE MONKEY HOUSE