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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

When I got home I had the urge to make a machine-knitted sweater. I haven’t mentioned machine knitting before (except for the pyramid hat) but I had been the recipient of a machine some years before this. My mother, the non-knitter, was into machine knitting. She had bought a machine, gone to classes, bought all the attachments, followed manuals and patterns slavishly and was able to turn out reasonable garments. She was able to make cardigans to suit an extremely fussy, and very short, elderly relative. She enjoyed playing. Somewhere along the way she had given me the first machine because she had bought another. All the machines we amassed between us over the years are still in a storeroom in my cellar. There are probably about six or seven along with a couple of ribbers.

I had played with my machine a bit but not with any enthusiasm. Now I wanted to do it. Getting out the machine and table was tricky but the knitting was so easy. It was another one of those things that I now realised had previously been so much effort I couldn’t be bothered to do it. Pushing that carriage had required huge amounts of stretch and effort and now it seemed to sail up and down with the slightest touch. Many more machine-knitted garments followed but they never took over from hand-knitting. I could churn out all the things people were asking for, making each one look unique. I could do all this at the same time as having an almost full-time teaching job, a very lively son who was now eight years old and I still had room in my head for a thousand and one new ideas. My approach to machine-knitting also rubbed off on Mum, who became much more adventurous.

But this journey is much more about where hand-knitting took me so the path of machine-knitting was just a diversion, now and then, from the main road.

When I was released from hospital my immune system had been virtually destroyed, to keep the new kidney working, and I was not allowed to mix with people outside my immediate family who had already been tested for any possible contagious infections. Shopping was banned for another two months so a little ingenuity was called for.

Do you remember all those balls of navy wool Mum bought nearly thirty years earlier? I still had them. I had a carrier-bagful. They had always fascinated me. So many balls the same but not quite the same. Many of them also still had the original crinkles from when they had been pulled undone. There were almost as many oddments of what we used to call ‘beige’. That colour seems to go under many different names now but it is as uninspiring as it always was. I was finding it almost impossible to work with several balls of yarn at once. I could not manage to feel, or pick up, the one I needed to be using and it was a frustrating experience. There had to be a better way. That navy wool kept beckoning to me.

Kaffe Fassett had appeared on the knitting scene and there was one technique that he used that was perfect for that navy. He called it the ‘Magic Ball’. If you haven’t heard of this technique, the ball is made by tying together short lengths of yarn and then knitting with the ball letting the colours fall randomly. Kaffe was all for using a large variety of toning colours in the ball but for me it was the ideal use for my navy. I did not need to send anyone to the shops. I had everything at my disposal in the stash of oddments I had collected over the years. Navy still features prominently in my work today and, although I have some very good conscious reasons for using it, I think my sub-conscious always harks back to the Magic Navy Ball. Of course, I also used the beiges, which were more varied, to make the Magic Beige Ball.

I don’t know whether any of Kaffe’s books were published at this time. I certainly didn’t have any but I had videoed his television series and was very taken with his Persian Poppy design. I studied this design on freeze-frame and came up with my own variation. As a mathematician, the calculations for fitting the poppies onto a jacket were child’s play for me. The poppies were navy, with odd bits of brighter blue, purple and anything else that seemed to blend in. The background was beige. Almost as soon as I started someone wanted to buy it. I have never sold hand-knitted items for profit. Everything I knitted from this time onwards was by way of experiment and if people wanted to buy my experiments I was glad that they found homes to go to. I would not knit anything just because someone asked me to but if they had a vague idea I could play with, and if they didn’t mind if the finished product wasn’t necessarily what they originally had in mind, then I would experiment and give them first option on the resultant garment.

This was wonderful. I could cope with two balls of wool provided there were no other complications. Persian Poppies relied on dramatic shapes and colour. No fancy stitches were needed. I couldn’t do many of the things I had done before but I felt I was back on my normal path. Another version of Persian Poppies followed. This time it had a grey background and poppies of deep reds and purples. Much of it was one particular shade, called maroon in those days. I don’t know where it came from but it had also been hanging around in crinkled balls throughout my childhood.

There were two other advantages to the Magic Ball technique. It cost nothing, because I was using up bits I already had, and I didn’t have to go out into crowded shops. Even when I was allowed back out into civilisation, there was no need to buy yarn. I was using up stuff I thought could never be used. There were odd hanks of 2 or 3 ply yarns but these could be used double, or treble and there would be no obvious difference. I basically worked in double knitting thicknesses but if the odd short length was thicker or thinner than the rest it would do nothing to affect the overall effect. Some truly horrible yarns were mixed into some of my magic balls. The most unlovely yarns can give a lift to more exciting things around them. I could use them all up and feel good about it. As you may have realised by now, I can’t bear to throw away anything that might ‘come in useful’ and at last they had found a use.

Click here to see some photos.

5b. HANGING BY A THREAD continued