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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

Times were changing. To some, knitting may seem an old-fashioned activity but alongside this, when I bought my first computer, long before the transplant, I did not know anyone else who had a home computer. This was in the days of 5.25" discs. The floppies we have had since, and which have now become almost  obsolete again, did not exist. Printers were dot matrix and, by comparison with today, everything needed a lot of juggling to produce results. Nevertheless my computer allowed me to contemplate things that would  not have been possible before. I loved my computer almost as much as my knitting. I soon progressed to a bigger and better machine, running an early version of Windows.

Setting up and using early PCs, as they came to be known, was a frustrating process. They cost a small fortune and then you needed to buy an assortment of packages to make them work. Nothing was done for you. There was nothing on the computer when it arrived and it needed to be loaded with DOS, then Windows, then the programs that could actually do something useful. It was a long and slow procedure and, inevitably, it never worked properly the first time and had to be started all over again. I often felt like throwing the whole lot through the window but I was never one to give in and eventually managed to get it all performing as it should. All this stood me in good stead for all my later dealings with computers. By comparison, everything is so easy these days – until it doesn’t do what you expect! It was a baptism of fire but well worth the effort.

It wasn’t long before I decided that all the geometric knitting knowledge we had acquired should be recorded. We were already involved with various mathematical organisations and the first booklet we produced was for a children’s workshop organised by one of those bodies. Looking back at it now, it was a very simple thing, using Maths in a practical and colourful way, but I would never have been able to do anything like this before. My handwriting is diabolical, I can’t type, and I wouldn’t have the patience to write and rewrite if I had to do it by hand. With a computer all these problems are solved in one fell swoop.

I knew these ideas had potential to go a lot further and tentatively suggested to Steve that we should write a real book. I expected him to think I was crazy but he was as enthusiastic as I was, especially when I said I thought we should employ another of his talents by having cartoons in the book to make it appear slightly less serious. It was to be a book with a sound mathematical base. We didn’t want anyone alienated by the mention of Mathematics and the cartoons might do something to ease this feeling.

From Day One the book was called Woolly Thoughts and the main sheep in the cartoons became Woolhelmina. She was never mentioned by name in the book but came into her own some years later. Steve drew cartoons. We bought a hand-held scanner, which was all that was available at the time, to get them onto the page but it was never very successful. The sheep ended up with long heads or long legs or a twist in the middle. None of this really mattered because it would eventually be a publisher’s responsibility to get these sheep under control. The equipment we had didn’t do justice to the drawings so I spent vast amounts of money on buying yet another computer, printer and flat-bed scanner. That scanner cost about twenty times what it would cost today.

We had all the information in our heads. Steve drew cartoons. He also drew lots of pictures of knitting, to illustrate various points, and became fascinated by the way the stitches lock together. He drew the step-by-step process of knitting a square by our method. We both drew computer designs. We started to assemble all the pieces. The first section was very simple but it became obvious that some people would get this far and be up and running with their own ideas and we hadn’t mentioned anything mathematical. The book knew where it was going. It was, hopefully, to be inspirational. There would be no patterns or detailed instructions. Every piece of information would say enough to make sure readers couldn’t go wrong with the calculations but it would allow them to go in dozens of different directions. It would encourage people to think for themselves at the same time as being foolproof. At the back was a mathematical section but this could be ignored by anyone who didn’t want to know the hows and whys of these ideas. To know that the methods worked would be enough for many people. The number of publishers of craft books, in Britain, was on the decline. This wasn’t to be a ‘coffee-table book’ so we searched for an appropriate publisher and found a handful. It was accepted almost immediately by Souvenir Press.

6a. WOOLLY THOUGHTS