Knithropology

Last weekend I chanced upon an advance reader’s edition of Knitting for Good! by Betsy Greer and thought I’d give it a bit of a review. You can purchase the released version at any good bookshop from 11 November 2008.

(Please note that this review is of a book that may change significantly before its official release date, and be assured that problems with formatting, spelling or other errors which may have occurred during the production of this early release will not factor into my opinions.)

Knitting for Good! bills itself on the front cover as “A Guide to Creating Personal, Social, and Political Change Stitch by Stitch”. Betsy uses herself as the centre, and as she explains her history as a knitter, she shows how her knitting caused her to interact more positively with her family, her community and finally the world.

She draws lightly off related texts, but this is clearly not an academic work nor a manifesto - this is a codification of her personal journey as a knitter and an exhortation to the rest of us. Her manner of storytelling is engaging and easy to identify with; she darts between being incredibly idealistic and incredibly practical, which is endearing - I think many of us skirt those same boundaries with our own knitting.

In her introduction, she charts the course many of us take: learning to knit, being terrified and intimidated at the possibilities, slowly getting more confident, becoming a knitter, becoming a charity knitter, becoming a politicised knitter and finally, spreading the word. The process brings to mind the tagline to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage ethos - “Where are you on the road to River Cottage?” Well, where are you on the road to…Knitted House? Yarn-filled Apartment? Stringy Dorm Room? Whatever you want to call it, it is something that many of us sense and understand, and we can plot exactly where we are, and know that the steps ahead are already beckoning (Knithropologist, no longer terrified, knits for family, friends and charity, am relatively politicised and will spread the word only in appropriate situations. I’m still on the road.).

I suspect that, because this is so familiar to many knitters, Betsy’s book may not break much new ground for those of us who are already tuned into knitting as being more than a hobby (though there’s nothing wrong with knitting as being just a hobby - ack, hobby is such a loaded word, I’m sorry for using it), but for people who haven’t quite made the jump from knitting as hobby to knitting as a gateway to all sorts of ideas and insights, this text really could be quite galvanising. I was especially touched by the sidebars sprinkled throughout the book, each written by people Betsy finds inspirational; the sidebars bring perspectives that accentuate and compliment Betsy’s own views and add to the overall impact of the book. After reading some of the sidebars, I was ready to take on the world - if these folks could do it, why can’t I? Whenever I need a kick up the brain, I’ll definitely read through those again.

The patterns included are a scarf, hat, baby blanket, cushion cover, pet bed, a cuddly lion, socks, vest and a jacket. Most knitters would be able to take these on no matter their knitting level.

I hope, possibly naively at this late stage, that the final edition will have actual photos to go along with the patterns, as the drawings aren’t incredibly true to life and might confuse more novice knitters; though I concede that if one was confused about basketweave stitch, finding pictures of it online wouldn’t be too difficult. I can see also where costs could prevent photos, and I long for the days of colour plates. And this is a small quibble, but I wish the knitted globe on the cover had actually been knitted rather than…digitally manipulated? I can’t for certain tell what they’ve done, but I think I’d be so much more impressed if it had been knitted - and if there was a pattern for it included!

Since this is a book which addresses the personal, I should probably talk about what I got out of it. A few months ago, I made a list of things I want to do with the latter half of 2008, and one of those things is “Make charity knitting at least 25% of my knitting.” Well, with all the baby showers, the birthdays, the squirrels raiding my garden and the need to use up that damned Malabrigo, that hasn’t yet happened. Discouragement had set in, but luckily for me, Betsy gently reminds her readers that charity items can be whipped up in as little as a couple of hours.

That’s one of those strange things I know intellectually - just like I know that I don’t have to eat all the fresh homemade peach cobbler in one day -  but the reality of it had slipped away (just like the cobbler, om nom). So it was time to reassess; if I knit a hat or relatively simple but functional scarf every week, I would be well on the way to my >25% and would still have time for other knitting projects. And it would make sense to take charity projects on the bus - why not have something easy to pass the five hours of transit time I have every week? Really, given the choice of hauling a nearly-finished heavy wool cardigan or an rather lighter Irish Hiking Scarf around for a couple of days, I know what I’d prefer - and come Monday I’ll pack my bag accordingly.

So there we go, folks; the book has worked on me, anyway.

Knitting for Good! by Betsy Greer. Boston: Trumpeter Books, November 2008. 150 pages. ISBN 978-1-59030-589-8.

Good grief, folks. My apologies for being away so long; life was full of excitement. I earned my bachelor’s degree last month - on 8 August, which was of course a special day for other reasons - and took a week off work after that to knit and celebrate. And then…life went a bit mad. I’ll try to be here more often; I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’d been eaten by moths.

8 August, then. Opening day of the Ravelympics. I went pre-event insane and put three projects into the running: Masala Bay (Montego Bay Scarf in Handmaiden Sea Silk, colourway Masala), my Razoresque Cami (Razor Cami for WIPs Wrestling) and (this might be the most insane bit of it) a Central Park Hoodie. I’ll spare you the inevitably crushing details and give you the results.

The Razoresque Cami was finished just in time. The cotton in the yarn (Lana Grossa Novella) hurt my wrists a bit and triggered some wristy badness that would get me later on. Despite knitting on this through bits of my two graduation dinners and a graduation breakfast (woof, what a food-based weekend) the yarn didn’t have enough give for me to knit comfortably for too long.

I finished the Masala Bay the Monday after the Ravelympics (so no medal) and it is wonderful. Oh, how I love it. I can see myself making many more as gifts in the future. The yarn is stunning to regard, feel and knit and the end result is an absolute peach. I’m so pleased. Here, have a look (though I despair that my camera brings out a stripiness in this scarf that isn’t as noticeable in real life):

I wore thIS scarf when I had my photograph taken for work recently, which was a nice chance to show it off…except that the picture was printed in black and white. Ah well.

And last but not in the least silly, that Central Park Hoodie? It isn’t a CPH by any stretch of anything. It’s a top-down raglan pullover (with a seed stitch steek strip - say that ten times fast! - at the front) with a staghorn cable on the back, small staghorns on the sides, and, as of yet, no hood. I only managed to knit it to just about where I’d separate the sleeves and body before some sort of carpaly tunnely nonsense hit and I had to put it down. I’m working on it at a safe pace now, though I’m having to frog a bit because one of the cables got away from me, and not in a way I could fix without frogging. So really, this is no CPH. I’ll put up a picture of my Staghorn Cardigan when it looks like less of a Cascade 220 Heathers lump and more like a garment (But you can see the lump on my Ravelry projects page if you’re into lumpy things).

But wait, I hear you saying, there’s something here that doesn’t add up: the Razoresque Cami was nearly finished before the Ravelympics - how could I possibly have been working on it for so long? Well, friend…let me tell you a story.

Yarn overs. They always frustrated me, always dogged me - why didn’t mine look right? Why were they too small? Why were they so hard to knit into?  For two years, I’ve been nearly unable to do lace. Why?

(big sigh)

I was wrapping the wrong way! As the folks from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which just returned to our screens last night!) might say, “God damn it, Charlie.” Once I started wrapping properly, thanks to a combination of videos and text descriptions found all over the internet (three cheers for the internet!), I was insistent that my Razoresque Cami would not bear the shame of my inexperience - so I frogged it. Again. Alllllllll the way back to the ribbing. Again. From 95% to 5% finished. Two weeks and some wrist pain later, I had this to show for it:

Not bad. I feel like an ice cream van on the beach when I wear it (because of the colours, not the size), which is rather nice. I’ll have to wear it the next time we make and serve sorbet at home. I rather like the way it fits - it shows the world that I have breasts and a waist and doesn’t make me look like a sack. That’s my life’s goal, really. “My driving force in life has been not to look like a sack. Or a sausage, but mostly a sack.” I cast on loads of extra stitches to go up to my 44″ bust, and I’m really pleased with the results. The lace stretches very nicely. In fact, it stretches so nicely that I need to buy an appropriate bra to wear it outside the house, which is the perfect excuse to make another one in a different yarn!

And of course, finishing the cami and getting my head round the YOs meant I could start and complete Masala Bay (like I said, no medal but yay for my knitting pride!). Now when I look at lace, instead of being confused as to how they got their holes so holey, I think, “Yes, I can do that. Lad, bring me my laceweight!”

So, in the pipeline now? Finishing the Staghorn Cardigan, casting on a Autumn Forest Malabrigo Koolhaas for The Lad, a top down raglan cardi for me (which I cast on out of boredom and haven’t yet listed on Ravelry), making a baby blanket for an oncoming child (I made two bibs earlier this month but gave them to the mother before I could get pictures) and some scarves for folks in my life who really deserve them. Oh, and finishing this:

I frogged my Malabrigo So-Called Scarf in Curacao and let the yarn mope around for ages until it could figure out what it wanted - and I think it finally has. It’s a Curacaopotis! I’m really thrilled, and it should be finished tomorrow if I really put my wrists into it.

Ah, and one last thing - want to know what the best graduation present ever is? A fifty-dollar gift certificate to my LYS. Thanks, Karen. I’ll be sure to put it to good use.

[This is a long one, folks - blogging as catharsis, perhaps?]

One of the many fabulous parts of my job is researching new software for faculty and grad students to use for research. Zotero, the extraordinary add-on for Firefox, provided me with loads of fun. I needed to do all kinds of research to really push the add-on, so what did I do? I turned to my specialist subject. Though I’m still going through the majority of the resources I found, I’d like to share some bits and bobs from a thesis I obtained via ILL thanks to this experience.

Purls of Wisdom: Motivational factors of contemporary women knitters, a master’s thesis by Catherine A Hunt from Iowa State University.

Much of the material covered in Catherine’s relatively recently-written (2005) thesis would probably be well-known to knitters who have read the few knitting history works out there and who have taken the time to think critically about the needles and yarn in their hands, though if you’d like someone to back up what you already know, or you’d like another source telling you how fantastic knitting is, then this is still worth reading. The text is written in a style that wouldn’t alienate non-knitters or anyone who is not conversant with the social sciences (Catherine’s field is Textiles and Clothing) and has much to offer those who aren’t knitters themselves; I suspect that members of her advisory committee, if they aren’t already knitters, may have a new appreciation for the craft.

One topic in the thesis really stood out to me, and I think it could bear closer examination: the resurgence of knitting in the US as a response to the 11 September 2001 attacks. Hunt’s informants - thirteen in all - were all white, middle-class and nearly all of them highly-educated women (Hunt 2005, p 30) with graduate degrees. Three of them, in interviews conducted separately in the informants’ own homes, mentioned a possible connection between the terrorist attacks and ‘cocooning’, getting back to basics, learning traditional skills that should be preserved (Hunt 2005, p 43-44). I think it is very telling that these women espoused this idea independently of one another, though Hunt’s pool of knitters from which to pull informants may have resulted in these women already knowing each other through knitting groups or other fibre-related places or activities. It would be extremely interesting to know if other knitters of any gender felt this same pull specifically after 11 September, either as a reaction to the attacks themselves or as a reaction to how things have changed since then. A further step might be to take those findings and compare them to how knitters felt after other major conflicts (assuming studies like that were done at the time or could be done now by speaking to those who remember). But it’s an interesting idea and one unique to knitters from the United States.

I have no real complaints about Hunt’s thesis (grammar and punctuation, but that’s for her committee to critique, not me), but reading it makes me really wish there were more knitting ethnographies out there. Perhaps this could be my own clarion call.

Should you have the chance to get this via ILL, I recommend it. I’ll just have to take it back to the library first.

One of the next items on my reading list is I Knit Therefore I Am: An Ethnomethodological Study of Knitting as Constitutive of Gendered Identity, a doctoral dissertation by Kristina M Medford of Bowling Green State University. And it’s online, so you can read it too!

Let’s move on from theses now, as I’d like to chat about a recent project: Alkar. Alkar is an Irish Hiking Scarf I knitted recently - yes, just an Irish Hiking Scarf, nothing special - but he has deeper meanings than anything else I’ve knit so far. I mean, look at him:

The Knitting You Can’t Give Away. That was nearly the title of this post, despite the use of ‘you’ instead of ‘one’, which would infuriate an English teacher I had when I was much younger. I can’t give Alkar away, nor can I wear him. He will probably live on my scarf shelf forever, unused, unloved, but respected. Fellow sci-fi enthusiasts may get the name.

My mother had brain surgery Thursday morning; I think I’ve mentioned before that she had a tumour that was causing her a bit of bother. I won’t go into what happened just before her surgery or since, but I am assured she’s doing well and will probably be out of the hospital today. She and I aren’t currently speaking, so I haven’t heard any of this from her.

I’ll stop there, I think. I don’t know you internet people well enough to go into all of it. But let me tell you how her surgery fits into Alkar’s story. Alkar is…well, he’s the anti-prayer shawl. Sort of. When I was dealing with all of this passive-aggressive nonsense, the rejection by my mother, the worry about what might happen, the resurgence of my feelings about having an alcoholic parent, about how this last course of school has been so ill-timed, how all of my friends are experiencing extreme heartache of their own (so why bother them?), how I’m still so unhappy with myself…ad infinitum, ad vomitum. And all that was poured into a skein and a half of Cascade 220 Heathers in a lovely light purple.

Alkar. He’s on top of my stash cabinet right now because I don’t know where to put him. I suspect that if anyone tried to wear him right now, they would spontaneously combust or fling themselves off a cliff. I wouldn’t gift him to my worst enemy. So he’ll sit somewhere I can see him and he’ll remind me of how knitting can help - wait, we all know the EZ quote. “Knit on with confidence and hope, through all crises.”

Thanks, Alkar. Just don’t come near me for a while, yeah?

All this has got me thinking about perfection, probably because I’m having my own personal extravaganza of imperfections lately. When I look at other peoples’ projects on Ravelry - tikru’s [insert colour here] Gables come to mind first, as I’m dying to knit one of those - I don’t see the mistakes. I suppose most of us don’t generally see other peoples’ mistakes, knitting or not, unless we look closely - and after all, they’re design features.

I struggle to remember that should I knit something and it is a colossal disaster (sort of like the Titanic, but with string) it isn’t time wasted nor is it the end of the world. Figure out what went wrong, frog, relax the yarn and try again with the newly-learned lessons in mind. If I do this, I’ll be a better knitter and a more patient person. That’s the ideal outcome, anyway.

I’ve also been having some body image issues recently. I live in the thinnest state in the country (she says, sighing, because Colorado is only (!) 19% obese), and I’m not the svelte young woman I was a few years ago. Depression, anxiety, depression and anxiety meds and dislocation have left their mark on me and it hasn’t been easy erasing it. I console myself by saying that, when I’m not languishing in too-large jeans and t-shirts, I sort of have a pin-up’s body - acres of breasts, a small waist and hips you could bake a small pizza on. I don’t think I know quite what I mean with that last bit, but it makes sense at the mo. I’m not obese, I’m not even that heavy, I’m just not the radiant goddess I feel I was in my early twenties. So I’m trying (though not very hard) to lose weight. I eat an amazing diet; we never eat out anymore, we cook everything from scratch, eat loads of fruit and veg, beans and lentils and even our sweets are homemade (though the chai buns aren’t really all that healthy, but the watermelon sorbet is alright). Diet-wise, we’re doing great. It’s just that pesky exercise. I need to learn to knit and walk.

Back to knitting, though. I would like to be thinner for purely practical knitting reasons: garments would take less time, less yarn and less hassle. I could wear things knitted in worsted weight and not cry because I thought I looked like a badly-stuffed sausage. I don’t know. I know I’m not that overweight, and if I put up pics of myself on t’internet, you’d know as well. I suppose those Tomato pics are up waaaaaay back in the archive, but I’m thinner than that now. Hrm. You’ll have to trust me.

And finally, the slight finishing spree. I managed to crank out those coasters (though mine isn’t yet fully…fullled), make a tissue packet holder and finish that Colourwork Bag. Pictures!

The Lad’s coaster:

My coaster (for my massive, massive sheep mug):

Tissue Buffer:

Colourwork Bag (both sides):

When I’ve finished all of the Pi-Topper hats for my mother, I’ll post pics of them here. If you’re on Ravelry, you can pop over to my notebook to see them for now.

Right, it’s time to end this blog entry. I have to revise for my makeup exam tomorrow and there’s no time like the present for reviewing the importance of olfaction for Lemur catta.

Life is somewhat poor right now, but it’s getting better. “Knit on with confidence and hope, through all crises.”

Yeah.