Bridget's Blunder

Last year, I posted a rhyme, Anna's Adventure, published by Patons & Baldwins about 1946, to advise knitters on how to wash wool.   Last week, I found another P&B rhyme in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection.  "Bridget's Blunder" is about the dangers of using allegedly shrink-proof wool, other than P&B's own 'Patonised' wool.  Here it is, with a transcription below:

BRIDGET’S BLUNDER

My story tells of Bridget Whitting
Who loved both plain and fancy knitting,
But though she worked by day and night
Her efforts seldom turned out right.
Friends would say, "Cor! That jumper's posh!"
But when she'd given it a wash,
Instead of snugly fitting Bridget
It seemed more suited to a midget.
One day, when off to see her draper
She saw announced inside her paper
A brand-new wool; was she elated!
For bold as brass the maker stated
"This wool's the best that can be got,
It will not shrink, no matter what!"
So Bridget told her woolshop flat,
"I'll have a basinful of that."
And hurried home with glowing cheeks,
But couponless for weeks and weeks.
Soon willing labour bore its fruit—A salmon pinky jumpersuit,
Which Bridget wore with pride o'er-weening
Till, soiled and creased, it needed cleaning.
Said B., "It won't take half a wink,
The makers say it cannot shrink."
(But they forgot to say—the wretches!—
That wool made shrinkless sometimes stretches).
'Twas washed; the outcome nearly killed her,
It went three times round Aunt Matilda!
And looked in shade like Aunt Euphemia
Who suffers from acute anaemia.
"That's finished it," wept B., "I'm quitting,
I'm through for good and all with knitting;
I'll write at once to my M.P.
About this dire calamity."
Her tale was penned 'midst groans and hisses,
—The M.P. showed it to his Mrs.
Who said, "That girl should be advised
To stick to wool that's Patonised,
Which, used with reasonable care
Will wash and wash, and wear and wear;
Trust P & B, the leading spinners
Only to turn out certain winners.
Just tell her she's a chump to quit
When there's such lovely wool to knit."
B. took the tip, no longer weeps;
That M.P.'s in his seat for keeps! 

The poem appeared in The Nursery World 1st Knitting Book, published I think in 1946, like "Anna's Adventure".  Even after the war was over, clothes rationing in Britain continued until 1949, so the reference to being "couponless for weeks and weeks" after buying enough wool for a jumpersuit is no exaggeration - in fact, I doubt if anyone could afford the coupons for that much wool more than once a year, and even then it would be your main clothes purchase.

I suspect that the shrinkproof wool that stretched in the first wash might have been intended to refer to Emu wool.  Emu started to appear in ads from 1943 (possibly earlier) with the slogan "Knit with Emu and stop thinking about shrinking".  One ad claimed: Emu is the result of scientific research into wool shrinkage.  It is made permanently unshrinkable and easy washing by a secret process called "emunising". I assumed that emunising and Patonising were more or less the same process, but perhaps not.   And in any case, if Patons & Baldwins were indeed referring to Emu wools in "Bridget's Blunder", it didn't do the brand much harm - Emu Wools were very successful, and remained so until the 1980s.  The company was eventually taken over by Thomas B Ramsden (makers of Wendy, Robin and Twilleys yarns), who relaunched Emu Superwash Wool in 2005 (though it seems to have been since discontinued).  So shrinkproof Emu wool evidently had a long and distinguished career.

I wonder if there are any more P&B rhymes from the late 1940s still to be found?  We have had A for Anna's Adventure and B for Bridget's Blunder - was there a C, D, ...?   If you know of one, please let me know.

Jamieson's

While I was in Shetland for Wool Week, I went on a tour of Jamieson's Mill at Sandness. It's about 30 miles from Lerwick, on the west side of Mainland.  A coach picked us up in Lerwick, for a 50 minute drive across the island.

Garry Jamieson gave us a tour of the mill (in two groups, so that there was plenty of time to look around the shop, too).  It was fascinating to see all the processes involved in converted the raw fleece into balls of knitting wool, all in one building (as well as weaving and knitting, too). Garry showed us one of the fleeces, in the state that they arrive in, and talked about the quality of the wool.

After washing, the wool is dyed. The dyepot looked like an enormous pressure cooker, gently steaming.

Bales of dyed wool

Later, it goes through a carding machine...

... and out the other end.

And then gets spun. I think this is what's going on here:

And after two strands of the spun yarn are plied together (Jamieson's Spindrift is 2-ply), it's ready to be wound into balls.

(The blur in the middle is the wool moving very fast.)

Finally, each ball gets a ball band, and 10 balls make a pack of wool...

 
... all ready to be sold.

Apologies for any inaccuracies - all due to me, and not to Garry's tour.

A couple of eye-catching things around the mill. 

And as I said, there was a shopping opportunity.  I had already bought the Shetland Wool Week Annual, which is mainly a book of patterns, beautifully illustrated with scenes of Shetland, and decided that I'd like to knit the Seaweed Slipover, designed by Wilma Malcolmson.

The background colour is pale grey, which I like a lot, but I decided that I wanted the other colours to be slightly lighter and brighter versions of the ones in the Album.  These are the ones I picked from the Jamieson's shop:

It's hard to get an accurate rendering of the colours, especially the pink (Lipstick).  These are from Jamieson's website:

I have knitted three Fair Isle jumpers or pullovers before, though a long time ago, but this will be the first one knitted properly, i.e. in the round, with steeks.  It will be my next project, after my current one.

I forgot to mention in my last post that while I was in Shetland, I realised that I had somehow missed one of Ann Cleeves' Shetland novels.  (Not the last one, so I don't know how I missed it.)  I bought a copy in the Shetland Times Bookshop in Lerwick, and read it on the way home. And now I'm re-reading the other seven.  Many of the places mentioned in the books are real places, and so it is lovely to read about places I went to.  There is a scene, for instance, where two people have a drink in the bar of the Mareel, the arts centre in Lerwick, near the Shetland Museum. I did that too!   I'd really like to watch the TV programmes again, as well, because I know that they show wonderful scenery, and now I've seen some of it.  The programmes don't seem to be available just now, but I'll keep looking.

 

Difficult Knitting

In February, I wrote about finding several balls of Patons Lucelle in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection, and showed several pattern leaflets for little jumpers knitted in Lucelle on very fine needles.  I thought at the time that the best way to show what the yarn is like would be to knit a swatch, and when we had a lot of snow a couple of weeks ago, and I mainly stayed at home, I decided to do it.

I also wanted to try out the lace pattern in one of the jumper patterns. The leaflet calls it a "Shetland-pattern jumper" and it has three lace panels on the front and one around the bottom of each sleeve.

Patons 994

As I said in my earlier post, the main part of the jumper was intended to be knitted on size 16 needles (1.6mm.), with the rib on size 17s (1.4mm.).  The smallest needles I have are 14s (2mm.) but I decided for a swatch it wouldn't matter.  Knitting an entire garment on size 16s would be a daunting prospect, even though it has short sleeves, is only designed for a smallish size (34-36in. bust) and is quite short (19¾ in., or 50cm.).

I had assumed that, apart from the lace panels, the jumper was knitted in stocking stitch, but got an unpleasant surprise on reading the instructions - the background is a lace mesh stitch pattern.  Barbara Walker calls it 'Star rib mesh' in her book A Treasury of Knitting Patterns.  It's a 4-row repeat, and on alternate rows you just purl, so it's relatively simple.  Even so, it's a lot harder than stocking stitch.  I certainly wouldn't ever be able to knit it without watching what I was doing, as I can with stocking stitch. 

The main lace stitch, in the panels, is much more complicated.  It's a 40-row repeat, for one thing - though again, on wrong side rows you just purl.  (I might have given up otherwise.)  What's more, the number of stitches changes constantly.  You start with 23 stitches, but sometimes you have as many as 31 stitches, and other times it goes down to 17 stitches.  Which is pretty crazy.

After I had done the first pattern repeat, plus a few more rows, I was a bit puzzled about what it was supposed to look like.  (I made a small mistake half way up - it's supposed to be completely symmetrical.  But apart from that, I followed the instructions correctly, I assure you.)  There are some things that might be intended to look like leaves, and some smaller shapes that might be petals?  or smaller leaves?   Altogether it doesn't make much sense to me.   

So I went back to the pattern leaflet and had a closer look. 

 I thought that in some places, the photo seemed to show two leaves, a four-petalled flower, and some smaller leaves either side.  Hard to tell. It looked as though there perhaps should be a central disc in the middle of the four 'petals' - like a sort of daisy. So for the second pattern repeat, I changed one row of the pattern to make it look more flower-like.

I don't know.  It's quite pretty, I suppose, but I'd like it to look a bit less random.   And it is much too much work to want to repeat it. 

Here's my complete swatch.  I do at least now have something to demonstrate what Lucelle is like when it's knitted up.  I do wonder, though, whether anyone ever knitted this jumper, apart from the sample knitter.  Who was, I hope, paid more than the usual rate for it.

   

Patons Lucelle

Whatever happened to January?  It doesn't feel like we've had 31 days since the New Year, and yet here we are, past the end of January and galloping through February. Anyhow....

Last week we were busy at Lee Mills having a big clear up (or Big Clear Up) - things that had been sorted once but not quite finished, things that had got into a bit of a mess,...  Mostly I spent the week sorting out knitting needles (more later).  And in a drawer that probably hasn't been opened for years, we found a long-forgotten cache of 1950s knitting wool.

It's Patons Lucelle Fine Ply, and as you can see I found some Lucelle pattern leaflets elsewhere in the Guild collection.

Each ball has a ticket buried in the middle:

It is very fine - we should probably call it lace weight now, I think.  The earliest leaflet I found (from 1954) is for a 'Shetland-pattern jumper' and is knitted on 16s and 17s.  I can't find a knitting needle conversion chart that goes below a 14 (2mm), but from a British wire gauge conversion chart, it seems that a 16 is 1.6mm, and a 17 is 1.4mm.  Or to put it another way, the tension specified in the pattern, for stocking stitch on size 16 needles is 54 stitches and 78 rows to 4 inches/10cm.  Here's the illustration, should you feel inspired to have a go.  (It only takes 4oz. (about 100 g.) of yarn, so at least it should be a thrifty knit.)

It has three vertical panels of a lacy pattern on the front, but unfortunately the leaflet illustration doesn't show the lace clearly - you would have to knit a swatch to see what it looks like.

As the ticket with each ball says, Lucelle was a blend of wool, angora and nylon.  It was intended as a luxury yarn, in imitation of cashmere.  It seems to have been introduced in the early 1950s: I found an ad from November 1952, for "PATONS LUCELLE WOOL -- The New Cashmere Wool".  It was priced at 2/6 per ball.  2/6  is directly equivalent to 12½p, so now that seems remarkably cheap, but the same ad gave the prices for 'Purple Heather Wool', 3-ply and 4-ply as 1/5 per ounce (7p) and  'Patons Super Fingering, 2-ply and 3-ply, as 2/- per ounce (10p).  Since Lucelle was sold in ½ ounce balls, it cost 2½ times as much as Super Fingering, weight for weight.

Later Lucelle patterns, like Patons 114, were knitted to a looser tension, on 13s and/or 14s.

And even men were allowed the luxury of Lucelle:  you could knit the pullover or long-sleeved  sweater in Patons 124 below either in 3-ply or in one strand of 2-ply and one strand of Lucelle.  The leaflet says "Lucelle and 2-ply knitted together make a fabric of the utmost affluence -- but there's also a down-to-earth version in 3-ply."  (Though a hand-knitted long-sleeved sweater in 3-ply seems very luxurious to me, and not at all 'down-to-earth'.) 

James Norbury, who was the chief designer for Patons throughout the 1950s, used Lucelle in The Penguin Knitting Book (published 1957) for two evening jumpers.  Here's the nicer one.

Lady's Evening Jumper in Lucelle, from The Penguin Knitting Book, by James Norbury

It has a chevron band around the low neckline, with a small cluster of pearls and sequins on each point - very elegant.  I am sure that James Norbury had a team of knitters at his disposal, so he would have had no qualms about designing a jumper that requires a tension of 42 stitches and 52 rows to 4inches/10cm. on size 13 needles.

The latest Lucelle leaflets I have found so far are from 1960.  Patons leaflet 1054 is for 'Two Lucelle Lovelies':

 I think that by 1960, there were fewer knitters with the patience to knit sweaters with very fine yarns - a new generation of knitters had not had the experience of clothes rationing, when you had to make a very little wool go a long way.  So even 3-ply knitting was beginning to seem like hard work, and I suspect that Lucelle disappeared not long after 1960.  Now we would knit lacy scarves and shawls with such a fine yarn, on much larger needles -- much less work per square inch.

A New Yarn Shop in 1919

I was browsing some online newspapers today, looking for something else, when I found an account from May 1919 of someone opening a wool shop. The woman concerned had been in uniform during the war, and wanted to carry on being financially independent.  Employment for women was scarce, with all the men returning from the war, so setting up her own business was a way round that.

It seems from the article below that wool shops had not been flourishing before the war, though the huge effort in knitting comforts for the troops must have helped the trade.  In 1919 a new 'knitting craze' was foreseen - correctly, as it turned out, with knitwear becoming very fashionable in the 1920s. So it must have seemed an auspicious time to start a wool shop.

I was particularly interested in this account, because the Wakefield Greenwood company started out in  just the same way:  in June 1919, Clara Greenwood and Harold Wakefield (who were engaged to be married at the time) set up a shop in Huddersfield, selling knitting and crochet yarns, and all kinds of needlework supplies.  This could almost have been their story too:

MY WOOL SHOP. 

A BIT OUT OF CRANFORD SUCCESSFULLY REVISED. 

Somehow talking about wool shops seems to suggest "Cranford" and Jane Austen, and those early Victorian days of terrible gentility when one of the few things that a poor woman could do for a living was to keep a shop for the sale of Berlin wools and crewel silks. Those times have changed, however.  At the outbreak of war period it required some searching to find a shop where such commodities were the principal feature.  Wool and fancy workshops "went out" at the beginning of the century, but the war has helped to bring them back again.
At least, they are on the way.  There is, I think, a decided opening for them in many parts of the country.  I happen to know, because I have just received the experience of a woman who has established one.  Her home is in a little country market town not very far from London, a fairly busy place and popular with holiday makers.

 The Business Rest Cure. 

"When I came out of khaki,"  she told me, "my doctor advised me to stay at home and take things quietly for a while, and in answer to my protests at enforced idleness, he said jokingly: 'You'd better take that empty shop in the High-street and turn it into a wool repository, like it used to be when I was a boy!  The papers say that there is a wool craze ahead, and that women will soon be knitting all their own clothes, so you ought to do well!'
"It was meant as a joke, but it seemed to supply just what I had been trying  to find—an idea for 'something different' from my pre-war work, something that would give me some independence and which would not demand a terrifically large initial outlay.  So I did it.
"The empty shop which had been a Berlin wool shop in my grandmother's young days became mine for a moderate rental: it was painted and cleaned and made to look pretty, and one bright morning it was opened with some wools and fancy work goods arranged artistically in the window and myself behind the counter.  Since then it has been opened continually, and now there are two 'young ladies' in the shop as well as myself, and things are more promising and prosperous than I ever dreamed.

On the Wave  of Fashion. 

"No doubt the recent and present craze for woollen garments and trimmings has had something to do with it; all sorts of wools can be bought at my shop.  Embroidery silks, too, either for working cushions or frocks, besides all sorts of fringes, bead trimmings, braided work, and various made-up passementeries, for which there is a greater demand now than there has been for a quarter of a century or so.  Lately I have added some pillow and various English cottage laces to my stock, also lace-making equipment, and the results already have been very encouraging.
"One of my assistants is a good embroideress, and I have some 'outside workers,' who will do work to order, so that it is possible for me to take orders for work to be done—in particular, I find many women are glad to give orders for special dress trimmings of an everyday order, also for hat bands, children's clothes, and such like.

Lessons in Knitting. 

"To a lesser extent, too, unfinished work is completed; some orders are taken for knitted garments in special colourings, etc.; while the demand for lessons in knitting, lace-making, and embroidery of all sorts, is far greater than the outsider would imagine. It is so great. indeed, that I am seriously thinking of taking a clever friend into my business who will confine herself to teaching.
"It is an old idea which was dead and has been resuscitated, but it is worth reviving.  My wool shop is a flourishing concern: so is one on exactly similar lines which is run by another woman friend in a London suburb. And one hears people who drop in saying: 'How I wish someone would open a shop like this where I live.' "

The popularity of hand knitting lasted until after World War 2, and beyond.  When I learned to knit as a child, there seemed to be little wool shops everywhere.  In Huddersfield, Greenwoods closed long ago, when Miss Greenwood (aka Mrs Wakefield) retired in the 1960s - until then it flourished and expanded into the wholesale yarn business, run by Mr Wakefield.  It would be good to think that the woman in the article did well with her shop, too. 

Advent Calendars

In November, a group of knitters from the Huddersfield Knitting & Crochet Guild branch decided to share two Opal advent calendars - these calendars have 24 doors for the days of Advent, like other Advent calendars, but behind each door is a 15g. ball of Opal sock yarn.  There were 8 members of the calendar syndicate and 48 balls of wool, so 6 balls each - sounds simple, doesn't it?  No.  They devised an extremely complicated scheme - before any of the doors were opened, the ball behind each door was pre-allocated to a syndicate member.  Then each member had custody of one of the calendars for 6 days.  Every day she opened the appropriate door and posted a photo of the ball door could see what she was getting.  Here's one of the photos, posted by Ann Kingstone.

 And after six days, the keeper of the cube met the next keeper, to hand it over.

Yesterday was the grand finale, when the syndicate met to distribute the balls of wool to their owners. I wasn't a member of the syndicate, just a fascinated observer, but I went along to see how it all worked out.  They met in Salt's Diner in Salts Mill in Saltaire, the other side of Bradford.

Every member of the syndicate was given a pair of socks with their balls of wool stuffed inside.  Then there was some swapping, so that people could get a selection of colours that they liked.  There was even some discussion of what they might knit with the yarn - the 6 balls will make a pair of (very multi-coloured) socks, though you could mix them with a plain background colour and make something bigger like a shawl.  And as far as I could see, everyone was happy with their share, and keen to do it all again next year.      

By then it was dark, and we went into the village to see the Saltaire Advent windows, which are lit up every evening until January 5th.  Like any other Advent calendar, a new window was 'opened' every day in December until Christmas Eve, though they started with 10 windows on December 1st, so now there are 33 windows to see.   The windows are scattered all over the village, and I didn't have time to see many of them, but I did see some very well-designed and executed displays.  And the very first that we found was this:

   
It's all knitted or crocheted - poinsettias in pots, snowmen, paper chains, a gingerbread house,...

Knitted robins wearing woolly hats on a knitted snow-covered log:

Alpacas wearing woolly scarves (both crocheted, I think) under knitted mistletoe:

 (Alpacas are important in the history of Saltaire because Titus Salt, who built the village for his mill workers, made his money out of spinning alpaca yarn.)

So window no. 7 was a very good start for a party of knitters.  

Another favourite:  window 19, showing Father Christmas in his sleigh flying over the village.

And here's window 9, a display about Titus Salt's rules for the people living in Saltaire:

No pubs; No drinking alcohol; No hanging out washing; No animals in Saltaire.

You can read more about the rules here.  As far as I remember from a guided walk around Saltaire, the prohibition on hanging out washing was because Salt had provided a wash-house and he wanted the villagers to pay to do their washing there, but it wasn't popular.  Some villagers got around the rule by hanging out their washing on vacant land just outside the village.  And he wasn't against alcohol as such - the rules was really against being drunk, and he didn't want pubs where workers might meet and combine against him.  Philanthropic, but only up to a point.

The windows were worth seeing.  The Saltaire Living Calendar has been happening every Christmas since 2006, though I had not heard of it before this year - I'll go again next year, with enough time to see them all.  

Yarn Week

We often have a week in June when we concentrate on sorting out some aspect of the collection.  In 2014, we had Hook and Needle Week, when we sorted out thousands of knitting needles, hundreds of crochet hooks and lots of assorted tools and gadgets.  In 2013, it was Crochet Week - we intended to sort out all the crochet, but actually didn't get much beyond the dozens of doileys.  Last week was Yarn Week, focussing on all the shade cards and yarn samples in the collection.  As well as the volunteers who come regularly, several other Guild members joined us for a day or two.  Everything has been put in order where necessary and reboxed, and a start has been made on cataloguing.  Everyone involved did a great job - and I can say that because actually I didn't do any of it.  I still have boxes of publications to sort out, so I spent the week doing that.

But I did sneek a peek at some of the shade cards, along the way.  I was looking for the shade card for Jaeger Naturgarn, and found it in a binder of shade cards issued by Jaeger in 1979-80.

I remember knitting a Patricia Roberts design, Cream of the Crop, in the 1970s, in cream Naturgarn for the cables and welts and white mohair for the rest.  I wanted to check that my memory is correct, and it definitely is Naturgarn - the colour is called Polar.

And in the same binder was a shade card for Jaeger Gabrielle - I never bought any of it, but the ads were very memorable.  (So memorable that I can recall them after all this time.)

Jaeger Gabrielle ad

Shade cards - the proper ones with samples of the actual yarn, and not just photos of yarn - can be really attractive, with lovely colour ranges.  The names are very evocative, too: Wildwood, Glade, Autumn, Brick.  Some are a bit puzzling, though - why 'Ellesmere' (the name of a town and lake in Shropshire) for a cream/pink/light brown mix in Naturgarn?

Orenburg Lace

Yesterday evening, we had the monthly meeting of the Huddersfield Knitting & Crochet Guild, and I managed to get to it (with some help).  The theme of the meetings this year is 'Around the world in knitting and crochet', and yesterday we were in Russia.  Marie had done a lot of research (and a lot of work) on Orenburg lace shawls, and gave us a fascinating talk on its history.  She had bought a hank of Volgograd goat down yarn to show to us, and had acquired a sample of the original goat down - you can feel how warm and light it is just by letting it sit on the palm of your hand for a little while.  (Or so I'm told - the palms of my hands are still covered by the casts on my wrists, and it doesn't work quite as well on fingers.)  To make the yarn stronger, it's plied with another fibre - silk for the finest shawls.

Marie talked about the construction method used for the shawls: you knit the bottom border first, in a long strip;  then turn the corner, and pick up stitches along the straight edge of the border; then knit the centre of the shawl and the left and right borders all together, side to side; then turn the corner at top right and knit the top border, taking in the stitches from the top edge of the centre part as you go.  then finally at the top left corner, you join the top border and left border by grafting.  Not the grafting that you use on sock toes (aka Kitchener stitch), but Russian grafting.  Which was amazing to me, because I wrote about Russian grafting on this blog way back in 2010.  I had never heard of Orenburg lace back then, and it never occurred to me to wonder what Russian knitters might use Russian grafting for - I just thought it was a really neat way of joining shoulder seams (which it is).   But it is also (and I suppose originally) used for finishing Orenburg lace shawls.

Marie talked about the traditional motifs used in Orenburg lace, and had knitted a lot of samples to show them. The samples are constructed in the same way as a full-size shawl, with a border. Most of them were knitted in Rowan Kid Silk Haze, including the rectangular one at top, and this one with the lovely chain of hearts motif.

Chain of Hearts sample

 
And to emulate the finest Orenburg shawls, Marie had knitted a sample in an incredibly fine yarn -  Heirloom Knitting's Ethereal CashSilk (70% cashmere, 30% silk).  There are 1500m. of yarn in a 25g ball,  amazingly - it's finer than sewing thread, and I don't know how it's possible to knit with it. But evidently some people can, including Marie.  (Ethereal is an apt name, I think - "Extremely delicate and light in a way that seems not to be of this world".)

Lace sample in Ethereal Cashsilk 

It was a great evening - I'm so glad I managed to get to it.  Thanks very much to Marie for a fascinating talk, and for all the work she had done beforehand.

Ribbon Circus, finally

Back in February, I went to a fund-raising sale for Ribbon Circus in Hebden Bridge, one of the many businesses and houses in the Calder Valley that was flooded last December.   The shop re-opened in March, and I intended to visit shortly afteerwards, but it snowed on the day I was planning to go, so I didn't.  But finally, last Saturday, I got there.

It was a beautiful, sunny, warm spring day and Hebden Bridge was busy - it was great to see so many visitors returning.

And there were some very tempting yarns in Ribbon Circus.  I didn't buy any - it would be too frustrating to have new yarn when I can't knit.  (Due to two broken wrists, if you missed the earlier post.)   But I will.  The Juniper Moon 75% alpaca, 25% nylon was especially enticing - I'll be going back for some of that.  (It's sock yarn, but would be wasted on socks if you ask me - I'm not much of a sock knitter.)

Helen of Ribbon Circus, me with my casts, and lots of lovely yarn

Two more weeks until the casts come off my wrists, and the splint on my left leg gets changed for something that allows some bending of the knee.  Can't wait.