The Art of Knitting

Strange things happen around my old New England farmhouse sometimes. Things disappear. Sometimes I think that I am living with The Borrowers, or that the field mice are lining their winter nests with my knitting! The most recent things to go missing are all my fingerless mitts (I would call them gloves, except they don't have fingers). I've had a couple of pairs of my own Koigu Gloves pattern - one was my favorite green Broccoli mitts - and use them every fall before the weather gets cold enough for really serious gloves. But when I cleaned out and organized the coats, jackets, and accessories they were nowhere to be found - nowhere! Borrowers, indeed.

So...here are my quickly knitted replacements: Veyla, from Ysolda.



I can't say enough about this pattern. The finished gloves are so lovely and with their lace and details they look like a complicated knitting project - but they're not. The pattern is clear and very fast. I made this pair in three days, just working on them in the evenings while watching Rubicon.

My yarn is the wonderful MacKintosh Yarns in the Iona Fingering, which is a merino-cashmere blend, with a little nylon for durability. It's so soft and her colours are stunning in person. This colourway is a deep blend of dark teal blue and black - very "ocean-depths" coloured!



The buttons are antique faceted and silvered black glass. They were a gift from a friend and, I wanted to use them on something where I would see them often. I have enough for a sweater, though, so if I make something else that they would be good with, I might switch these up and use smaller ones on the Veylas.

These mitts fit perfectly and I'll use them on those early frosty Fall mornings we are having. (like today - 39 degrees Fahrenheit right now, although later today, it will be closer to 70!) I see more pairs of Veylas in my future!



The book in these photos is a precious antique volume of The Art of Knitting, 1902, published by The Butterick Publishing Co [Limited], London and New York, Price: fifty-cents or two shillings.



This incredible original came to me as a gift from my friend Marky in Australia - its a real treasure! This was obviously a well-used volume over the past 110 years, as the pages are filled with faded photographs of mysterious people, patterns cut out of other magazines of the day, and hints on cleaning felted hats and pressing silk sash ribbons between muslin... This photo is the beautiful "Maggie" holding a garland in her lap and perhaps dressed for a wedding with her deep V-necked gown and dainty button-up shoes.



The frontispiece is a very familiar one - a scene that I've found in several of my old knitting and crochet volumes from the mid and late 1800s, that of a grandmother teaching her granddaughter to knit, and leads me to believe that in a publication from 1902, at least some of the patterns have their origin in an earlier century. Perhaps this picture is meant to indicate that the patterns span generations?



The patterns are quaint, like this simple and quick pattern for sleeping socks:



Its heelless design and openwork pattern would make it a very easy pattern to work up in a bit of leftover wool or silk.

I particularly like this pattern for a cuff, with it's scalloped design and think I might make a pair to peek out from the slightly-too-short sleeves of my brown jacket:



And, of course, these beautiful mittens will have to find their way into my wardrobe this year. I don't really wear mittens much, so I'll probably re-design these to have open fingers.





On the very last page of this fragile booklet, the previous owner has pasted a pattern article from a 1915 newspaper - the WWI years. It is "A Cap Comforter for Tommy" - a hat and neck-cowl combination for a soldier in winter. With it's ingenious design and historical significance, I think it deserves it's own post, so plan to put that up in the future.

antique beaded purses

I finished the Tellum cowl (sorry for the crappy photo-in-the-mirror phone picture):



It still need a button (the one in the photo is just sitting on top, not sewn on) and weave in the ends. Its just what I wanted... a neck scarf without long ends. And I love that it's also a hat. I love to walk in the rain, but I hate the feeling of cold winter rain on the top of my head! and it's just cool that it's convertible.

Today I wanted to show you a most beautiful gift that a friend sent me some weeks ago:



It's an antique crocheted purse, of course, crocheted tightly from silk twist and it's design is crocheted in with steel cut beads. The fringe and tassels are twisted beads and their cut silver sides form a unique sparkling architecture.

These beaded purses amaze me. I always imagine the person who might have painstakingly made it, counting out one of a couple thousand tiny beads, then another and another, following a complex pattern.



That's one of the things I love about vintage pattern books - the connection with the actual person who used them. Some of the booklets, like the Fleisher Knitting and Crocheting Manuals, have beautiful pen line drawings of knitters and crocheters going about their happy pastimes. They read by bow windows and ski in hand knits down small natural slopes, and gather with friends to window-shop. And all the time, they're creating these beautiful items that take so much skill and detail. It really makes me want to up my game, and stop doing small instant-gratification type projects. Well, I can dream. :)

Oh, by the way, last night I ordered another set of needles. I got the notice that they had shipped this morning. This afternoon, I found my original unused set, in the very place I had looked all week. It must have happened for a reason, but my poor credit card is saying "ouch!"

My other life (number 27)

Those of you who know me IRL, know that I've been living several lives at once for a long time. Like Paul Revere (though not as brilliant, of course), who was a politician, a craftsman, a landlord, and a shop-keeper, I move from one castle of the heart to another - sometimes through several different occupational identities in the same day. One of my other lives is as an antique textiles restorer.

The piece that I'm working on is an 88 square cotton crochet coverlet. Its owner tried to brighten it by soaking in bleach. And bleach, as we all know, is an eroder of natural fibers - it literally eats them away.... when you lift the item from its bleachy bath - whether it's antique lace or cotton lingerie - this is what you find:



My heart goes out to lovely antique lace or clothing painstakingly handmade that has been destroyed in a matter of minutes by an uninformed descendant and inherited by a chagrined historical society or museum.



The first thing I do is to lay the lace on a dark surface and catalog the damage. I make a grid or use graph paper and designate each square by horizontal and vertical rows to note both its specific destruction and how many stitches are needed to mend it and what kind. For instance, the tear above is

#15 2/5 to 2/6; 3 triangles 4 loops 2 st

This coverlet had 102 areas needing mending.

Matching the weight and colour of the original materials is an important prep step, too. I have a collection of vintage crochet threads and knitting yarns that I use for this purpose. Usually lace thread this old is the colour of old bones. But in the case of cotton crochet thread that has been bleached, new white thread is needed to match the now too-white colour.



In most cases, I use my antique tools in order to match the size and effect of the original stitches as closely as possible. Most of the old crochet hooks that I have were inherited from relatives and most of my antique knitting needles have been gifts from my friend Marky. The particular lace hooks that I used for this bit of lace were a gift from my bf one Christmas:



Over time, cotton crochet stitches pull against each other and tighten so that it's sometimes hard to get even a lace hook between the threads. In many places I didn't have the tiny hook size I needed so I crocheted with the tip of a sewing needle.

I also use any vintage books I have to look up the lace pattern that was used in the original. I don't have nearly the archive that I need, and in this case I ended up recreating a square of the pattern by counting stitches visually. Once I've established in my mind how each part of the original was created, I use that knowledge to mend the individual portions. In this case, the design was a multiple of three: each part was either 3 stitches, 6, 9, or 12 stitches, etc. This helps to keep the proportions of the mended parts equal to the original parts. After this, it's just a matter of painstakingly and methodically moving from one square to the next, referring to my grid and sample-square notes, and mending, mending, mending. I always incorporate any remaining ends of threads into the mend - this results in a stronger overall fabric that won't unravel through another 100 years of wear.

Here are the photos of the same area as the first one, above, after I was finished: