Thank you to everyone who has purchased yarn or spinning fiber from Black Bunny Fibers!
Your support and loyalty mean more to me than you can ever know.
by Jane Waller (Crowood Press Ltd. 2006) contains exactly what it says it does: updated patterns that were originally published in the 1940s, along with historical background and information about the styles and knitting culture of the time period. I discovered this book just by browsing on-line for new releases on a large internet bookseller's website. (The copyright page states that it was first published in 2006 in Britain but apparently it was only recently released in the U.S.) It's a delightful book -- and I'm surprised that with growing interest in vintage patterns (think Nancy Bush's Knitting Vintage Socks: New Twists on Classic Patterns
, or Victorian Lace Today
, for example) it hasn't gotten more press.the true joy of knitting is only obtained when it becomes a creative craft. The decrees of fashion demand much more than mere utility, so that the knitting art, practised in this way, becomes not merely a pleasing and useful relaxation, but also a genuine means of self-expression.[quoting Marjorie Tillitson, Knitting Book (1945)]. Waller warns her contemporary audience that knitting fashions of this time were knit using finer-gauge yarns and thinner needles, and although these garments took a little longer to make, they were tailored, featured beautiful stitchwork and other detailing, and remained favorites that were worn over and over again, recompensing the knitter for the extra investment of time. Wise words, Jane Waller.
, which was very kindly sent to me by a faithful reader and test knitter (thanks, Carol!) was heartbreaking, fascinating and infuriating. The subject of the book, David Reimer, suffered a horrible accident as a baby that resulted in a penisectomy. Under the guidance of a Svengali-like psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, his well-meaning parents had doctors perform a rudimentary sex-change operation and raised him as a girl. David's childhood was every bit as miserable as you might expect, and at age 14, when he learned for the first time what had happened to him, he resolved to switch back and live the remainder of his life as a boy. What is particularly infuriating is that the doctor who spearheaded the course of treatment apparently did not communicate to the parents that this was basically an experimental course of treatment and that the doctor's own scientific "methods" left a whole lot to be desired. In fact, even though Reimer's case could not be considered a success by any standard, the doctor continued to portray it as such, likely leading to more ill-fated surgeries on babies with damaged or ambiguous genitals.
Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.
with a scheduled release date of May 1st.
by Lily Chin, which is, I believe, available now, although I haven't seen it.
. The release date is June 1, and the publicity blurb states:Containing more than 200 swatch designs in her signature style, this is a must-have manual for beginning and experienced stitchers alike. Special chapters on fabric, motifs, grannies, and flowers highlight a myriad of patterns, including beautiful lace, shell, and cluster stitch variations, and gorgeous circular and hexagonal designs. Each chapter also includes stunning garments, such as a classic Chanel cropped jacket in woven mesh, a lacy shawl with leaf embellishments, and a 1920’s cloche cap covered in crocheted blossoms. Every one has a special individuality that transcends “here today, gone tomorrow” trends, so crocheters will enjoy these for a long time.
by Narumi Ogawa, coming out in July from North Light Books. I'm not a very good crocheter, but man, for ten or twelve bucks, I think I'd buy this one just for the title.
by Linda Kopp, also due in July.
. Her new book is Silk Knits: 20 Designs in Fabulous Fibers
(Martingale Press 2007).
I was charmed by the dedication, which features a vintage photograph of the author, her mother and her grandmother (all named Elaine). I liked the first section – though it was brief, less than ten pages of text – which talks about silk: its characteristics, a brief history of silk, how to swatch with silk, explanations of the various types of silk. This section contains some good, practical tips for working with silk yarns.
The remainder of the book consists of twenty patterns, which for the most part, did not appeal to me. The table of contents suggests that the patterns are divided according to seasons, but they are (oddly, I think) not presented in four separate chapters, but rather randomly, with small icons in the bottom corner to tell you that, say, the sleeveless top is for summer. The patterns consist of two shells, three cardigans (one with a rolled neck, one knit side-to-side to form vertical stripes (the cover pattern), the third oversized), four vests (a rib vest knit circularly thus forming a huge bull’s-eye on the back -- oh, the Lyme Disease rash flashbacks;
a ribbon-yarn vest worn like a shell, a slip-stitch vest and a textured vest); four pullovers (one yoked, two textured, one with an asymmetric tab closure), a simple stole (not knitted in lace), a shrug, a poncho, a mobius scarf/neckwarmer, a lace shawl and a scarf/hat combination.
In the introduction, the author writes “I don’t believe in complicated knitting,” and to be quite frank, it shows. Simple isn't necessarily bad, but very little about these patterns was unique or interesting to me (with the exception of the circularly-knit rib vest, which is creative). You’ll see a fair bit of dropped shoulders, not a lot of shaping, and so on; for example, here's the oversized cardigan, which doesn't have anything particularly unique about it and adds visual pounds.
I liked the use of the eyelets in the yoke of this sweater
and this is a lovely lace shawl -- by far the most complex and original pattern in the book.
The sensibility is directed, I think, toward a certain demographic of middle-aged women, and I think younger and more fashion-conscious knitters will find few "must-make" garments.
The yarn selection is odd: I had hoped for more attention devoted to knitting pure or mostly silk yarns and tapes that challenge knitters with their slipperiness and potential for sagging. But many of the designs are done in yarns that merely have silk content: for example, Garnestudio’s Silke Tweed (about half silk, half lambswool) – and some of the yarns used have less than a third silk content. If the book is devoted to the challenges and joys of knitting with silk, I’m not sure it adds anything to include, say, a pattern in Noro’s
When it comes to sizing, the finished bust measurement for the patterns varies from a minimum of 33 inches to a maximum of 60 inches (for the oversized cardigan), a very generous range, but not all designs include all sizes. There are schematics, a few charts, and some helpful text boxes with tips (like doing an intarsia join). There are lots of color photographs, including some good clear shots of each design. The patterns themselves are remarkably short and (except for the lace shawl) quite simple and direct. You know what I always say: when it comes to patterns, it all comes down to your taste. These patterns weren't mine, but they may be yours.
Silk can be a tough fiber to knit with, although its sheen, softness and drape are superlative. Those who haven't worked much with pure silks may find the introductory sections helpful, but I would not buy this book sight unseen; you'll need to judge for yourself whether you like the patterns enough to invest in it.
by Daniel Mendelsohn. Gripping story of a New York writer's search to discover what happened to his great-uncle and his family, who perished at the hands of the Nazis in wartime Poland. This book moved and fascinated me. I'm an amateur genealogist, so the allure of tracking down the long-lost family members -- including the details that make relatives more real ("she had great legs," "she was a snob," "he loved his wife so much")-- was irresistible to me, but when placed against the backdrop of the Holocaust, the book takes on tremendous depth and emotion. This one's going to stay with me for a while.
by Maureen Corrigan. Written by Fresh Aire's book reviewer in a sort of memoir meets lit crit, this one was a pretty quick read. NPR has been introducing me to some interesting reads: as a matter of fact, I heard the author of The Lost on it, and this one, too. (I started to wonder what kind of spell my local public radio station was casting on me when Marty Moss-Coane's interview of a guy who wrote a book on the glory of pigeons -- and no, it's not Sesame Street's Bert -- started to sound really interesting. But so far, I've passed on the pigeon book.) Corrigan's descriptions of how a love of reading helped her and hurt her hit home with me (oh, the agony of realizing that real teens were nothing like the ones in my Whitman novels!) . I also enjoyed her survey of books she particularly enjoyed, complete with analytical spin on them. (It's the first time I ever heard anyone else talk about the Beany Malone series
of books, which I read when I was a kid, as part of her Catholic schoolgirl lit discussion.)
At Stitches East last year, I helped a customer who was looking for Koigu. She was a very nice woman and she came clutching a Vogue Knitting in her hand, one that featured a beautiful multi-colored garment designed by one of the Koigu ladies. She also had a handwritten list of the color numbers and quantities used in the sample shown in the magazine. She handed me the list and asked which of these colors we had.
The simple answer was that I had no idea, nor did anyone in the booth (except maybe Lisa, whose steel-trap mind can recognize some colorways of Koigu; you’ve haven’t lived until you’ve trawled a yarn festival with Lisa, only to have her stop mid-sentence and dash over to a nearby booth, saying over her shoulder “I think they’ve got 107B!”)
This is particularly true of hand-painted yarns. Even if I take careful notes of the exact process I used – dye colors and proportions, the way I apply the dye, and so forth – I still can end up with two strikingly different batches of yarn that are supposed to be the same “colorway.” There are just too many variables, many of them intangible (perhaps different skeins of the same yarn were made from the wool of different sheep, or maybe one batch soaked longer, or maybe the strength of the dye varies slightly from container to container. I could think of a dozen more variables like that.).**
For this reason, when I do stuff for Black Bunny Fibers, I don’t profess to have a set of regular “colorways” nor do I profess to be able to exactly repeat any given set of colors. I can take a shot at it, and I might produce something that looks pretty close, but I can’t guarantee it. There are certain batches that I know beyond the shadow of a doubt I can’t replicate, because I sometimes mix all sorts of dyes together and it would be impossible to ever mix the same batches in the same ways again without taking painful copious notes – and at the risk of sounding like a smacked ass, part of the fun for me is playing around and seeing what I come up with. You know, following my muse and all that.
Still, I do struggle with the issue of replication. I frequently get emails from people saying “Hey, are you going to dye up any more of that [fill in the blank] colorway?” And I’d like to accommodate them, and I try, but it doesn’t always work out. Part of what makes my stuff unique (I hope) is the way I do it and becoming too anal about that would, I think, make my stuff more generic. This is not meant as an apology but simply an explanation.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that when it comes to handpainted yarns, particularly from small producers like me, try to ease up on the expectations. Sure, it may be comfortable and predictable to believe that your garment will look exactly like the one you saw, or that your skein will look exactly like the one on etsy. But isn’t it also kind of cool knowing that you have a skein that, by definition, is unique in all the world? Isn’t there something exciting about diving into the color and putting aside your -- or someone else's -- preconceived notions about it? Is making a mistake or getting something different than you anticipated such a horrible thing, or is it an inevitable byproduct of using unique yarns and fibers?
That was what I tried to explain to the Stitches customer. She’s probably still going from yarn shop to yarn shop, though, desperately trying to score 3 skeins of color 375 rather than trusting her own instincts about what she likes and what she thinks looks good.
*I learned this while knitting a baby blanket for my oldest kid. I ran out of cream cotton yarn and was stuck taking a different dye lot. When some friends came over and were admiring the blanket, my husband’s asshole observant friend said “Oh, look at the stripe in the blanket!” Yep, it was where the two dye lots diverged.
**In fact, even two skeins which are dyed together as part of the same dye lot, exactly alike in every controllable way, may look different – startlingly so – when you knit them up. This freaks a lot of people out, but it’s inevitable when it comes to yarns that are individually dyed.
The order, whose 55 members have been described as a "feisty crowd", are believed to have run up the debt after splashing out on six industrial knitting machines to produce woollens that became highly popular with the local community around their convent, close to the Greek-Bulgarian border. They apparently sold products to some 25 chains around Greece. Store owners complained that the nuns had also run off with a substantial amount in pocketed deposits. Apparently they removed their equipment a few days before they disappeared.
Greece's authoritative Kathimerini newspaper reported that the knitting business began to unravel when the nuns accrued massive debts after attending foreign fashion shows in a bid to keep up with the latest designs in woollen garments. They are then believed to have mortgaged the monastery of Kyrikos and Ioulittis to the hilt to pay off the debt.
