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Miniature Entry Advice That Made a Difference

My favorite quote by the late Maya Angelou isnt from one of her poems, and in fact theres not even a trace of it (that I can find) online.

It came from an answer to a college students question about changing the world. She told the student that if you want to change the world, start by making your bed every day.

Why?

Because if you havent got sufficient will and dedication to do that one simple thing, you might want to reconsider whether you have what it takes to reach your more ambitious goals.

You dont have to agree with her about this. But I do. And its one of the only pieces of Advice from a Sage Thinker that has made any damn difference in what I do with my day.

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Miniature Entry Other String

Im in Madison, Wisconsin. This weekend was the local (enormous) guilds annual Knit-In, and they asked me to come up and do a bunch of fun stuff. On Friday I gave a talk. It was all very prim, as is my wont, but they made it sound dirty.



For the record, a night with me ends at about nine. Party down.

I leave for home in just a wee while but wanted to show a bit of progress with the tatting. When I remembered that dear, old Weldons Practical Needlework had offered tatting numbers of course I had to pull them out and see if they were any good. Turns out they were.

Working in odd moments between furious, deadline-driven labor Ive crept along to two-thread tatting (Some folks call it continuous tatting or tatting from the ball.) This is a Weldons two-thread edging.



The thread (some old crochet cotton I had lying around) is really too coarse for the work and my tension is all over the place; but hey, Im having a good time.

When I showed the first shots of my tatting I got a couple of comments–some quite concerned–that this must signal the end of my engagement with knitting. Really? Really? How? Why?

Are you afraid Ill be unable to resist the pull of the tatting market, and the legions of tatting enthusiasts who flock in their thousands to the glamorous international tatting circuit? Are you certain that within a year Ill have been put under contract to appear exclusively on one of the several tatting television series that ornament the airwaves?

This happens every time I mention a craft other than knitting.

So, to clarify.

If I write about a flirtation with crochet, tatting, weaving, embroidery, quilting, sewing, or any other fiber-y fabric-y gerund, it doesnt mean Im jumping off the knitting ship. It means Im looking to find out what else string can do for you. I find it refreshing. I find it inspiring. I dont believe in craft monogamy or textile purity. Im all about seeing how techniques combine and complement.

I wrote a piece for Lion Brand Yarns about my desire to see knitting and crochet returned to their former unity. With John Mullarkey Ive been mixing knitting and weaving in projects like our Ligeia Stole. And when a Madison student brought this in to show me, my heart skipped a beat:



She found it rolled up in her grandmothers sewing machine. On the right is a tatted chain. On the left is what the chain looks like when you complete the edging pattern with...crochet.

Mix it up. Mix. It. Up.

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Miniature Entry Life at Sea

At present I am aboard the Cunard liner Queen Victoria, sailing from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale via the Panama Canal.

If youve been reading for a long time you know I love Cunard ships, past and present. I am supposed to be having (on doctors orders) a complete rest from work but of course you know I wasn’t going to climb aboard without any knitting.

So Ive taken to doing a little in the Winter Garden, in the mornings. As you would expect, its a surefire conversation starter. The passengers are in the main fairly elderly. I wouldnt be surprised if a few of them knew Queen Victoria personally. When she was a little girl. I couldnt be happier–this is my crowd. We tend to like the same music and the same movies.

I was clicking away a few mornings ago as we headed for Costa Rica and a flurry of tropical print hove into view. The person in the print stopped, then dropped into the next chair. She was English, ambiguously eighty-ish, artfully preserved.

"That," she said, pointing at my knitting, "is very impressive work. My father was a knitter, so I know."

Whereupon we started chatting.

She is doing the World Cruise, Southampton to Southampton. This is something like her forty-fourth Cunard voyage. (The brand breeds loyalty.)

"Of course my favorite is and forever shall be the QE2," she said. "Theyll never build another like her."

I nodded. I never sailed in her, mind you. I only saw her, once, back when I was on the Minerva II and she docked beside us in Malta. I remember that seeing C-U-N-A-R-D on the side of ship for the first time gave me chills.

"But may I say something? Im going to say something."

She leant toward me and through her dark round sunglasses I could feel her glare. "You young* people," she said firmly, "have absolutely no stamina and no idea how to have a good time. No. Idea."

I raised my eyebrows.

She pointed towards the windows above us, which belong to Hemispheres–the ships disco. "They will close that bar tonight at one oclock and you will all go to sleep. Ridiculous. Ridiculous! On the QE2 we never dreamt of bed before sunrise. A party every night. Until sunrise. We knew how to have a good time. You young people, I dont know whats wrong with you."

"Well," I said, "the seventies were different, weren’t they? All that cocaine would keep anybody awake."

This time her eyebrows went up. She leant even closer.

"Youd better believe it, kid," she whispered. "Youd better believe it."

 *Yes, on this ship Im young. Im quite possibly the youngest person aboard not scrubbing pots or being looked after by the Cunard nannies.

Note: The lady in the photograph is not the lady in the story. Shes another lady, with whom I danced rather madly one evening.

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Miniature Entry On Pattern Writing

When you design knitting patterns for multiple clients, part of the deal is sending in your finished patterns using each clients house style.

This can become confusing when three patterns for three clients all reach the finish line simultaneously.

One client insists that "inches" always be written out in full; one insists you must always use the double apostrophe (non-curly!) and never the word; the third will only accept the abbreviation "in" (no period!).

You pause in your writing, and remember a very nice student asking, "Why dont we have one standard for knitting patterns? Dont you think that would be a good idea?" and you laugh quietly and reach for the rum bottle.

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Miniature Entry Intern

I decided that before one of this weeks finished pieces goes to its forever home, it needs a little extra love. Pride in your finishing isnt everything, but its almost everything.

I brought it with me here, to the coffee shop where I do so much work that we call it my field office. Between bouts of pattern writing I ripped out the imperfect seam and started sewing a new one.

A nice little girl, maybe six years old, came in with her mother for a hot chocolate. I liked her immediately, as you often do take to a person whose drink of choice is also yours.

As they sipped and chatted, it was pretty obvious the girl was curious about my work. The mother quietly told her to stop staring, but I asked if shed like a closer look.

She stood at my shoulder and I showed her what I was doing with the needle. I chanted a little bit for her, the way I always do in my head when I sew by hand. Up, around, down, through. Up, around, down, through.

"Oh!" she said, after about six stitches. "I get it. You have to do it the same way, in the same places, all the way to the end. And thats how you win."

Kid, youre hired.

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Miniature Entry New York

The desk clerk on the second floor at The Strand looked exactly like a Fred Armisen character from Portlandia and I was going to snicker and then I realized that I was wearing a bow tie and a 1930s Swedish shooting jacket and a newsboy cap and wingtip shoes and a chin beard and so do I.

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Miniature Entry Cheat Sheet from the Past

A dear friend recently gave me a magnificent present that deserves (and will get) its own entry. But tucked inside this gift was a piece of paper, the survival of which amazes me.

Its a sheet of the slick, translucent typing paper that some of us remember was called onionskin.

Yellowed, battered, and containing...



typed instructions for Kitchener stitch.

Below the typed copy is a spidery line of manuscript that reads...

ME spiral narrow at 19" narrow quickly

Somebody was making socks, I bet. Knee socks, maybe? If you were to knit a 19-inch tube, quick spiral decreases would give you a toe at the right point for a short womans knee sock.

Or, possibly, "spiral" applies to "ME" and the socks were akin to the spiral stockings (knit without heel shaping) in Mary Thomass Knitting Book.

I cant say with any certainty what "ME" means. Make Even? Possibly, though its not a usage I have run across before.

In the upper right corner is a name and address:



Alice Maynard
558 Madison Avenue, N Y City

I wondered who she was, what sort of apartment she would have had on Madison Avenue in the East Fifties, and why she was typing instructions for Kitchener stitch for one of my friends relatives. The miracle of the Internet gave me an answer in seconds:

Expert Guidance Offered to Knitter and Crocheter (New York Times, August 18, 1964)

Knitting help at Macys,* Gimbels, and Bloomingdales. The mind boggles.

If any of you have memories of knitting at Macys, Gimbels, or Bloomingdales; or of shopping at Alice Maynard, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

*Although Macys "has no time for anyone who has not mastered the basic stitches." Love it.

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