A Pox On Jargon

Please note: I will never, ever describe the color of anything as a "colorway".

Yee gawds, save me from unnecessary jargon.

I do not know when it became hip to describe one's yarn choice as a "colorway" -- perhaps when knitting became hip (again; is this the 2nd or 3rd time in my life?).

I hate jargon; it is silly and exclusionary.

If we love our craft, we should make it as accessible as possible, including the ways in which we talk and write about it.

Besides, it would truly be teh stoopid to say I knit Niebling patterns with "cotton sewing thread in a white colorway".

The Areas Of My Anality

This is the story of a woman whose standard size knitting needle is a 000, and who habitually knits with cotton sewing thread.

I learned how to knit when I was 10 or so. I had already been exposed to sewing, embroidery, crochet and quilting — I knew how to do them, but none of those handcrafts really grabbed me, to where I knew I wanted to devote hours and hours to total mastery.

Knitting was different. My mother was teaching herself to knit, and I picked up one of her books, figured out how to cast on, and I was off and running. Until I graduated from high school, I was rarely without a knitting project on my needles — usually baby sweaters or booties for the nieces and nephews that had started arriving about the same time I learned to knit.

I stopped knitting for several years, having started to devote myself to drinking. I picked it up again when I sobered up in my mid-20s. It was like coming home to an old friend — but soon, I became bored with just knitting sweaters and afghans and the like.

Borrriiiiiing. But, by the early 1990s, hand spinning had a resurgence in the United States; I bought my first spinning wheel, a used Louet, for $100 (a lot of money for me in those days!) at a fiber fair. I struggled to learn the coordination between treadling and drawing during the Clarence Thomas hearings, never quite sure if I wanted to throw the bobbin at the teevee because of my frustration at the hearings, or my frustration at my inability to produce a useable yarn.

Learning to spin was like learning to ride a bike or drive a stick shift: eventually something "clicked", and I could treadle and draw and had the control to produce whatever type of yarn I wanted to. It's been many, many years since I've done any spinning — it takes a lot of space and goodly blocks of un-interrupted time, such that life with children and cats makes spinning difficult. I do, however, have a trunk full of unspun fibers, and four wheels awaiting my eventual attention.

When I was pregnant with Elder Son, I started knitting again — back to baby sweaters and booties! One day, when I was at the yarn store, I happened upon The Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting by Marianne Kinzel.

Oooooh. I just had to know how to do that! I've knit many of the patterns in both the First and Second Books of Modern Lace Knitting — along with collecting every publication I've come across over the years. In 1996 I completed the "Tudor Rose" pattern on size 000 (3/0) needles, using cotton sewing thread (that's size 50 thread). It's framed and hanging over the mantel in the living room. I've also done the "Daffodil" pattern on size 000000 (6/0) needles, using size 100 thread (see above).

Now, I am not, over all, an extremely anal person: my filing system is "piles of paper until I get around to putting them away"; housework... bleh. My "style" of garden design is "oooh, what an interesting plant, now where can I possibly stuff it".

But I do have my areas of analness. Like time: I am totally anal about timeliness. And at work, I'm absolutely adamant about the need to properly format documents (I'm a legal secretary).

And lace knitting — an exercise in absolute anality. To have it work, one must count, count, and count again — the correct number of stitches, in the correct order, must be maintained.

I hadn't done any lace knitting for 5 years or so — until I saw some German knitting magazines on ebay, touting the lace patterns of Herbert Niebling.

OMFG WTF! The designs were so outrageously good I told the Mister I'd be dropping some big bucks to buy several of the magazines; the designs are highly prized by lace knitters, and few are available outside of the German publications. There is one book in English of his patterns, and the biography portion reads:

[Niebling] said about himself, "As the composer writes down he notes that he hears, in the same way I write down the stitches that I see." Herbert Niebling was born in 1905 in Holstein and was already knitting his own socks as a six year old. Knitting and knitting patterns cast their spell over his entire life. When he died in 1966 in Frieburg he had created thousands of designs for knitted lace over the course of his forty year career and had knitted many tablecloths himself.

So, I bought several German magazines, and ordered Lyra from Lacis. Since late December 2009 I’ve finished 2 Niebling patterns — Lyra and Goldregen — and I’ve started a third, one of the patterns from The Knitted Lace Designs of Herbert Niebling.

Alas, I didn’t find Lyra to be that difficult to knit; Goldregen had some interesting-to-execute stitches (although I made changes in knitting similar stitch combinations on the subsequent Niebling), but really, conceptually wasn’t that difficult.

When dealing with challenges which require anality, I find techniques which minimize the possibilities of going off-track. With Nieblings, using an abundance of stitch markers to map out each motif in each section (with Goldregen I often had a dozen markers in each section), it became very easy to track just where I was, and what I should be knitting.

So I needed to find a new challenge, and I have: I’ve embarked upon knitting the Princess Shawl from Heirloom Knits, which I’m executing in pale gray cashmere/silk.

I will return to Nieblings — I can use his designs as a break from the Princess Shawl. And I am finding the every-row-pattern of knit lace, as opposed to the every-other-row-pattern of lace knitting, to be a challenge. Additionally, it surprised me how differently I have to tension the cashmere/silk thread compared to cotton sewing thread.

I am hoping to convince others that "knitting small" isn't that hard. It just takes a little getting used to. If, like me, you have middle-aged eyes (I'm 51), you might require reading glasses; and you do need good light. But otherwise, anyone who has mastered the basics of lace knitting can turn a tablecloth pattern into a piece of art for one's walls.