Knitting – Adventures in Design

Poppy & the Carpet Beetles

A couple of years ago I found that Poppy, the tiny knitted red bear my sister made for my son, Julian, when he was little, had been eaten by critters – moths or carpet beetles, I don’t know which. I had found the little bear in some box after losing track of it for a long time and sat her on the shelf above the counter in the kitchen where we have a collection of treasures from different times and places. Some time later I found she was full of holes and I put her in the freezer. She has been there ever since. Now every time I get some ice cubes, I see Poppy, lying there in the drawer, her tiny scarf around her neck, her stuffing coming out through her side.

I saw some carpet beetles on the windowsill of my bedroom over the summer. My historic community doesn’t allow screens on the windows, as they are considered to disrupt the historic look of the community (though I suggest cars and electricity lines do that handily and more obviously) so bugs come in. Seeing the carpet beetles concerned me at the time but I didn’t find any evidence of damage until recently when I put on a wool skirt I rarely (never?) wore. I saw light through a constellation of holes in the fabric but saw no critters themselves.

Seeing the holes made me panic. My house is full of wool – clothes, carpets, yarn, fabric, embroideries. I started to search and found a tiny felted purse (made by my sister Noni) on my desk had been ravaged. A ball of yarn was lying in a shatter of fiber dust. A large tote I had embroidered showed small areas of damage. I felt agitated and sick with fear that there was more I couldn’t see being made by critters still too small to detect. I put the tote and some other embroideries in the freezer with Poppy, put a pile of carpets on the porch in the cold and started looking for internet resources on repelling and killing moths and carpet beetles.

Oil & Alcohol: Eucalyptus, Clove, Cedar & Neem

Based on what I found, I have begun to use essential oils – 10 drops suspended in a cup of isopropyl alcohol and sprayed over vulnerable woolens using a misting hand-pump: the efficacious essential oils are eucalyptus, clove, cedar & neem.

The oils I purchased came from https://www.bulkapothecary.com/standardized-and-commercial-grade/

A few online resources with detailed methods for managing infestations and controlling beetle populations can be found here:

15 Quality Home Remedies To Get Rid Of Carpet Beetles

https://www.wikihow.com/Get-Rid-of-Carpet-Beetles

http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7436.html

BEWARE: Lavender, my sister found, attract critters instead of repelling them and so should be avoided (A shearling coat showed damage around the label where she had hung a sachet of lavender on the neck of the hanger; not the desired outcome!). Borax sprinkled onto fabrics and brushed into the fiber is supposed to kill the destructive beasts.

Despite these new measures, I also made a mistake. I pitied the skirt full of holes and didn’t throw it away right away. Now I have found some damage in a piece of knitwear I recently finished and which I worked on such tiny needles for so long that I damaged my left hand. And now before I have even woven in the ends I find that there is a hole and I feel stupid for pitying the material of a skirt I had really never worn. That pity – the thought that I could mend it or salvage parts of the material – has resulted in damage to things I care much more about. I didn’t think far enough ahead. I couldn’t see the critters in the skirt so I didn’t properly assess the threat keeping it posed. Looking at the shawl, I know I can not make it over given my injury. I can only repair it.

Since writing the paragraph above, I have thrown the skirt away, and resumed the process of inspecting everything else in the room for holes. I need to re-spray with eucalyptus, dust with borax, wash, repair, protect, purge.

Synthetics

Substituting natural fibers with synthetic fabrics is one of the recommendations for avoiding carpet beetles described in the different articles to which I have linked above. It’s also the solution I (and probably you, dear reader) am unwilling to try for multiple reasons Many of my wool things are beautiful examples of handwork – handmade carpets, embroideries, handsewn garments and knitted accessories. I won’t give them up as I am committed to them, invested in them as repositories of memories, of stories, my own time, labor, pain, love. The handmade fabrics made by others are beautiful in themselves and their beauty is justification enough for preserving them. At the same time, to me they represent social lives, even if I don’t know what those lives were before those textiles came to me. They were witnesses to particular truths and moments in the lives of their makers during their production, truths and moments that are unknowable to me. And the things I have made have similar social lives that are largely known to me, but not wholly. These social lives have a romance, a poetry, a history that should be guarded, shepherded into the future.

The beauty and value of textiles made in natural fibers is not the only reason I want to keep my natural fibers. Shrinking my carbon footprint is another that has an increasing urgency. I want to minimize the extent to which I use petroleum-based fibers and materials. I want to minimize the extent to which I use fibers that shed micro-plastics into our water supply. I want to minimize the extent to which I use fabrics that will never bio-degrade. I have always preferred natural fibers, over synthetic ones, for their sensuous qualities. Now I value them, too, for how they sequester carbon.

The Second Scarf

In my last post I told you about my knitting experiment. I wanted to re-create my first scarf. So I did. It had its challenges like any new project and required me to develop new skills. Being random, or at least appearing random, intentionally requires effort and control. I developed a technique. I got better at it.

In this image you can see the uneven quality of the knitting:

Not only did I vary my stitch length and tension. I varied the number of stitches in the rows, adding and subtracting to create a varied profile. It was simple knitting. No purling. No rib. This sort of knitting-every-row knitting can boring. Instead, it was interesting and I started to to control the inconsistency. I know this goes against the stated project but I did want to achieve the look of the child-knitting I sought to re-create.

Then I styled it. The first styling I did (and which I show you here) I have used before with a long rectangle. I think I love this one in particular because it transforms the long rectangle so completely that it is often a revelation to the knitters I talk to. There is a kind of knitting epiphany that can happen on multiple levels. First, that a plain old long rectangular scarf could take on such a dramatic shape. And second, that my screw-in pedestal buttons and closures can take you out of the button box, so to speak. This one unique styling of a simple shape can lead to the realization that these styling tools can take any simple shape to a different level. Simple shapes can become dramatic, sculptural shapes that show-off the knitting (why would you hide it after working so long) and show off you!

To follow is a series of images of the first styling from different angles. What can you do with your simple rectangles and a little JUL? I would love to see your images on Instagram.

Tag @jul_designs / #juldesigns so I will see your images.

Use the coupon code FIRSTSCARF for 15% off pedestal buttons and the Cordoba Series closures.

Front:

Front right:

Back:

Side back:

Don’t forget: I want to know what you can do with your simple rectangles and a little JUL? I would love to see your images on Instagram.

Tag @jul_designs / #juldesigns so I will see what you are up to.

Use the coupon code FIRSTSCARF for 15% off pedestal buttons and the Cordoba Series closures.

More stylings coming soon . . .

First Knitting

I was seven when my mother taught me how to knit. She learned from her aunt Elma. I don’t know exactly what the kinship arc was that connected my mother to Elma and made Elma my mother’s aunt and for this story it doesn’t matter.

I don’t remember the learning-to-knit part. I remember the first project once it was done. It was white wool, a short scarf, and very uneven and badly shaped in the way first knitting projects can be – wide at the start and loose, narrowing to the center and way too tight, then widening again as I tried to rectify the tightness in the center. Some stitches were too big, others too small. It didn’t look like my mother’s even knitting.

I gave it to my father as a gift. It was soft and I guess I must have been proud enough to have made it that I could give it to my dad even though, when compared to fine knitting, it was clearly no good.

My father wore it. That amazed me. That he wore that no-good first-knitting little white neck warmer totally amazed me. He would fold one side over the other to cover his neck. The narrow part fit at the back of his neck. The two wide ends came down to the top of his chest. Then he’d put on his coat. As I remember it, he wore it alot. And even if that is a bit of hyperbole my amazement wrought, I’ll take it.

I decided to re-create that first scarf. My motivation was simple enough. I thought about how, if it is sufficiently inept, a first project can alienate one from trying again. When we face real difficulty in achieving a goal of mastery, we may decide we are no good at it, are lacking in some fundamental talent that other people clearly have but which to us is inaccessible or elusive. We hold our first-starting-out selves up against those with years of experience and find ourselves so lacking that we lose hope and lost interest. The thing is no good. It’s no use. It’s unwearable.

The fact that my father wore that badly-knit scarf his little daughter made gave me the confidence to execute the next project, which was better. Even if the scarf was unwearable to me, it was not unwearable to my father.

But I contend that an unwearable scarf -from the perspective of even tension and a consistent number of stitches – can become wearable if it is styled well. The unintentional can be wrestled into submission to intention with the right approach and good tools. The first scarf can take us from ambivalent about the issue of our first efforts to more than proud: stylish.

This transformation is what I work for. It’s my job. I design and produce accessories. The justification for my work, my company, is my need, your need, for tools to turn handmade fabrics (knitted, crocheted, handwoven) and purchased garments into beautiful wearables that show the fabric off and make the wearer feel beautiful in addition to looking stylish.

My closures should make your life in fiber-wear easier. I want the same things you want. I want to look good without thinking about it too much. I want to go about my days undistracted by difficulties with my clothes. I don’t want my scarves falling off and catching in drawers when I bend over. I don’t want my shawl to slide off one shoulder and require re-arranging many times a day.

I felt sure that I could take a first scarf, of the kind I made when I was 7 years old, from wonky to wonderful with a few screw-in closures. So I cast on.

It’s hard to return to a pre-control moment when you can’t achieve an even tension, have trouble discerning where a stitch begins and ends, and haven’t yet learned to purl. I got better at inconsistency and wonky as time went on. Well, that’s not quite true. Because I was working toward inconsistency, in a sense I became more consistent in my achievement of inconsistency. Even naive execution contains the possibility of mastery.

So I finished it. The end with the cast-on yarn trailing, is where I started. The increase of stitches to make the scarf slightly wider was fairly subtle. I wanted it to be more extreme. My inconsistency in tension was not enough. I pushed it harder. By the time I finished, I felt I had begun to master the first scarf. If I make another, I’ll do even better at bad knitting.

Now comes the interesting experiment – adorning the first scarf so it becomes an enviable style piece, a fabulous example of hand-knit art you might expect in a high-end chic boutique. This is my goal.

What is your first-knitting story? I would love to hear it. You are welcome to tell me about it in a comment.

If you want to start growing your style toolkit, go to juldesigns.com

Check out my instagram @jul_designs to see how I have styled this Simulation and get 15% Off the Pedestal Buttons and screw-in closures in the Cordoba Series when you use coupon code FIRSTSCARF.

Shared Birth – The Beginning of a Reflection on Mothers and Sisters (and believe it or not . . . knitting)

The approach of my birthday, Mother’s Day and making room for my son to return home from college became an occasion for reflecting on family and creativity.

My twin sister Nora – of Noni Designs – and I were born at the beginning of May in 1967. Our poor mother thought she was having one big boy. Instead she got two tiny girls born six weeks early. We were incubator babies, supposed to be Gemini (the doctor predicted a delivery date of June 12) but instead born Taurus. Did that change everything?

We would have been Daniel if we were a boy and Nora if a girl. So my sister, who was first, is Nora. May name Laura was hastily selected; I am named after my mother’s maternal grandmother.

This is what we looked like when we were born. Nora is on the left (I think). I always look at the lips if I am in doubt.

In later pictures it’s easier to tell us apart.

AGED THREE?

I have no idea who made these matching sets of ponchos and tams. Maybe it was my paternal grandmother, who was an avid knitter in the English style. But they could also have come from one of the aunts on my maternal grandfather’s side, who all knitted continental, having emigrated from Sweden. (UPDATE: Since I wrote the above, my mother has commented that she thinks they were made for us by our Auntie Jo. Jo was fictive kin and an important creative figure in my life, and probably for my sister too. Auntie Jo was the first artist I knew. That is, she did more than knit and sew like the other women in the family. Auntie Jo painted. She made wood carvings. She was in gallery shows. And she made phenomenal pecan pie. She was not a pretty woman. She would tell you this herself. But she was beautiful to me and she had black hair until she died.)

My sister was a cherub. I often appear mischievous. In the picture below, knowing that, you can guess I am on the left. We must have been about 3.

PART OF THE EXTENDED FAMILY

You can pick out my sister easily if you look for the cherub. She is on the right in my uncle Al’s lap (father’s brother). To the left of him is Nancy, his first wife. My mother is to Nancy’s left next to me. And I’m on my father’s lap looking sullen. I like this picture. It was taken in Boston before the family moved to Maryland when we were four.

And here are just the two of us during that same visit:

Me less intense, my sister distracted by one of my parents?

STARTING TO REFLECT

I started looking at these photographs because I had to empty the beautiful creative space I made for myself and about which I wrote some months ago. The reason: Julian is returning home but I’ll tell you that story in a different post. The room was spare but full of treasures and I took my time compiling and moving, looking at each thing, letting the objects evoke past adventures, most of them with Julian. And I found an old book of photos, from which came most of the pictures here. The moment for reflecting on them was perfect because it was only days away from my sister’s and my birthday. So I thought about my sister and our mother. I thought about our father. I thought about my son and what it has been like to be his mother and to mother him differently than I was mothered, to raise him without a father.

And I thought about my first knitting project, which I gave to my father.