Book Review: Interweave Knits Winter 1997

Title: Interweave Knits, Winter 1997

Author: Interweave Knitting original staff

Publisher: Interweave Press

Date: 1997

ISBN: not applicable

Length: 88 pages

Illustrations: glossy full-color photos on every page

Quote: “[W]e offer some quick-knit projects that you can make in a few hours…[or]…more challenging double-knit pieces that will carry you through the long winter days ahead.”

And at least three patterns for women’s sweaters without that snug band of ribbing across the hips.

That was editor Marilyn Murphy, reminiscing about how her yarn store used to get seasonal floods of requests for help to finish projects by a special day, most often Christmas, making the store staff feel like “Santa’s little elves” and hosting all-night knitting bees. Though Interweave Knits was still growing into a major magazine for creative hand knitters, its for-us-by-us, baby-boomer-feminist vibe was strong. The few patterns chosen for this magazine were practical: last-minute projects for those who weren’t going to get that elaborate sweater finished by Christmas Eve, and potentially extremely warm (and complicated) double knitting.

And the cover jacket, daringly photographed as a close-up of a sweater rather than a face, definitely qualifies as a challenge because of all the jacquard inlaid colors and the elaborate shaping of that flattering V-pointed yoke and flaring, hip-skimming, skirtlike bottom section. I want to do it. I’ve not done it yet.

Then we come to the double-knitting section. Double knitting is a slipstitch technique worked with two yarns (contrasting colors are optional) to create, as you choose, either a double-thick reversible fabric, a tube of two separate layers of fabric, or two separate but identical pieces of fabric at one time, depending on how you start, stop, and twist the yarns along the way. I’ve used it to insert pockets and make scarves. If I’d wanted to take the time, this magazine is a complete tutorial that would have guided me from a two-layered hotpad (be sure to use all natural fibres, because synthetics will melt) through a two-layered baby blanket through a pair of double-thick mittens to, finally, a pair of elaborately shaped two-color sweaters, one with a matching hat. If you work two-colored double-knitting correctly the two sides will be photographic negatives of each other: one side will have white figures on a black background, and the other side will have black figures on a white background. One sweater has traditional “rose” motifs; one has reindeer.

Several of the knitters who contributed designs to Interweave Knitting in its first ten years were stars of the contemporary knitting universe. Marcia Lewandowski was not the only one who published books of original designs. Her mittens pattern in this magazine is by no means the most unusual (or challenging) pattern in Folk Mittens but its inclusion does give me a chance to mention that I’ve always been glad I bought copies of—well, the copy I kept actually has Folk Mitens on the spine. Copies, plural, either sold or given to friends long ago; my own copy is not for sale. It’ll take years to explore all the mitten-knitting ideas in Folk Mittens.

What makes me think a pattern magazine this old is still likely to interest women today is the fact that knitting, viewed properly as a way women empower themselves rather than a way they can be exploited by the fashion industry, does not really have fashion as most of us know it. Instead, a pattern that’s quirky and arty one year (the way that cover jacket was in 1997) is the fashion for another year. Since sweaters were originally men’s wear (and mostly underwear), all the classic, easy knitting designs naturally fit some women better than others, adapt to suit another subgroup in the group “women” better than others. Top-heavy women have no problem with the way the traditional sweater shape has a snug band across the wide part of the hip, or can be cropped to hug a narrow waistline. Bottom-heavy women are always interested in designs that skim vaguely off the hipline, whether those designs are seen as quirky or as trendy.

So, this magazine offers a selection The cover jacket is a long A-line; the Double Exposure Jacket in double knitting actually has a traditional shape with a color pattern that gives the illusion of widening toward the bottom, but once you’ve worked your way through the other double knitting patterns you’ll be ready to give it as much of an A-line as you want; and the “Ribbons and Snowberries” pullover, with those slimming vertical lines, can be cropped or lengthened as you like.

Though “Ribbons and Snowberries” looks more like a variation on Aran traditional patterns than on Scandinavian ones, it opens a section of patterns with a Scandinavian cultural influence. (Double knitting techniques may have been discovered elsewhere but they’re first mentioned in literature from Russia. Russian knitters used them to make both socks in a pair at the same time, thus ensuring a perfect match.) There’s a hat and pair of mittens in Danish entrelac, a pattern for matching jacket and pullover in Swedish “brocade” texture patterns, a family collection sweater worked in real Norwegian yarn from the very fanciest Norwegian pattern stitches, a sock pattern “modeled after a pair of socks I purchased…in Estonia,” and then we come back to Britain with a hat, scarf, and mittens in lace-and-cable patterns described as (recent) traditional ones worked on the Isle of Skye.

The last batch of quick-but-quirky patterns are frankly born in the U.S.A., and although they’re from the 1990s not the 1980s they continue the tradition of Witty Knitting. (However, in the 1980s, the main focus of knitting was sweaters.) Child-sized mittens are decorated with warm (and slow-drying) little bumps that suggest dinosaurs. Six variations on a basic hat pattern range from wacky-like-Dr.-Seuss-drawings to wacky-in-a-traditional-way. Then there’s a miniature hat and a miniature mitten, for laughs, with the warning that actually giving somebody one miniature mitten is an old traditional way of rejecting a suitor. (Does everyone remember the old song in which “She gave him the mitten, sure as you’re born, because that young man didn’t hoe corn”?)

All but one of the sweaters are worked in fairly thick yarn (widely available, quick to knit up) and the one worked in fine Norwegian wool has two colors on every row, which means that, though it’s not double knitting, it’ll be quite warm. Double knitting in thick yarn is snowproof; walking in it through falling snow, you can start to feel that it’s too warm. The stitch patterns used on these sweaters are too big to be easily adapted to hats, but they’d work very well on blankets or cushion covers.