What to Read to Learn About Knitting

When the first response to this Long & Short Reviews prompt showed up in the blog feed, I thought, "That site is just having fun at reviewers' expense this week." Actually L&SR left us free choice of subjects to recommend books about. Lydia Schoch was the one who chose to recommend books about Canadian history.

I don't expect anyone else picked that subject, since most blogs linked to L&SR seem to be based in the UK or US. (In that order.) Books about Canadian history or contemporary events aren't marketed to us the way they ought to be. A big name like Farley Mowat or Margaret Atwood, maybe, but even Pierre Berton is hard to find in US libraries. 

This is not a call for more bean-counting. Bean-counting is likely to work against Canadian writers--the "Right, Margaret Atwood's name sells her books, that's our Canadian content, now who'll be the ONE Australian author on our list?" kind of thing. This is a call for more reading (and retailing) of books without much concern about where the authors come from or what they look like.  We could use more reading and retailing of books merely because they are good books, done by people who think authors with different backgrounds are interesting. 

I know the feeling of hating that your college literature book, which someone stupidly chose to decorate with thumbnail portraits of the authors, was so White-male-centric that people teased you about carrying around photos of your boyfriends. Likewise the feeling of discovering all the good stuff that used not to be considered for inclusion in the literature books just because it was not written by White men from the UK or US. (In that order.) Neither of those feelings is a valid reason for discriminating against living White men who are writing books now, as many publishers are doing. "We want to see manuscripts from BIPOC writers, 'sexual minority' writers, and we might consider White women writers...White men have to pay us to read anything they write." There will never be another Terry Pratchett, or Wendell Berry, or C.S. Lewis, but, if another man was born with the ability to write things of comparable appeal to "literary" scholars and to readers, he'd have to pay today's editors to discover him, probably by sending them printed manuscripts someone dug out and read when the computers were down. It's not right.

Canadian authors are a minority in the US, but they're not a trendy minority so the publishers don't care about them. That's not right, either.

There are good writers in New Zealand. There are good writers in India. There are good writers in Kenya. "For copyright reasons," most of their books aren't in US bookstores or libraries. Some excellent books can be discovered at State Department book sales. Some can be mailed by friends in the appropriate country. 

I recommend that Americans read more foreign books. I recommend that more of us read more books, period. 

Anyway my specialty, or niche, or Knitche, is knitting. Here are some books to read to learn about knitting:

1. Everyone starts, or wishes they'd started, with Elizabeth Zimmermann: Knitting Without Tears, Knitters' Almanac, Knitters' Workshop, Knitting Around, and the posthumous collection, The Opinionated Knitter.

2. Serious knitters can explore the structure of stitch patterns with Barbara Walker's four Treasuries of Knitting Patterns. Those who want to try making a living designing new knitted pieces could work with those two writers' works alone. People did it in the 1980s.

3. If you like simple designs to knit with or without frivolous 1980s motifs, for children and adults, study the collected works of Helene Rush: Maine Woods Woollies, More Maine Sweaters, and any of the others you can still find. Because HR was known for accessibility and her books were published as inexpensive paperbacks, they tended to wear out. Someone should republish her work as a new coffee-table-type book that will last.

4. If you want to play with Aran cables and Fair Isle (type) colors, study the works of Alice Starmore, especially Alice Starmore's Book of Fairisle Knitting. 

5. If you're interested in the history of knitting, look for anything you can find by James Norbury or Richard Rutt. (Their books were historical studies but, yes, both men actually knitted. Rutt was also a bishop in the Church of England; Norbury was also a TV star.)

6. If you're interested in knitting as a modern art form, you were probably drawn to it by the work of Kaffe Fassett. Glorious Knitting (or Glorious Knits, depending on where your copy was printed) was his first book and has the most different patterns in it.

7. If you want less verbiage and more distinctive patterns you can knit into basic, useful pieces like hats, socks, and mittens instead of sweaters, get Anna Zilboorg's Fancy Feet, Magnificent Mittens, and Fine and Fanciful Hats. 

8. If you are a woman who wants to knit something for a typical man, don't buy books with titles like Sweaters for Men. Or buy them, since Alice Starmore's Sweaters for Men were irresistible designs, and admit you're knitting them as oversized "boyfriend sweaters" for yourself. Typical men want a precise fit and a generic look, typically the exact opposite of what beginners want to knit. They are more likely to appreciate original, distinctive-looking knitted pieces for the house or car. It's worth looking for "official" collections of sports-motif knitting patterns you can work into blankets and pillows for your favorite sports fans. These are short-lived, as "official" motifs change from year to year, and tend to be printed as cheap paperbacks.

If on the other hand you find a man who's willing to model your knits, looks good in them, and asks you to knit something just for him, follow his taste precisely, and observe him in other contexts. He may be worth keeping.

9. If you want to knit things for children, the essential consideration is that they tend to be more active than adults. Babies chill easily; active wiggly children overheat easily. Don't put a sweater on a child before it is shivering. That said, children I knew used to model things I knitted from designs by Jil Eaton (Minnow Knits and sequels), Helene Rush, Chellie Pingree (Maine Island Knits and sequels), The Yarn Girls, and Knitters magazine. Patterns for children's things are useful guides to size and shape; since they're designed to appeal to adults you can always update the colors and patterns as long as you keep the size and shape, or alter it as necessary to fit the child.

10. If you want to knit distinctive sweaters for your (female) self, the secret is to ignore New York fashions. You can update any design that appeals to you from the 1920s onward. It will not be possible to knit a majority of designs from even six months ago in the original yarn, since most sweater designs are published in order to market "this season's" yarn and "this season's" yarn rarely sells well enough that manufacturers keep it in the stores next season. If the brand of yarn is still in the stores, you'll still have to update the colors. If the design that caught your fancy came from a different decade, you may want to knit a smaller or larger size to get today's kind of fit. The knitwear I've modelled in the booth while selling other knits have been chosen according to the expected temperature, and came from, in order of when they were knitted: Erica Wilson's Knitting Book (my purple and teal sweater was based on one she knitted in natural cream and brown wools), Annette Mitchell's Country Diary Book of Knitting (the light red cotton sweater), Pat Menchini's Beatrix Potter Knitting Book (the blue cardigan), and Deborah Newton's Designing Knitwear (the rainbow-of-scraps Blanket Shawl). I don't think newer designs or books are in any way inferior--it's just that I've taken good care of my three sweaters and shawl, and not needed to keep more knitwear for myself. Younger talent deserves its reward. Look at the new books and magazines in the stores as well as the classics from the 1980s.