Rowan Knitting & Crochet Magazine 53: A Review, Part 1

So it's time again to review Rowan's latest semi-annual issue. If it seems like just a few weeks ago that you read my review of Rowan Knitting & Crochet Magazine 52, it was. This is what I get for procrastinating on a review.

But let's have a look at the first twenty of the thirty-seven patterns in Rowan Knitting & Crochet Magazine 53. Part 2 of my review of this issue will be posted tomorrow.

I had to tilt my laptop screen back so I could actually see the sweater in this photo. The white background, pale model, and pale colours made it look more than a little bleached out. The pattern is called "Vanilla" so I suppose the tone of the photo could be some sort of oblique reference, but I doubt it. However, I do like this cardigan sweater. Good use of colour blocking and the striped trim sets it off. It's a beginner project that looks finished and well-designed.

This pullover works. Striking and inventive graphic design, classic fit.

This wrap is one of those pieces I have to try to put my personal preferences aside to try to review fairly, because my first instinct was to snipe that it looked like one of those crocheted ripple-pattern afghans, which isn't fair. This shawl has a sharp, graphic design and drapes well. If you have a modern dress sense and would wear a wrap, go for it.

This top is crocheted, and it's not bad, but it is a very open openwork stitch. You'll probably need to wear something underneath it, and you may not want to do that in summer.

Let's see, a pullover with a stringy front panel that will necessitate the wearing of something underneath, unflattering dropped shoulders and a slight boxiness of shape, and a sleeve-length that matches exactly with and extends the hipline. I'll pass, thanks.

In 1957 dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor stood stock still in total silence on a bare stage for four minutes. Critic Louis Horst subsequently ran a review in Dance Observer that consisted of nine inches of white space. I feel like doing something similar here, because I can barely see the sweater in this pale photo. However, I won't, as I do like the sweater. It has such an interesting construction. It'll be figure-hugging, so make sure you've got the confidence to feel comfortable in it.

Nice cardigan, but do be warned it's not for every figure. You'll need to be small or flat-chested and to have a waistline you don't mind emphasizing for it to be flattering.

I'm a little divided on this lace pullover. It is very oversized, which normally I condemn, but it's also of a delicate and intricate openwork stitch and lightweight enough to not bulk up the wearer. Who would still probably need to have a model's figure to carry it off. And she'll also have to wear a camisole or something underneath. It's a garment that is, while not a failure of design, of very limited wearability.

This striped pullover is definitely an item you'll be able to throw on with a pair of jeans and just feel happy and relaxed in. It has a good, flattering shape and you can have some fun figuring out your own colourway for it. You might even use three colours instead of two, i.e., black and gray for the body and wide stripes of gray with narrow stripes of red for the arms. I find the two blues used here to be a little lacking in imagination and verve.

A very simple, cropped, openwork top. There's nothing wrong with it and it would probably make a handy coverup for the beach, but you'll probably want to wear a layer under it.

Let's see, dropped shoulders, boxy shape, cropped length, horizontal stripes. This pullover has it all. And by "all", I mean, "all the characteristics that can detract from your appearance individually, but when combined will conspire to make you look the worst you've ever looked in a sweater". And wait, there's more! The transparent interstices between the stripes and the off-the-shoulder neckline that will constantly gape at the front and slip off your shoulders will also help rid you of any vestige of dignity. It's a lot to ask of any knitting pattern, but this one is does it all by a mile and still gets aided along its way by the stylist, who paired it with a baggy drawstring jumpsuit. This is a Murphy's law design.

This generic pullover isn't a bad thing of its kind, though I would fix the dropped shoulders, make the sleeves the right length, and add a little waist shaping.

This beaded pullover is pretty, but I would make it the right length. Cropped tops just aren't flattering on anyone. Oh sure, if you've got a model's figure, you can get away with it, but even then wouldn't you rather wear clothes that work in your favour rather than act as a litmus test of your looks? Also, be aware that you'll need to wear something under this item.

The cabled detail on this sweater is sewn on after you've finished knitting it. And it's not unattractive or ineffective, but it does look a little like the result of a drunken collision with some sailboat rigging. If you make this sweater for yourself, be prepared for some America's Cup and/yacht club/sailor jokes, some of which occur to me immediately.

I actually quite like this striped cardigan. Striped sweaters can look juvenile or beginner-ish, but the variation of the stripe width and the sophisticated colourway elevate this to a polished, adult look. I would fix the dropped shoulders and make it waist-length rather than cropped, however.

This striped man's pullover isn't bad, though to me there's something a little discordant about the stripe pattern.

This striped sleeveless top looks like a late-sixties or early-seventies pattern that doesn't quite work as a contemporary piece. The shape isn't flattering and the stripes aren't going to help in that department either.

The pattern on the front of this man's polo sweater is eye-catching and innovative, but the neckline and collar, which are probably supposed to be innovative as well, just look as though the designer couldn't decide which neckline to use, put both on to see how they looked, and then never got around to removing one. I'd make this item with either the v-neck or a regular polo collar and placket, not with both. The pattern on the front automatically makes this sweater really striking and any crazy detailing is just going to put it over the top.

I'm pretty sure I've seen a pattern almost exactly like this in some eighties-era knitting pattern pamphlet. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. If you want to make this colour-blocked vest, which admittedly isn't a bad shape or badly constructed, I'd recommend making it in a different colourway altogether. These candied/dayglo type colours are just too random and dated-looking to be really attractive.

This Kaffe Fassett top is actually really cute and playful.

Look for Part 2 of the Rowan Knitting & Crochet Magazine issue 53 review tomorrow!

Update: You can view Part 2 here.

Hand-Painted Yarns

I thought I'd like to share my two favourite knitting paintings with you. There are a lot of knitting paintings in existence, perhaps not surprisingly, because knitting was a necessary part of women's daily lives for centuries. Some of the paintings have captured some lovely moments in knitting.

I first saw the painting above at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2000. It is Les Sabots, painted in 1768 by the French painter François Boucher. The woman depicted here has a figure and colouring not dissimilar from mine (her hair looks more reddish in the original painting than it does in this reproduction), and has taken her knitting along on a picnic only to get a little... distracted, which is totally something I would do. I told the man I was seeing at the time that it was "our" painting, but although he agreed that the parallels were fun, he sniffed that he didn't like pastorals. So the painting became just my painting.

This is another painting that I saw at the AGO, and the original is actually quite large (60" x 40"). It's Gossip, painted in 1888 by a Canadian artist, George Agnew Reid. I love that the spinning wheel is at a standstill and that the knitting is lying idle, because these two women are so intent on their conversation. And we don't know what they're talking about, but it seems a sure bet that it's something really good.

If there's a knitting-themed painting you love, feel free to tell us about it and link to it in the comments.

How Men Who Don't Knit See Knitting

This Harry Bliss cartoon from The New Yorker sums up the non-knitting male perspective in a word, doesn't it? Poor insensible darlings.

A Hurtin', Knittin', Country Song

Did you ever hear that old joke about what happens when you play a country song in reverse? You get your spouse, pick-up truck, and dog back. Here's a country song called "Pardon Me (I Didn't Knit That for You)". If you played it in reverse, you'd have a ball of yarn and an intact relationship, but I think most knitters will like the song exactly as it is as they'd prefer to keep their work unravelled and to ditch the partner for whom the sweater wasn't intended.

Incidentally, the tasteful yarn ball arrangement on the mantlepiece behind the two vocalists is a nice touch.

Dorothy Parker and the Gateway to Domesticity

Dorothy Parker was a woman who avoided domestic tasks like the plague. She'd have starved rather than boil herself an egg, ate bacon raw claiming she didn't know how to cook it, and threw her soiled underwear back in her bureau drawer with her clean pairs, leaving the resulting mess for the maid to sort out, if there was one. She wrote in one of her poems that she hated women who made their own clothes and who were always hurrying home to make dinner. But she was an avid knitter. The photo above shows her carrying her knitting bag, and according to what I've read, she was seldom without it.

Knitting has a dynamic and a pace of its own. One can pick up knitting and knit for exactly as long as one wants to, or has time to, whether that be five minutes or several hours. One can put a knitting project down and leave it for hours, days, months, or years, and then pick it up again. Knitting is portable. Knitting is compatible with carrying on a social conversation, with being out in the world. None of these things can be said of cooking or cleaning or dressmaking. Dorothy Parker no doubt felt she could yield a point and enjoy her knitting without it becoming some sort of gateway domestic task, the first step on downhill course of action that would eventually deposit her in the kitchen, slaving to prepare meals for a family of six.

I've always been one to revel in domestic skills, perhaps because my mother was both a dedicated elementary school teacher and a woman who enjoyed baking bread, making jam, growing flowers and vegetables, and making clothing. Like her, I earn a living working in a professional capacity and also do most of the same household tasks, and have never felt that these activities were in conflict in any way. I tend to roll my eyes at some of the feminist critique of the so-called "New Domesticity", and get impatient with the moaning that women are setting back the clock by turning away from the feminist achievements of their mothers and grandmothers and embracing housewifely roles and tasks.

For one thing the whole idea of a "New Domesticity" is an appallingly classist construct. Relatively few women have been able to turn their backs on domestic tasks over the past fifty years. My mother and both my grandmothers certainly did all their own housework. Only a relatively small percentage of women could afford to not do their own housekeeping, and their household staff brought up the average by doing double duty: they did their employers' housework and then went home to do their own. There's nothing new about domesticity because women have been steadily tending to their housekeeping through all the waves of feminism.

In any case I see nothing at all wrong with women choosing to cook from scratch or make their own candles or spin. And I've had it with this relentless nitpicking over how women run their lives. Feminism was supposed to free women up from gender-based strictures, not add new ones.

Not that I don't get where some of the critics are coming from. As I've said before on this blog, leisure-time activities do need to be kept in their place. These domestic hobbies that can be so pleasant and rewarding shouldn't become a vortex that absorbs all our free time and keeps us from ever reading the newspaper, voting, volunteering, learning new skills, or otherwise attending to higher priority personal or professional tasks. But it's certainly possible to indulge in these elective domestic tasks without neglecting other more important things, and I would like to see these New Domesticity critics show some respect for women's ability to do so. No one assumes a man will contribute less to the world or fail to reach his potential because he's taken up woodworking. Dorothy Parker's knitting never took away from her writing — though her drinking and her hatred of the actual task of writing certainly did.

Dorothy Parker's flight from domesticity made sense given the era in which she lived. Relatively few women of her time managed to bypass the kind of domestic, housebound life women were then expected to lead in order to live a professional, artistic or political life outside the home. Parker's hostility towards the domestic role was one of the means she used to avoid it. She reminds me of the narrator in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (published in 1973), who refused to learn to type so that she could ensure that she didn't wind up working as a secretary. She didn't become a secretary, but she handicapped herself as a grad student and professional writer. Surely things have changed since Parker's day, or even since the seventies. Surely we don't need to share Parker's contempt for domestic accomplishments, and to shoot ourselves in the foot by refusing to learn needed life skills, because we need no longer fear their thralldom as she did.

Can't we now admire domestic accomplishments rather than dismissing them as "women's work" as though they were lesser achievements and past-times than those traditionally perfomed by men? Can't women bake bread or crochet a tablecloth without anyone telling them they've betrayed feminism? I hope we can. Because it's only when we can do so that we will have made real progress towards respecting the work women do and their right to make their own choices.

A Tall Muskox Yarn

One day in the summer of 2004, my parents, who were on a road trip to Alaska and the Yukon, called me from their car so that my dad could ask me if I wanted any muskox yarn. I said, uh, sure, and he asked me what I wanted to make with it, adding the caveat, "Not an afghan. It's pretty expensive." I told him to surprise me. My father is very much a process-oriented person and was very excited by the whole concept of my making something out of such an unusual and exotic yarn. My mother, a relentlessly practical woman, interjected things like, "It's too expensive to be worth it!" and "She'll have to hand wash it!"

Dad came back from their Alaskan road trip with a hat kit for me, and I knitted a little brown cap for myself. Mum told me how much it cost and said I was not allowed to ever throw it out, that if I got tired of it I had to give it back to her so that she could shadow box it or something.

I'm not sure I ever would have thought yarn could be made from muskox hair. It doesn't look like a feasible project. But I am increasingly realizing that yarn can be made out of virtually anything. The muskox has a two-layered coat, and the yarn, called by the Inuit word "qiviut", is made from the soft underwool. The muskox sheds this layer every spring. The muskox aren't sheared as sheep are. The wool the yarn is made from is gathered from the pelts of hunted muskox, gathered from the wild during the molting season, or obtained from farmed muskox. Qiviut is stronger and eight times warmer than sheep's wool, and is softer than cashmere.

You'll be glad to hear you don't have to have parents who travel to Alaska to get muskox yarn of your own. In Alaska, the Musk Ox Producers' Cooperative, which is owned and operated by native Alaskans, sells hand-knitted qiviut items. Because the muskox yarn and knitting industry was developed to give the indigenous population of Alaska gainful employment, the co-operative doesn't sell much yarn, but they do sell the cap kit my father bought for me.

Alternatively, the Quebec company Cottage Craft Angora has, besides some hand-knitted items, 100% qiviut yarn for sale in not only its natural brown but in a range of attractive dyed colours, and in both 2- or 3-ply. At $39 a skein, it's probably not a purchase you'll make lightly, but keep in mind you are getting an unusual and high-quality product and helping to support a grass roots industry in an economically challenged region.

If you really feel like splurging, Cottage Craft Angora also has hand-painted qiviut/silk blend yarn for $150 a skein. Much more attainable is their superwash blend, which is 10% qiviut, 10% cashmere, 10% bamboo and 70% superwash merino, or their qiviut/angora blend yarn. They offer other yarns as well.

And keep in mind... even if you don't ever own any qivuit yarn, you have learned a great new word that will allow you to triumph over your next Scrabble opponent.

Yarn of the Dog

They say pets and pet owners tend to resemble each other. This may or may not be true, but while you may not look like your pet, or want to, you can dress like your pet. Knitting with Dog Hair by Kendall Crolius apparently tells you how in comprehensive detail and includes bonus info about how to do the same thing with cat hair. It's out of print, but there are some copies of Knitting With Dog Hair available on Amazon. Among the mostly positive Amazon reader reviews, there's one which raves,

I found this to be an excellent book. So far I have made a pair of otter skin gloves, mousefur socks and a Gerbil Thong. I plan on making a bearskin bra for for my wife and a chipmunk purse. Without this book I would never have discovered the joys of Animal fur knitting!!!

I don't think the Amazon reader reviews' far-reaching potential as a means of subversion is generally realized.

Some people have actually acted on the advice in the book and had sweaters made from their dogs' hair. You can see a gallery of pets and pet-hair-wearing owners here, and I must admit some of the sweaters aren't totally unattractive.

But one word of advice.... if you decide to make a sweater with your dog's hair, be sure not get caught in the rain while wearing it. You'll smell, perhaps unsurprisingly, like a wet dog.