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The World of Illusion Knitting

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PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

In the autumn of that year we were invited to exhibit some of our work at the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace and, later, in Harrogate. Alongside this show there was to be a quilt exhibition and our ‘knitted quilts’ were to form the bridge between the two. We weren’t able to be there at the setting up for either exhibition so sent off the items to be displayed. We were not able to go to either exhibition until the weekend.

One Saturday morning we set off for Alexandra Palace in the worst rain I have ever seen. It was so heavy traffic on the M1 was forced to stop and wait for the worst to pass over. By the time we reached Ally Pally it was starting to dry up but it had rained all night. Arriving at the exhibition, we discovered that the ‘bridge’ where we were meant to be was a marquee between the two exhibitions. The rain had poured in overnight. The security staff had been quick to act and pulled down everything that was being threatened. The rain wouldn’t have done any permanent damage to our work but they couldn’t have known that and everything had been removed to a safe place. We were found another, rather confined, space but there was room enough and we had plenty of visitors to talk to.

The quilts were taken from there to Harrogate, about a month later. There were no problems this time and again we were able to be there at the weekend. On Saturday afternoon we had a huge surprise as a grinning face approached us atop a big ball of fluff. I was once accosted from behind at another exhibition, when wearing my mosaic jacket, by someone saying, “There’s only one jacket like that in the world.” Now I had exactly the same feeling. I had seen a photo of this ball of fluff before. It  was a waistcoat made from husky fur and representing the swirls of the Yukon River.

Debbie bounced up in characteristic fashion and almost immediately, amongst many giggles, produced a ‘plastic thing’ from her bag. It wasn’t at all obvious what it might be but we were soon enlightened. At the time we had seen her in the summer, Debbie had been asked to make something in lace for a new book being put together by Meg Swansen in US. She had declined on the grounds that she hadn’t knitted lace since she was a girl and it didn’t have much in common with the way she was going now. However, later on the day we had been to Stoke Bruerne she had seen a coracle being towed by another boat. A couple of weeks later it turned up in their home marina and lace suddenly became attractive. She was making a lace coracle!

The plastic thing in her bag was a small-scale version of what she was intending. It was the second attempt. The first had been in white yarn which was then encased in resin. The yarn had disappeared. A stronger colour was needed so mark two was in green – and it worked. It took a long time to complete the full-size version and her story about taking to the water for the first time was hilarious. The coracle was to appear in her own book Unexpected Knitting several years later.

We met up with Debbie and John several more times during their holidays in England. There was always some weird and wonderful work in progress and great hilarity on the boat.

While we were at Harrogate I was facing a big challenge. We had developed an interest in mazes. Maybe they were just one step on from the twisting, turning, space-filling curves but they had infiltrated themselves into our brains. Amazement was based on a drawing from a book by Adrian Fisher and Diana Kingham, which was of  the Chevening maze in Kent. It was physically the most difficult afghan for me to make but it had to be done. It was a square maze made in four large triangles, in a very similar way to The Long and Winding Road, but it could only be made using several balls of wool at once. It took a long time but the effort was worth it and it proved to be very popular with children.

We seem to veer between using ideas we come across in other people’s work and those that materialise out of thin area. I don’t remember where the next inspiration came from. Maybe it was from a very simple task I had often used in school to help children understand the difference between area and perimeter. Twenty four pieces of fence could be used to make a very large number of fields which could enclose different areas. Similarly, the same area could be enclosed by different numbers of fences, depending on shape. It was a nice activity, accessible to all.

Wreck Tangled was difficult to design, easy to make, of no real interest to the lay person and much appreciated by mathematicians. It had fourteen rectangles, all different, in a range of shades of green, on a dark background. Each rectangle has the same area. In knitting terms that means each has 3360 stitches. What’s more, the total area of the rectangles is exactly the same as the area of the background, which has 47040 stitches. It was a very satisfying project.

Click here to see more about Amazement
Click here to see more about Wreck Tangled

14b. ECCENTRIC KNITTING continued