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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

A month or so after the publication of Woolly Thoughts I went to a knitting exhibition at the National Exhibition Centre. I only remember one thing about it and that was related to computers not knitting. One of the exhibitors was an American lady called Susan Lazear. She was also as much involved with computers as with knitting. She was demonstrating the knitting design programme she had created. It was a very exciting concept and I bought the programme even though it was very expensive. More exciting than the programme itself was a banner she had across her stand, giving her email address (but they weren’t called that then). This was the first person I had met in real life who had a modem and was able to communicate instantly with other people around the world. This was 1994 and the internet, as we know it now, did not really exist! I picked her brains and went out the next day to buy a modem and a package to join CompuServe.com.

It was a difficult time. There was nobody to give advice. Everything was trial and error. The modem would dial and, very often, a voice would be heard coming out of the computer’s speakers. It was the voice of someone trying to answer their phone and hearing only strange noises and there was no way to tell them what was happening. It was also extremely difficult to change between modem and phone and I sought help from BT. They were horrified and questioned why I wanted to do this because, in their view,  a modem was for business use, not the home and this was the only future they saw – as recently as 1994. I was very vociferous in telling them they were wrong and sought equipment I needed from a specialist company elsewhere. Someone, somewhere, was listening. Shortly afterwards I had several phone calls from some high-up person at BT asking my opinion about who might want to use a modem and why. I like to think I had some effect on waking them up.

On joining CompuServe you were given a number and email addresses were of the format 12345@CompuServe.com  That seems very cumbersome compared with today’s email addresses but it was a huge leap forward. It was also very expensive. My Broadband connection today is cheaper than the monthly rate was for that provider. The monthly fee paid only for access to the service and all phone charges had to be paid on top of that, at higher rates than they are today, because, in the first instance, they were routed through a few centres, not the local telephone network.

There were bulletin boards where you could dial directly and leave a message. Sometimes, if you were very lucky and very patient, you could download some information from some of them. CompuServe had a system of Forums, a bit like Yahoo and other discussion groups are now. At the start there weren’t many groups. At the time when I joined, all crafts were lumped together. Pottery and woodwork went hand-in-hand with knitting and weaving. Over the years, as more people joined, the groups split again and again to cope with the growing numbers. They became more and more specialised and eventually there was a forum specifically for knitting. Since then the internet has changed out of all recognition. In those early days we met up with people we could never have encountered under other circumstances. The advent of email and the internet certainly pushed us further on our way.

Although Woolly Thoughts had only recently been published, it had left our hands a year or so earlier. During the writing of it I had been given a very good piece of advice. The first person to see any part of the manuscript was a friend who was a Maths teacher and a published author in a totally different field. His sound advice was “Don’t put everything you have in the first book. You will want to write more later”. He was certainly right. By the time Woolly Thoughts was complete we already had many new ideas that had developed from the original. These mainly relied on using the same mathematical principles to create a complete garment rather than using small pieces joined together. We had sweaters, jackets, waistcoats, etc. with sections of the garment being knitted in unconventional directions. It was really a matter of making the link between flat, 2D, shapes and the concept that a garment needs to wrap round the body as a 3D structure. Conventional methods of knitting back, front and two sleeves were redundant. The sections could be anywhere that would allow them to connect together to form the shape. The ideas worked equally well at this different scale and were obviously the basis for another book.

It was only now that we realised what a fortuitous title we had chosen for the first book. We didn’t have to think of a title for this new book. It had to be Second Thoughts. Many people, including our new internet friends, were wanting more from us so we avoided the problem of having to wait a year or two for it to be published by a real publisher, by publishing it ourselves. We set about acquiring an ISBN number which was a task I left entirely to Steve. The options were to pay a small amount of money for one number and details of how to work out nine more, or to pay a much larger amount of money to have the complete set of numbers. It was merely a fairly straightforward mathematical process so soon completed.

6d. WOOLLY THOUGHTS continued