ConnieLene – KnitDesigner

I know it is really peculiar.

Well it would be to our mothers; this chatting, writing, blogging, skyping and texting that we do in our world with all the technology that we have at our finger tips.

I am keeping my worldwide family aware of what I am doing using facebook and email, and have sent the link to my first double pointed needle attempt to my Danish cousins who live in America now, and who were in New Zealand as children.

It set me thinking – we need to know about our families, and there may be out there in this wide world many more people from the extended Rohde, Rode and Schrader family in New Zealand, America and Denmark who may not know that in the early years there were an abundance of us in New Zealand, and that we were all taught to cook, bake, knit, sew, garden and embroider by some, or all of the mothers.

The technology now enables us to keep track and to get to know one another again, where we once relied on our mothers to communicate by the hand writing of thousands of letters and sending them to and fro across the world. They are nearly all gone now – those mothers.

I know that all those very very strong women who emigrated to New Zealand, from Denmark, after the war, all had an impact on my interest in various creative forms from cooking, baking and gardening, to embroidery, crochet, and then knitting which has become my big big passion. I never did take to preserving, making jams and pickling cucumbers and there is one other skill that I never did master from those wonderful women and that was the knitting of socks.

All those great women knitted, sewed, embroidered and crocheted everything from dish cloths, hand towels, collars for our dresses, gloves, socks, and all those sweaters and hats and one can just go on and on about what they each did. They baked bread, made yeast buns which had such a delicious warm aroma – that made everyone come in from the fields to eat without even the tiniest call. Children came from everywhere. These mothers made cottage cheese, mayonnaise, pickled everything, bottled everything, and made fruit juice out of the skins of the fruits they had bottled. They stitched and gardened and cooked and still had times to read stories to us and to write letters, thousands of letters – to keep everyone informed. In short they were amazing.

I knit. I knit passsionately as they did, but they were sooo busy everyday that being a little flamboyant with yarns and so on would never ever have happened. Embroidery was the way to colour their lives.

I am so lucky. I am so lucky to have known these amazing women, my mother (mor), my aunts (Tante, Moster, Faster) and all their friends and latterly my mother-in-law. Without them I would not be me.

I am also lucky that I am able to communicate so easily, so readily, with my family using modern technology. What a long way we have come from letter writing to this. We are all so busy, or so we feel. Yet I think those women were really busy and they knew what was important – imparting knowledge, sharing skills, supporting each other and they were full time jobs and were valued and were valuable for the strength and safety of the community.

Anyway – this story all began because of my journey to create “Red Socks” with double pointed needles.

I have put it out there to my family using the technology (facebook), so I do have to add to my TO DO list here again. The RED SOCKS – the Sir Peter Blake Red Socks.

Now Best Beloved and our son requested these for Christmas last. They have an IOU as I haven’t even started these. I have knitted the fingerless gloves using double pointed needles – so I guess the socks will happen sometime, when I have the time to learn a new skill in knitting, if I can stop playing with the technology.

But HOW to create a Knitted piece to cover a Haarlem Ball – or other spherical object – that is the question?

You need to know the size of your sphere – ball. My first one was 150cm plus a handspan (my handspan).

I began with 8 stitches, increased to 320 stitches by increasing 8 times on every 4th round (more or less). I knitted this on a circular needle and circularly – entirely appropriate for a circular object.

I used 8 ply or double knit yarn on 4mm needles. The length from the top point to 320 stitches should be around 80cm. I have knitted the last of the top section of about 10 cm in k1p1 rib to help the cover to cling well. It is not a good look to have a baggy saggy ball warmer. There is a bit of give and take – because I didn’t knit this first half with only 8 ply (DK) yarns – I included mohair and faux fur fibres and some cotton yarns. So I needed to measure the piece for length as I knitted and adjust the increases and I will have to do the same when I do the decreases. SO this is not a formal pattern – this is a “suck it and see” piece of knitting.

Decreasing will be the increasing process in reverse – except that I will end up with around 32 stitches because the bottom half doesn’t present the full sphere to you as it is set in concrete. This half will still be created on a circular needle, but is not longer knitted circularly otherwise it will not fit over the ball. So back and forth from the centre down (more or less). I will knit the bottom half in garter stitch to assist it to join more easily – it is awkward to join the ball warmer together as I found with the first Haarlem Ball Warmer. I think I will use velcroe on this one – so that it can be joined more easily and removed more easily. It could then live another day as something else maybe.

There are lots of balls to alter however temporarily here in Haarlem, and also in Maastricht, so maybe they are everywhere in the Netherlands and I have received reports of very large balls in California.

What a nice group of people – sitting in a dark corner of the cafe hunched over their knitting and talking about who knows what – all double dutch to me. But then they are Dutch – so what could I expect.

They were lovely – they all speak English, at one level or another, and one of the group is English and has lived in the Netherlands for 35 years. And they knit the most amazingly beautiful things. They create beautiful fair isle knits -with tiny needles and thin yarns and delicious and beautiful colours. I am so in awe of their skills and patience to knit such beautiful time consuming pieces – shawls, socks, baby garments etc.

And they didn’t laugh at how I knit – which is really great. I thought they might knit the way I do as I understood from my teachers (my mother, and 2 aunts), that my way is the Continental way – or European way or perhaps the Scandinavian way. The group mostly seem to knit more like the English way I saw in New Zealand.

But they really are sitting in a poorly lit corner of the cafe – and there is lots of talking, and it could be bitching, I don’t know. I came away feeling really tired from trying to follow the conversation. I do have some hope because I do understand knitting, but my Dutch language is pretty hopeless.

I will go back – as just maybe this will encourage me into fair isle knitting and to creating socks and gloves etc using double pointed needles. I have only once knitted with DPN’s – my fingerless gloves.

So I may become a more capable knitter because these ladies have set a challenge – their work is fine and beautiful and I should explore the techniques and just maybe I will understand more Dutch before I return to New Zealand and that would be a bonus.

Well I think they would. Mor, Moster Maria, and Tante Ranghilde taught me to knit – and they all knitted wonderful socks, lacy collars for our dress, and gloves with fingers. I still have some examples of their work – at home in New Zealand.

Me, I knit bigger things using many colours and have never until now created anything using a set of double pointed needles.

I have just knitted a pair of fingerless gloves / wristwarmers.

I enjoyed it and I hope they are watching from somewhere, as I am now going to knit red socks before Christmas and I may well need their advice.

I have orders for 2 pairs of red socks. These are to replace those tired Red socks which have been worn in memory of Sir Peter Blake and his red socks, which he wore in 1995 America’s Cup campaign – plain red socks.

Every time the black boats went into battle off San Diego, Blake, wore red socks. And every afternoon, the team returned to shore victorious. One fateful day severe tendonitis in his elbows forced Blake off the boat and it was the only time in the entire 1995 series that Team New Zealand sailed without Blakey’s lucky socks. And it was the only time the boat was beaten on the water.

Now my son has given up his tired, tatty red socks and I am to make him and his father each a new pair – for luck and in memory of Sir Peter Blake.