Nupps: rhymes with whoops.

Estonian lace knitting has to be some of the finest and most challenging in the knittosphere. My first experience with it was the Swallowtail shawl, published as a free Ravelry pattern. I used 100% baby alpaca lace for it. Here is a picture of my FO before I packed it up and sent it off to a friend in Finland (I apologize if it appears that my house is sliding downhill):

The main body of the scarf has a repeated lozenge lace pattern which becomes rather mindless after you memorize it. But then it all changes. After two rows of stockinette, you are instructed to make nupps. These are the little nubbins that look like berries or beads or peas set off by yarn overs. Often they are referred to as “lily of the valley” because they are somewhat evocative of that flower in bloom. Somewhat. I still think they look more like peas nestled in a pod. I digress, as usual.

A traditional nupp is created by knitting into the next stitch, but before pulling it off the needle, bringing the yarn in front, then knitting it again and repeating until there are anywhere from five to 11 loops of yarn on the one stitch. At that point, you may let the stitch slide off the needle. They are often followed or preceded by YOs. On the wrong side, you slide your needle into all those loops and purl them together, leaving you with one stitch encircled by a bundle of joy. Here are some closeups of nupps, wrong side so you can see the process, and right side, so you can see the result:

Now, here is where the inexperienced nupp knitter starts looking for a train track to nap on or a high balcony to leap over. The loops created by knitting and yarn-overing into the stitch must be very, very loose so that it is possible to get your purling needle into them on the way back. This fact in and of itself had me throwing my incomplete garment into a box and ignoring it for several months before I had the energy to face it again. After searching high and low online for a solution, I discovered what I should have thought of all by myself: insert a small crochet hook to pull the purling yarn through the loops. Then occurred one of those moments where I wanted to kick myself repeatedly for being so stupid.

However, while the crochet hook solution works, it is slow and probably not authentic. I cannot, in my mind’s eye, see grey-haired Estonian ladies in aprons pulling out crochet hooks whenever they have looped a nupp too tightly. So, there must be a way to do it so that implement is unnecessary.

My second nuppy item was “Lily of the Valley Scarf” from Nancy Bush’s Knitted Lace of Estonia. I made it from a cheap fuzzy yarn, Patons North America Lace, and it turned out quite well, as you can see.

My solution for the large loops was to wrap the initial knit stitch around my finger at the back, then pull it down with my thumb in front after pulling the loop through the stitch, and making sure that all my subsequent loops matched the one under my thumb. Of course, this is doable with English style knitting. I don’t know what a continental style knitter would do. For this particular yarn, because it was fuzzy and sticky, it worked very well. I had nupps which may even have been too large, but I’m not complaining.

I was so thrilled by my accomplishment that I made another Swallowtail Scarf, this time for myself. The yarn is 100% merino, Malabrigo lace. It was a dream to knit with, a nightmare to tink because it started matting as soon as it came in contact with another stitch, but that same sticky quality meant that my nupp loops didn’t change size on me when it came time to purl them. It was a success.

You can barely see the nupps in that photo, sadly. Just trust me that it turned out well. I get a lot of compliments on it.

I thought that that was it for me and nupps, that I had purled my last loops. Actually, I’m lying. I had no such intention. There are many patterns in Nancy Bush’s book that I would love to make, nupps or no nupps. And so, I volunteered to test knit a pattern by the lovely Mary-Anne Mace. This would not have happened if a friend in my knitting group hadn’t alerted me to the call for test knitters on Ravelry. I count myself as fortunate indeed that Mary-Anne chose me from the plethora of applicants for the job, because her patterns are gorgeous. She designed a crescent-shape, nupp-encrusted shawl incorporating her favourite Estonian motifs and I knit it out of a wool-silk blend (again a gift from my observant friend). Here is my version:

I confess that I did not do as error-free a job as I would have liked. The nupps were not so problematic as I anticipated, and there were a lot of them. There were sections that I let unravel and then knitted up again because I had messed up with yarn overs, or somehow had too many or too few stitches on the needles. But I completed it, made notes for the designer, and she was pleased. In fact, she asked the testers to reknit the shawl with a longer garter tab cast-on to try to alleviate the hump that one gets in crescent shawls. 

At first I demurred. Enough with the nupps already! Then I changed my mind and started again with a different yarn, Knitpicks Alpaca Cloud, a very fine lace weight 2-ply in 100% baby alpaca. And here is where we come full circle. The yarn I used for my first Swallowtail was also 100% baby alpaca in a 2-ply lace. The horror of the nupps has come back to haunt me. I am beginning to understand that the material in which they are knitted is as important as anything else. It wasn’t just the nupps, either, that were affected by the yarn. Mary-Anne had designed gorgeous lilies using a technique where you knit three stitches at once, producing seven stitches on the needle, which are purled separately on the return row and then separated by YOs to make petals. Here’s a closeup from the first shawl (done in a wool-silk blend):

Here’s how they look in the alpaca version (I apologize for the poor detail and contrast; it was blocked against a pink blanket in bad light):

You can see that it is distorted in the softer yarn, the YOs pulled into the opposite of uniform shapes. This adventure has taught me much about Estonian knitting, especially nupps. Err on the side of loops that are too big; even if they are of unequal size, once you get your knitting needle through all of them on the purl side, you can always pull them into a homogenous bundle. If you are barely getting the point through the stitch, while the loops are themselves at the very point of the left-hand needle, you have no such wiggle-room options. It’s a good idea to spread them out as you go, pulling down on the bundles so they lie flat instead of hanging like bleeding hearts. 

In the end, I am not displeased with the new FO. It is soft and delicate and I will wear it or give it away with pride. But it has been a learning experience, and it will also be some time before I take on another Estonian lace shawl.

Of Water, Words, Wood and Wool

There is a composition of wool and shells and string on a wooden frame hanging on my bathroom wall above the bathtub. I bought it in 1982 in London, Ontario at the Israeli pavilion of what passed for Caravan in that city at that time. For some unknown reason, it appealed to me then and I still like it more than a generation later. It’s hard to believe that much time has passed since I acquired it, but there’s nothing odd about that.

I remember some issue with the method of payment. The artist was charging $80, which was a fortune for a university student in those days (it still may well be). I gave her my credit card to charge and walked away with my purchase wrapped in brown paper. Several days later I got a call asking me if I wouldn’t please come back and pay for it again, as the credit card company was only allowing for purchases of up to $50, which means they should have put my card through twice for lesser amounts. I think I ended up writing a cheque and that was that. But it kind of spoiled an otherwise romantic moment.

The artist told me she had found the wool in a shop and loved it, gathered the shells and shark’s jaw on a beach and incorporated them into the FO that we have before us. Every so often I remember to dust it, but not frequently. I did so for the following photograph, as the sand dollars and starfish were a little grimy looking.

All of the above has been a preamble for explaining the name of this blog. My husband, who is a composer of some renown, wrote a piece for piano, violin and clarinet titled Of Water and Wood for a former university professor who played in a trio of that instrumentation. The finished piece incorporates a folk song, Lost Jimmy Whelan, about a young man who dies while breaking up a log jam on a fast-flowing river. His ghost greets the girl he was supposed to marry, bidding her a final adieu and telling her to get on with her life. It is a beautiful, haunting song and is arranged perfectly in the slow movement of the trio. The other two movements are fast and furious, more like the logs jamming up and then leaping free, flinging the boy to his death. It is quite difficult and has only been played a couple of times, never by the group that commissioned it. They ended up breaking up before they even got to the concert and my husband has always wondered if it was this piece that brought whatever vitriol was lurking to the fore. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

During our early married life, we moved around a lot as he did the sabbatical-leave tour of Canadian universities. During one such departure, while packing up our belongings, I wrapped the above wool and shell artwork in brown paper and wrote with magic marker on the front: Of Water and Wool, showing it to my husband and thinking myself rather clever. I have called it that ever since.

Faced with a text box demanding a name for this blog, the cursor blinking at me as though to say, “Hurry!”, I knew I had to come up with something original that befitted what I want to accomplish here. That meant I had to decide what that was. Blogging is not a new thing for me. I started my first online diary in 2003 and have had several more since. But none of them had been devoted to knitting. Needles and wool found their way into them because they are an integral part of my life, but I didn’t advertise those blogs; in fact, I purposely kept my readership small. Suddenly I felt I wanted to belong to a larger community, to communicate my thoughts on knitting and fibre to those of like mind. There would be no holds barred!

Of Water and Wood morphed into Of Water and Wool and then into Of Words and Wool. It is not the first time a composition of my husband’s has inspired a blog name. Check out Cassandra’s Tears before you leave. Sadly neglected, it contains my creative prose and is named for one of my husband’s violin sonatas. There appears to be a blog here already named “Water and Wool”, open to invited readers only. So I’m sure you won’t get us confused. Everyone is invited to read this blog. It’s a party!

What? Another knitting blog, you say?

Today, while soaking in a cooling bath, I finished Adrienne Martini’s book Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously documenting the journey she undertook when she decided to knit Alice Starmore’s Fair Isle sweater “Mary Tudor”. This was her Holy Grail of knitting projects, her Everest; might I even say, her MacGuffin. It was further complicated by her inexperience with this style of two-stranded knitting and the fact that the pattern book has been out of print for a number of years and is very difficult to acquire. The yarns the designer specifies are also unobtainable, as she divested herself of the mills that produced them. Here are pictures of Alice Starmore’s book with the sweater in question on the cover and Ms. Martini posing in her creation:

 

As a fellow knitter, I find her accomplishment very impressive. Sweater Quest was fascinating, as well as well written and engaging. I was introduced to the world of Fair Isle knitting, the history behind the patterns and the techniques and also to names in the knitting world belonging to (mostly) women who are famous among practitioners of our craft. I now want to go to Toronto to hang out with the Yarn Harlot and others of whom I had heard but knew little.

Because the yarns specified in the pattern were no longer available, Adrienne made do with the closest she could get. She realized at a certain point, when she had an opportunity to compare hers with actual wool in someone’s stash that matched pattern specifications, that her finished object (what we call a FO in the business) would never match the one on the cover of Starmore’s book. This seemed to be the biggest issue throughout Quest. Everyone she met she would ask: “If I am not using the exact yarns that Alice Starmore specifies in her pattern, is my FO still an Alice Starmore?” For the most part, the answers were vague and the responders oblique. Yes, it is, but with a personalized twist, is probably the final, distilled, answer.

Since finishing the book today, I have been thinking much about this question. I knit a lot of patterns and rarely use the specified yarns. I do have one book dating from 1976 put out by Bernat for sweaters made from Blarney Spun, a 100% wool made in Ireland especially for the occasion which is now discontinued. I actually made a cardigan from the book using the specified materials, which I still own. I also heavily modified another pattern from the book for a totally different yarn I bought last fall. I think it is expected today, with so many beautiful yarns available, that a knitter will substitute her (or his) own choice of materials for the ones the designer used. Of course, if a knitter falls in love with a particular garment and feels she must reproduce it exactly, then it makes sense that she would use the specified yarns. But why?

We have to look at knitting (and the designing of knitted goods) and ask ourselves if it is crafting or art. As a musician performing Mozart or Debussy or MacDonald, I know that I am required to reproduce exactly what the composer put on the page. It is up to me to render as faithfully as I can the composer’s vision. If I substitute my own tunes, cut out passages, insert bits not of Mozart’s doing, then am I still performing a piece of Mozart? No, one would say I am performing a piece based on a Mozart piece. If I cannot find French horns or bassoons for my orchestra and instead substitute saxophones, is it still Mozart? We would say that it is an arrangement, and we would have to give credit to the arranger as well as the composer. But that is art music. What about jazz?

Jazz relies very heavily on improvisation. In fact, one could say that that is the basis of jazz. You can perform Gershwin’s “Summertime” exactly as he wrote it in Porgy and Bess. It sounds kind of bluesy because of the way he wrote it, but it’s all there on the page. If I take it out of context of the opera and sing it with a combo, you’ll still recognize it as the same song, but it won’t be the same piece, and it shouldn’t be, because it’s now jazz.

What does this have to do with knitting and Adrienne’s dilemma? A fair bit, actually. Let us return to Mozart for a moment. He wrote arias in his operas for specific singers and he must have had an idea of how they would sound coming out of those various mouths. No two singers are alike, so a reiteration of “Deh vieni, non tardar” by another soprano is not going to sound like the original singer’s performance, which we call the “creation”. It will still be beautiful, it will still be Mozart, but it will not be exactly as Mozart heard it as he composed it. It would be impossible for another singer to sound like that. The beauty of classical music is that you never get tired of hearing it, even though it’s all there on the page, there are no surprises. We look for the nuancing, the different tone colours, sense of phrasing, and other performance aspects that different artists bring to it. 

If I buy a knitting pack, or kit, containing a pattern and yarn from a company like Knitpicks (and I have done this) to make a garment, I do so because I have fallen in love with the picture of it in the magazine or on the website. I am going to hazard a guess that other knitters have done the same. But if we were to compare our FOs side by side, they would all be similar, but not identical. Why? Because we are all different when it comes to knitting, just as other sopranos are different from me when it comes to singing. We have varying tensions, which is the most obvious thing. We may have different philosophies concerning blocking, and we are all built differently and that makes our FOs appear as individual as our shapes.

Adrienne knit “Mary Tudor” exactly as the pattern specified, stitch for stitch. That would be like me playing a Bach cello suite exactly as written, note for note. But she was unable to get the original yarns and so substituted. If I do not have a cello (or play the cello, which I do not) and still wanted to play the suite, I will find a different instrument. In fact, my husband has played it often in an arrangement for classical guitar. Is it any less Bach? Not at all. The notes are still there, the tune is the same. Depending on the instrument and its range, a player might transpose the piece to fit, but it is still Bach. Schubert Lieder are often transposed from their original keys to make them easier for singers to perform. No one says that they are no longer Schubert.

So I say to Ms. Martini: The pattern is Alice Starmore; the FO is yours. It is a variation, or an arrangement, of the original. It does not detract in any way from the authenticity of the design. Once it leaves the publisher and enters the knitter’s domain, an author has to cede ownership. Knitters and musicians make mistakes, they make subtle variations, and do things differently from each other. In other words, they make the work their own. Knitting and playing music are both craft, but truly accomplished performers will make it into art, and art is a reflection of the artist who created it, not the designer who designed it.