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.