Of Words and Wool: Dreaming about dreaming in technicolour, or, Not this again!

About a month ago we hosted a reunion at our house of my husband’s undergrad roommates. This is a bunch of guys who lived together in one house for several years while they were students at what was then called the University of Western Ontario and has (for no reason I can fathom) been renamed Western University. Their first impromptu reunion occurred at our 25th wedding anniversary shindig seven years ago. They had such a good time that they decided to do it every year. It hasn’t actually been an annual thing, but close enough to be called regular. Sometimes it has involved everyone’s families; other times, just the guys themselves.

There is one exception to this: the oldest member of the group has remarried and his wife accompanies him to these gatherings. She was there last year when they congregated at Cape Cod (I was in Paris being a cultural tourist) and the year before in New York. I have managed to avoid them for the most part. I do not drink and that is what they mostly do when they get together, plus play guitar and generally whoop it up like a bunch of college students. Boys will be boys. The wife, however, is a gentler soul. She drinks, yes, but she doesn’t whoop. This summer she was recovering from knee (or was it hip?) surgery, so was also rather sedentary, although we did get her to come on a tour of a local abandoned copper mine cum museum and she was a very good sport about all the stairs and only had one breakdown when her claustrophobia got the best of her.

While the boys were playing guitar and drinking, she was doing needlepoint. This is not a craft I have ever taken an interest in; I embroidered my jean jacket when I was a teen as was then the fashion, and I think some pillow cases when I was first learning the art, but I feel that it is a purely decorative craft and I am much better in the construction of things, not their embellishment (although I do like knitting with beads, which is fodder for a future post). Jen was working on cushion covers for the planned reupholstery of their dining room chairs. She had completed one, which she had brought with her, and was in the process of finishing another. She is very slow and meticulous, working only when she has a spare moment, and produces about one a year.

Her canvases were preprinted with intricate abstract designs in many colours and were quite beautiful. No two were alike. She told me they were designs by Kaffe Fassett, a name I had come across when I was reading Adrienne Martini’s book, but hadn’t bothered investigating further. Jen and I looked him up on the internet and pored over all the photographs of his work and I was suitably impressed and amazed. His designs are intricate, colourful and captivating. For example, this one:

Here’s one that is a little more “traditional” looking:

But he doesn’t just design needlepoint cushion covers. His work can be found in rugs, fabric, mosaics and, of course, knitting. I had to look at the knitting patterns. Look at this, from his Peruvian collection:

and this:

I can only imagine that it was these images (and more) which induced that dream I had about knitting Fair Isle.

I recently pulled out a pattern book I bought in the 1980’s (pub. 1983) which I had purchased with an eye to making some of the garments within. Some of them are rather dated now, but others have held up well over time. The one on the cover indicates the era which spawned it.

A quick Ravelry search reveals that several knitters have actually made this garment. Here’s one I particularly like:

There aren’t a lot of patterns from The Sweater Book which have found their way into the Ravelry database, unfortunately, and I am beginning to think it is time to remedy that omission. Here are a few that particularly caught my eye with their timeless quality, especially the last one with its catchy name.