Personal Statement

The whole story . . . .

I have had a life-long love affair with textiles and fibers. I vividly remember trying to weave baskets out of grass when I was 7 or 8 and I designed some mule-style slippers for a sixth grade craft fair. Out of necessity, my mother sewed most of my clothes when I was small and always let me “play” with her sewing machine. By the time I got to junior high school, Vogue Patterns and I were old friends. I learned to hand-knit somewhere along the line, but didn’t knit in earnest until my early 20’s. About that time I also acquired a used loom (we traded one of Arthur’s assemblages for the loom) and taught myself to use it. I especially loved tapestry weaving, which is fairly slow, painstaking work. Weaving became an important medium for me and led me down the path to spinning and dyeing and crocheting and basket making before it circled back to more hand-knitting and, eventually, the knitting machine.

I met my first knitting machine at the National Needlework Association’s summer trade show in New York City in the early-1980’s. By then, I’d owned a weaving teaching and supply studio for a dozen years and had dallied with production and commissioned work and finished a master’s degree in studio art. It was the first time I ever felt as though my hands could keep pace with my mind and I was hooked! I wrote a letter to the workshop instructor, Helen Deckelman, who was then the US distributor for Passap and Superba—and a pioneering force in US knitting machines. I told her how much I had enjoyed the workshop and how surprised I was that I had never run into any machines in New England yarn shops—and that I would like to be a sales rep for the company. She hired me, sent out a Superba electronic and a Passap DM80 (punch card machine) and asked me to try teaching myself from the tapes that came with the Superba. Which I did. And I can tell you, it wasn’t easy. The Superba electronics weren’t quite perfected yet and I never knew if it was the machine or me when things went wrong., but I persevered because I needed the job. The Passap was a breeze by the time I had graduated from Superba School and by that fall, I was on the road throughout New England selling, promoting and teaching Superbas and Passaps. One of the best things about that job was working with Gene Bailey—and his willingness to let me pick his brain! He was a good friend, generous with information and help.

After about three years with Associated, I accepted a position with the New England distributor for Singer Knitting Machines (Silver Reed). That was followed by several years with the national distributor for Singer before I was approached by VWS in Cleveland (distributor of Viking and White Sewing machines and Studio by White and Superba knitting machines) with the offer to head up their knitting machine division. I was the Education Director for knitting machines at VWS for 11 years, during which time I trained dealers all over the US, taught at seminars and workshops, instituted Camp Tuckanitslip, produced a series of instructional videos (that are still in use and available from Needle-Tek), and Tips & Techniques teaching leaflets and Studio by White Design Magazine.

When VWS decided to end their distribution of knitting machines, my sister-in-law and I opened a yarn shop in Connecticut. We ran Have you any wool? for about four years, closing just a couple of years ahead of the hand-knitting boom. The shop was divided between hand and machine knitting; including a classroom with 8 machines for group lessons. I still contend that knitting is knitting whether you use a pair of size 8 wooden needles or a bed of 150 stainless steel needles.

There were very few good, fashionable patterns available for machine knits and, like many others, I learned to design and chart my own patterns soon I learned to knit on my first machine. Because I always worked for one of the knitting machine companies, my sweaters were designed to feature the capabilities of a particular machine or accessory and I always tried to write them as generically as possible so that they would have the widest possible appeal. It doesn’t do much good to talk about Russell Levers or Part Buttons if your machine doesn’t have one or the other. I always found it simpler—and clearer—to just say “set your machine to hold needles in holding position” (for example) than to dictate specific settings. I think that I value clarity so much because my under graduate degree prepared me to teach special education and I am keenly aware that we all process information differently. I find that being able to explain what I do helps to re-enforce my commitment to what I am doing, while it forces me to examine and evaluate each step.

I have always loved detail work—including finishing. When I hand knit, I enjoy crossing lots of cables and when I sew I look for tailoring details that speak to quality rather than quick. Enchanted as we all are with the automatic patterning systems in our knitting machines, it has never been what I love best. In the early days, so many of the fair isle sweaters I saw were knitted too tightly with cheap acrylic yarns. They conjured up images of people just “ironing out” sweater after sweater and it cooled my enthusiasm for pattern knitting. I’ve always thought that the cost of the yarn to knit a sweater is the smallest investment we make. My time is worth so much more that I have never been tempted to cheap out on the yarn. I have no interest in producing K-Mart sweaters when I can buy them so cheaply and so readily. Fewer, better sweaters appeal to me more.

In the early days, I kept comparing machine knitting to weaving on a loom. I loved the fact that I could have an idea and sit down to sample it in minutes, experimenting with colors and stitch sizes and knowing exactly what I could expect my sweater to look like. As a weaver, I was used to the tedious process of dressing and threading the loom before I could really start to experiment. It is a different process and not fair to compare, but it gave me a whole new perspective that re-defined what I consider “work” and “play” and I think it was that newfound freedom that made hand manipulations so appealing. The instantaneousness of it is also the reason that I think machine knitting has enormous potential for creative expression—more than we usually see.

I wrote Hand-Manipulated Stitches for Machine Knitters in the late 1980’s. The publisher, Taunton Press, kept the book in print for over a decade and then the rights and the film to produce the book reverted to me. I was approached by Bond USA for reprint rights and they produced a paperback version of the book for a couple of years. Somehow, someone at Bond or Caron (which acquired Bond USA), managed to misplace the film and the book went out of print. In the fall of 2008 all rights to the book and video were finally returned to me. With considerable effort, the book has been reborn—with a new cover and any corrections that I was aware were needed and the video has been converted to DVD.