knitting without pictures

I have been thinking recently how much I enjoy knitting without pictures. By which I mean knitting something that exists in one’s imagination only. That rose coloured sweater I made a few weeks ago was so pleasing in process precisely because I had not seen it anywhere before I knit it into being. I picked out the yarn, spent a good while with the yarn thinking about what it wanted to be, envisaged the sweater, and then knit it, transforming the imaginary object into the material one. And it isn’t just that the sweater is an original rather than a copy. There were no distracting illustrations for it to measure up to or fall short against. No lovely willowy being in a carefully photographed Rowan landscape had either worn it or inspired it. Somehow, because its it-ness emerged solely and slowly in a narrative of knitting over time, rather than being inspired by a particular image, I have a different kind of relationship to it.

I was also considering the particular pleasures of knitting without pictures while reading Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top the other evening—which relies entirely on narrative to impart its wisdom. This is a book without photographs (excluding the one which adorns what might well be the Worst Cover Ever). In order to acquaint yourself with Walker’s matchless knitting insights, you have to read it carefully and sequentially. And of course, it is the pleasures of narrative that makes The Zimmermann so continuingly engaging. One is enjoying the writing while absorbing the particular sense of a technique. EZ began producing her narrative newsletters after being horrified when her original pattern for a circular yoked sweater was altered by the magazine in which it was published into knit-back-and-forth instructions. In her account of this incident in Knitting Around she also seemed a little perturbed by the way her sweater was transformed into an image with meanings beyond her control. The sweater was now there, she said, “to embellish the portrait of the beautiful blonde who had been summoned to model it.” (Knitting Around, p.16) This radiant creature with her cosmetic rictus grin indeed seems a million miles from EZ’s original intentions: “a dazzling and inspiring lure to cast on right away”—to make the knitter think I want that sweater. Precisely because they lacked alluring photographs, EZ and Meg Swansen’s newsletters inspired an entirely different kind of relationship between a knitter and a sweater. This was a relationship that did not rely on the appeal of a well-photographed model but rather emerged out of an engaging narrative. So instead of thinking I want that sweater, the knitter has to imagine the myriad ways in which they might make one of their own. You are being sold useful knowledge rather than an imaginary commodity.

However, these observations do not mean I now reject the false, golden allure of the image. On the contrary, I spent several hours the other day drooling over the Molloch of knitting photography that is Rowan 42 (a publication with no narrative pleasures whatsoever—the writing in that magazine is consistently terrible.) And here is an image of today’s knitting presented without any narrative accompaniment.