Habetrot

Welsh Knitter

Welsh girl in traditional costume.

Yes, including the hat.

Woman Knitting

Woman Knitting
Chaim Soutine (1893-1943)

Soutine was an impressionist painter of poor Russian birth who emigrated to France at the age of 20 to paint.

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This lady has been one of my favorites for a long time, ever since I saw her on exhibit about fifteen years ago.

You can see more of Soutine's work here.

Learn To Knit!

From a 1910 "Ladies Home Journal" magazine.

The Shrinking Song

The Shrinking Song

Woolen socks, woolen socks!
Full of color, full of clocks!
Plain and fancy, yellow, blue,
From the counter beam at you.
O golden fleece, O magic flocks!
O irresistible woolen socks!
O happy haberdasher's clerk
Amid that galaxy to work!
And now it festers, now it rankles
Not to have them 'round your ankles;
Now with your conscience do you spar;
They look expensive, and they are;
Now conscience whispers,
You ought not to,
And human nature roars,
You've got to!

Woolen socks, woolen socks!
First you buy them in a box.
You buy them several sizes large,
Fit for Hercules, or a barge.
You buy them thus because you think
These lovely woolen socks may shrink.
At home you don your socks with ease,
You find the heels contain your knees;
You realize with a saddened heart
Their toes and yours are far apart.
You take them off and mutter Bosh,
You up and send them to the wash.
Too soon, too soon the socks return,
Too soon the horrid truth you learn;
Your woolen socks can not be worn
Unless a midget child is born;
And either sockless you must go,
Or buy a sock for every toe,

Woolen socks, woolen socks!
Infuriating paradox!
Hosiery wonderful and terrible,
Heaven to wear, and yet unwearable.
The man enmeshed in such a quandary
Can only hie him to the laundry,
And while his socks are hung to dry,
Wear them once as they're shrinking by.

--Ogden Nash (1902-1971) prolific American poet and humorist.

Also by Nash:

Introspective Reflection

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance
Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.

Ogden Nash poems  Copyright © by Linell Nash Smith and Isabel Nash Eberstadt.

 

Millet - The Knitting Lesson

Jean-François Millet  
(French, 1814-1875)  (more).

Millet is a particular favorite of mine, as readers of these pages have seen.  He painted regular people going about their lives doing regular things in rural 19th-century France--spinners, shepherds, spindling shepherdesses, among many other subjects.

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He often used scenes from his own life, peopled by his own family.  One of my favorite themes is my topic today--The Knitting Lesson.

Millet was not alone in painting this tender scene.  Other artists have also done so from time to time.  See my previous entry here.

Millet painted and sketched this scene many times, and here are a sketch and three painting, all variations on the theme.

In each the tenderness and love of the mother for the daughter, as well as of the painter for the mother and daughter, is palpable. 

The large outline of each is the same, but the small details vary from one to the next--the dress, the amount of light coming in the window, whether the mother has work on her lap.  Sometimes there is a kitten in the background; the items on the linen press change from one image to the next

"Already a considerable length of stocking has been made, but this is a place where close attention is needed. Perhaps it is time to begin shaping the heel. The mother's work is left altogether for a moment. Putting her arm about the child's shoulder, she takes the two little hands in hers, and guides the fingers holding the needles."

From a book published in 1900, Jean François Millet, by Estelle M. Hurll, available here from Project Gutenberg.  On that page you will also find yet another variation on the scene.

 

This is Millet's painting, "End of the Hamlet of Gruchy," giving a glimpse of more of Millet's everyday life.

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Knitting Shepherdess

This is "Shepherdess With Goat, Sheep, and Cow" by Julien Dupré (1851 - 1910), a French realist painter.

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Dupré is a favorite of mine.  You will be seeing his works in these pages again.

Japanese Knitter -- Updated

A Japanese knitter from the late 1800's.

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With thanks to Beadlizard for being smarter than I am, I give you an amazing explanation of this image from my friend Alfred the ultra-knowledgable wonder weaver and worker of magic with silk.

"My guess, based on the fact that she is wearing a furisode (kimono with long, flirtatiously flappy sleeves) means she's unmarried; the fur collar piece extravaganza is still worn by unmarried-but- eminently-marriageable young ladies at New Years (they use white fur nowadays though), for shrine visits, and photography sessions.  The fact that she's knitting not only means that she's industrious and therefore marriageable, but also frightfully up-to-date, since knitting in Meiji Japan (1868-1912) was All the Rage as with many things western.  I am pretty sure that knitting made its initial appearance in Japan with the arrival of the first Europeans in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, but as far as I know it didn't 'stick' until the Meiji period.

Based on what I know about the period and the sartorial landscape of the time (there was a lot of change during that period, clothingwise), I would guess that your Marriageable One gussied herself up and posed for the shutter-click sometime between 1890 and 1900.

Also, she doesn't shave her eyebrows and has a simple pompadour (rather than one of the several de rigueur traditional hairdos) which means that she's slightly westernized.  Her face is powdered chalk white, another sign of wealth and class.  Merchant class, as they were not allowed to embroider their kimono (sumptuary law), but inventive people with money to spare can always find a way around sartorial edicts, so enter Yuzen-zome*, a dyeing technique, which later became exalted and refined, and today is considered rather more elegant than the embroidery and brocading it was originally meant to imitate.  She would be anywhere from 16-20 in this photograph, which almost certainly was used by marriage brokers to show to potential suitors.

*Yûzen-zome could be described as a masterful technique which utilizes both stenciled paste-resist and the technique of painting dyes directly onto mordanted fabric.  It developed in response to the sartorial edicts of the Tokugawa shoguns, who ruled Japan from 1600 until 1868.  The merchant class, who by then were the cash-richest people in the country at the time, had been 'aping their betters' in mode of dress, wearing fabrics rich with gold, embroidery, and brocading.  There were forbidden colors, as well.  The pissed-off shogun issued the sartorial edicts beginning (I think I got this date right) in the second quarter of the eighteenth century after a period of fairly wild abandon during which the merchants had become wealthy enough to become the arbiters of mode.  Brocades were now forbidden to anyone but the kuge, or noble families; embroidery was forbidden to anyone below the rank of samurai, which included farmers and merchants, respectively.  The merchants, of course, obeyed, to the letter of the law.  But they were still the richest people in town, with taste, and they turned the tables on the sartorial edicts by holding fast to their position as society's fashionistas by investing buckets of money in labor-intensive craft techniques.

Yûzen-zome was developed by some genius in the Yûzen family.  Can't embroider vines with Convolvulus blossoms on your fabulous new kimono?  The craftspeople would stencil-resist a vine, which would then appear after the piece was dyed and washed, as negative space.  This in turn would be painted carefully and laboriously outlined in crisp black hair-thin lines painted along the edges, and then a wide palette of hues would be 'embroidered' as in-fill within those lines, by painting dyes onto discrete areas of that fabric.  The results were breathtaking and became All The Rage, leaving the heavily-embroidered upper classes left looking like gaudy fashion has-beens."
 

Famous Knitters II

The in/famous Joan Crawford.

Doesn't she look like a happy, relaxed knitter?

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Take a look at this video for an amusing overview of her career.

And here's a 1972 "Ladies Circle" article about Joan and her knitting, complete with a pattern for this fabulous garter stitch afghan.   

Knitting Lesson

Hugh Carter 
English Painter and Draftsman
1837 - 1903


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Ode to My Socks

Ode to My Socks

    Maru Mori brought me
    a pair of socks
    which she knitted herself
    with her sheepherder's hands,
    two socks as soft as rabbits.
    I slipped my feet into them
    as if they were two cases
    knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
    Violent socks,
    my feet were two fish made of wool,
    two long sharks
    sea blue, shot through
    by one golden thread,
    two immense blackbirds,
    two cannons,
    my feet were honored in this way
    by these heavenly socks.
    They were so handsome for the first time
    my feet seemed to me unacceptable
    like two decrepit firemen,
    firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
    of those glowing socks.

    Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
    to save them somewhere as schoolboys
    keep fireflies,
    as learned men collect
    sacred texts,
    I resisted the mad impulse to put them
    in a golden cage and each day give them
    birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
    Like explorers in the jungle
    who hand over the very rare green deer
    to the spit and eat it with remorse,
    I stretched out my feet and pulled on
    the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

    The moral of my ode is this:
    beauty is twice beauty
    and what is good is doubly good
    when it is a matter of two socks
    made of wool in winter.

Pablo Neruda   1904 - 1973