Monday, August 13, 2007

She Stoops to Conquer.

The Squirrel & Oak mittens, with my sister's initials knit into the point. As I noted before, totally ridiculous, but I love them. I just bought Terri Shea's Selbuvotter and will use it to do more sophisticated Fair Isle mittens, but I had a lot of fun with this project.

Selbuvotter is a neat book with a rather literal premise--Shea recreates Selbuvotter mittens she has found in various collections down to mistakes in yarn, needle size, and thumb construction. The book, subtitled A Biography of a Knitting Tradition, is not meant to be a pattern book, but it's not precisely a biography either. It is perhaps more accurate to call it a painstaking record of a localized movement. I got interested in college in literary textiles and have been contemplating how to take a more materialist approach to my own work, so I have great sympathy for the project undertaken here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

woah. I congratulate you on the squirrels, and on the incorporation of "literary textiles" into your knitting. neat!

I have
a) changed blog addresses to noregretscoyote.typepad.com (name that Canadian lyric!), and
b) decided that law school was a soulless blip on my life radar that I was foolish to pursue and must now complete before I can move on to grad school, which I have discovered I will not be happy without...

so if you have any advice about either... fire away!

I hope all's well with you!

Anonymous said...

So, I was just checking out you ladies' blog and saw these! They're AMAZING!! It totally looks like an adorable little squirrel. If I were there I would give you a high five and a hug...if you said I could. Okay. Love you!