Why I Love to Knit: Part 3

These days I’m improvising a little boy’s helmet cap using many of the small balls of yarn that have accumulated in my work basket from prior projects. It’s a pleasure to handle these familiar yarns that tie me back to sweaters and scarves I’ve made over the last several years. My thoughts inevitably lead, of course, to the folks I’ve knitted them for. This project also reveals to me a palette that especially pleases me -- various intensities of natural unbleached wool, assorted hues of blue, green, and yellow, an occasional touch of orange or ruby. Worked together, the colors pulsate, come to life in surprising and satisfying ways.

I am reminded of my exciting discovery last fall at The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam of van Gogh’s red lacquer Chinese tea box containing small balls of different colored yarns wound together by the artist to test the visual effects of what his friend Emile Bernard called “unexpected interlacing tonalities.”

According to Debora Silverman’s Van Gogh and Gaugin: The Search for Sacred Art. (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2000), “In studying the play of color tones with his colored yarn balls, van Gogh re-created the method used by Michel Chevreul, author of the most important books on color theory for 19th century painters. . . and director of the Gobelins Tapestry Works. . . . Van Gogh had read and absorbed Chevreul’s color theories while in Nuenen in 1884-1885, during the time that he studied the hand-loom weavers in his parents’ village and depicted them in 34 images of varying media. . . . THe months of daily observation of the weavers’ activities activated van Gogh’s interest in applying paint as threads and color as fibers, to be placed on the canvas [like] the warp and weft of woven cloth.”

In van Gogh’s April 30 1885 letter to his brother Theo, this fibre-art color theory has already taken form: “When the weavers weave those fabrics . . . they try, as you know, to get singular broken colours and greys in the cheviots — or to get the very brightest colours in balance against one another in the multicoloured tartans. . . . [R]ather than the fabric clashing, the overall effect of the pattern is harmonious from a distance. A grey that’s woven from red, blue, yellow, off-white and black threads, [and] a blue that is broken by a green and an orange, red or yellow thread, are very different from plain colours — that is, they vibrate more and make whole colours look harsh, whole, and lifeless. . . . [I]t’s not always exactly easy for the weaver or . . . the designer of the pattern or the colour combination, to work out his calculation of the number of threads and their direction — nor is it easy to weave brushstrokes together into a harmonious whole. If you saw the first painted studies that I made when I came here to Nuenen — and the present canvas — side by side — I think you’d see that as far as colour is concerned — things have livened up.”

For the rest of his life van Gogh incorporated this color theory into his work. Sometimes described as “troubled” and “frenzied,” his brushwork in the late 1890’s demonstrates the full, exuberant, joyful flowering of this fibre-art-based color theory.

Why I Love to Knit: Part 2

The simple answers to the question, “Why do you love to knit?” are my love for the finished, hand-crafted product and the desire to feel productive and keep my hands busy when I’m otherwise sitting still. What’s more, especially at times of particular stress, the rhythmic, repetitive action of knit and purl (like stroking a cat on my lap) mimics and steadies the heartbeat and calms the nervous system.

Then again, knitting is woven into the fabric of my life. It ties me back to my memories of childhood. Not unlike the strands of my DNA, it answers the questions, Who am I? What has made me who I am? My father worked at Emile Bernat & Sons, Inc., a famous old Massachusetts yarn company, for most of his working life; he and my mother met in the 1930’s because her father was the shop carpenter when Bernat was located in Jamaica Plain. When I was a child during the 1950’s, my mother knitted countless hats, mittens, and sweaters for me, my brother, and my father from yarn that my father salvaged from the remainder boxes at Bernat. My mother taught me to knit in those years. I still have all her Bernat pattern books from that era, and I can still see in my mind’s eye the tiny jackets I made for my dolls in yarn left over from a maroon and aqua vest she made for my father. In the 1960’s during my college summers, I worked at Bernat, too, after they moved to an old textile mill in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, at a machine that made the sample color charts -- cards with little bits of yarn threaded through tiny holes labeled with all the yarn weights, colors and stock numbers. When my father died in 2006 I could hardly bear to give to Goodwill the vests my mother had made for him over the 50 years of their marriage. The memories spool back to me with a sweet nostalgia as my needles make their tiny click click clicking, as the wool runs through my fingers working on a winter cap for my grandson.

Bernat Yarns was founded by Emile Bernat, who brought the craft of tapestry color matching and repair from the Austro-Hungarian court to early-20th century Boston. Tapestry restoration was his calling, and he was very proud of the work he did for curators at the Boston Museum Fine Arts. The yarn mill he founded was his livelihood, a business he passed on to his sons Paul, George, and Eugene. Thanks to the Google digitizing project, I recently had a look at Emile Bernat’s 1919 monograph on tapestry curation and repair, The History and Care of Tapestries, a copy of which resides in Harvard’s Fogg Library.

Last summer I bought a yarn called Berroco for a sweater and hat for my granddaughter. The brand name Berroco is one of the last relics of the old Bernat yarn label, which was one of the most respected labels of 20th century American knitting. I gathered from my father that back in the 1970’s or 1980’s the third and fourth American generations of the Bernat family were no longer interested in running a yarn business, so they sold the company and its name to Warren Wheelock, a scion of the family that owned Stanley Woolens, another old New England textile mill. Mr. Wheelock's yarn company, Berroco, maintains its headquarters in Uxbridge and preserves the first syllable of the old Bernat name in his company name. The Bernat Mill in Uxbridge is gone now, lost to a 10-alarm fire in July 2007.

I’m afraid that Bernat yarns nowadays aren’t as old-timey as I remember them. If I have my druthers I buy hand-spun, hand-dyed yarns from country folks like Betsy Viola of Quaking Maple Farm in Horse Shoe Run, West Virginia, whose wool has the color and texture redolent of the good old days.