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.