Ravelings from the Early Years: Method or Madness

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We love reading the Ravelings in back issues of Interweave Knits. Essays written more than 20 years ago sound as though they could have been published a week ago. This piece written by Judith Durant from 1997 is a perfect example … enjoy.

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Method or Madness?

Before working on this issue of Interweave Knits, I’d never done double knitting. I became fascinated with this extraordinary reversible technique, and a simple baby blanket seemed the perfect venue for showing off. My first idea came quickly: I’d knit a small blanket with a striped border around blocks of teddy bears, rocking horses, and other such “baby” things. I chose yarn, knitted swatches, sketched out the blanket, graphed the pictorial patterns. And decidedly disliked this blanket. I’m not a mother and have no young children in my life at the moment. And while I love small and sweet things, I just wasn’t satisfied with these hackneyed motifs. I wanted something less obvious, perhaps less “cutesy”

Seeking Inspiration

I decided a trip back to the drawing board was in order. I thumbed through my children’s knitting books in search of inspiration. Everything I saw was along the lines of what I wanted to avoid: alphabets, animals, trains, and dolls. I racked my brain for a new idea. I felt pressured to come up with an inspired idea fast—I’d promised to provide a blanket for the issue and there are deadlines to meet. Blank. Zero. Zip. I finally gave up and went to bed where I practice a much-loved nightly ritual—reading.

Escape Into a Good Book

I had borrowed Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace from a colleague and couldn’t wait to start. Atwood is one of my favorite authors and I am her perfect foil, blithely allowing myself to be swept up in her prose. While living in New York City in the early 1980s, I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale. That eerie volume outlines the very simple way that men go about enslaving women by systematically stripping them of their independence. A rudimentary step is to separate women from their money. The tactic is simple: a woman goes to the grocery store with her bank debit card (de rigueur in this fictional society). At the checkout, the clerk informs the unsuspecting customer that she has no funds available. No money, no power. It all seemed so feasible. The scheme haunted me for weeks and, against all good sense, I began to shop with cash only.

As I picked up the new, hardbound copy of Alias Grace that night, I looked forward to another memorable adventure, this time inside a courthouse, madhouse, and murder scene. (By the way, those are three different places.) That first night I found myself stuck on page 33, where the author gives a curious description of madness:

I never do such things, however. I only consider them. If I did them, they would be sure I had gone mad again. Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

I read that passage over and over. Each time I picked up the book I went to page 33, reread the passage, and moved forward from there. Needless to say, I wasn’t making much progress. Finally, I was able to get on with the book. The passage stayed with me, but I locked it in my subconscious where it belonged.

Inspiration Strikes

The morning after I’d completed about a third of the novel, the solution to the baby-blanket design problem was apparent. I would keep the basic idea of striped borders around blocks of squares, but rather than knitting the aforementioned pictorials, I’d knit traditional quilt motifs. Eureka! I set off for work and spent too much of the day at my desk contemplating the new blanket design.

Returning home from the office that evening, I gave my husband a quick kiss and headed for my studio. I loved my idea and relished the excuse to pull out my long-neglected quilting books. Thumbing through them all, I placed Post-its on the pages that spoke to me. I sketched out my favorite motifs and began charting them on knitter’s graph paper. After discarding some of the more complicated patterns that did not adapt well to the limits of knit stitches, I ended up with six motifs that I think work well in two colors. Satisfied with the design, I closed up shop, had dinner, and later snuggled into bed with my dear husband and Alias Grace.

Source Revealed

Fifteen minutes into the read, the obvious hit me like a ton of bricks. Each chapter of the book is introduced with a small pencil sketch of a quilt motif. What I had thought was an idea that I finally found after days of running around looking for it was actually something that was there all along—I had only to stay where I was and let it in.

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Judith Durant is a knitter, beadworker, designer, author, editor, and teacher. She is editor of the best-selling One-Skein Wonders series and more.

Originally published in Interweave Knits Winter 1997.

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Discover more from Interweave Knits’ early days in the archives of past issues!