Remember how, when we were little kids, it was a big thing for kids who hadn’t taken piano lessons (yet, anyway) to sit down and play Chopsticks? Some were taught by older kids, some proudly figured it out on their own, but it was a way to show off and make the most noise in the room for attention. While the older siblings with their friends over would roll their eyes and groan at having to listen to it yet again.
I never did. I wanted to play like my big sister, not little kid stuff, and as soon as my teacher deemed me old enough I was in. Lessons!
For years and years in my knitting I didn’t know how to knit lace and I didn’t particularly want to; the word itself meant great-grandma stuff, like, y’know, antimacassars (it took me a long time to find out there was a word for those), i.e. big cotton doilies for draping over the backs of stuffed chairs.
For protecting them by absorbing the grease from–think of every picture you ever saw of George Washington and his hairdo. There you go.
For decades I knew people here and there whose one and only lace pattern was feather and fan for making afghans. Some used the occasional purl row. Some did not. They assured me it was easy, and unlike plain stockinette stitch, the edges didn’t curl.
But I thought, but if the result is everybody-makes-that and they-all-look-like-that, why bother? Where’s the learning? The new?
And then Schoolhouse Press republished Barbara Walker’s stitch treasuries from the 1970s: the bible of the knitting world, written because Walker, according to a recent piece in the New York Times, didn’t want knitting to be boring anymore. Thousands of looks that simple stitch sequences could create.
I found out what I was missing. I taught myself lace knitting by trial and error and determined hours with her first book in my lap deciphering her how-to graphics at the front.
Still it took me nearly 20 years to get over myself and knit an actual, unembellished plain old feather-and-fan into anything. (For the non-knitters: think sine waves.) It definitely has its places. I was avoiding them. I think it was the pandemic that left me thinking I had the time to finally just get to it.
I woke up this morning with the sudden clarity: Feather and Fan! It’s the Chopsticks of lace!
It starts off so simple but there are so many variations... (Have fun!) (Bugs Bunny!)