Knitting
I’ve been really lucky to land in a department where my colleagues do really interesting work and are wonderful human beings. This has provided the perfect excuse to make some interesting fiber art inspired by their work, and I’d like to share the two most recent projects with the world.
Michael Lane is a Mycaenologist who runs a field school at Glas in Boeotia and is an all-around great guy. We co-taught a course in 2018 preparing students for a study trip to Greece, which gave me an opportunity to see him in action. One bit of new-to-me information that kept coming up in his lectures was the relevant prominence of Poseidon in Linear B tablets and Bronze Age Greek religion, and I know he spends every January tromping through chilly, damp Boeotia setting up for next year’s excavations. So of course the logical tribute knit was a Poseidon sweater. It was designed using traditional fisherman’s sweater techniques and modified stitch motifs. This sort of sweater is great if you’re branching out into original sweater design and want a technique that is easy to fit as you go – my favorite instruction manual is Sabine Domnick’s “Cables, Diamonds, Herringbones.”
Here, I added “fringe” to the net motifs as an homage to the tied-off hems worn by the men of the Warrior Vase, a herringbone chest band, and cables ending in tridents at the cuff. I had to test a few different cables to get the trident tines to look sufficiently aggressive. The sweater is worked in sportweight Peruvian highland wool.
(My photography, alas, in not as good as my knitting, but this should give you the idea. The texture shows up a lot better in person.)
Melissa Bailey Kutner is our Roman Archaeologist who works on Roman numeracy culture. She teaches the bulk of our Roman art history units, and she’s in the process of converting to Judaism. Much of what I know about incorporating material culture into my research, I learned from her work, and she’s one of the best friends a person could have. So I decided to make her a tallit. This ceiling fresco from the Jewish Catacombs at Vigna Randanini provided inspiration:
(Source: http://www.catacombsociety.org/jewish-catacombs/
I fell in love with the round-in-rectangle shapes and the bold colors, but this kind of thing poses a challenge in knits because round shapes are constructed very differently from oblongs. I found some examples of round insets in Niebling tablecloths, but they didn’t really create the crisp central circle I needed. So I tried a few things, frogged most of them, and finally managed to get the proportions just right enough that the circle blocked out into the shape I’d hoped for. I wanted to incorporate sacred numbers into the design, so the lace motifs and stripes are grouped in sets of 12, 7, and 10. It’s also highland wool worked in fingering weight on #1 US needles.
