Mason-Dixon Knitting: The Curious Knitters' Guide
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Knitting nirvana
REVIEW BY ANN SHAYNE Searching for the soul of a dishcloth "There." "Like this?" "No, too styled." Too styled? I thought that was our mission: "styling" the handknits for the photographs that are to go into our book, Mason-Dixon Knitting: The Curious Knitters' Guide. We are in the kitchen of a Victorian house in the Catskills, hunkered around a knitted dishcloth, seeking to capture its soul. There are five of us: Steve Gross, a distinguished architectural photographer who has in a weak moment agreed to shoot our book for us; Sue Daley, his partner who is a gifted stylist; my co-author, Kay Gardiner; my sister-in-law Mary Neal Meador; and me. The kitchen is crammed with laundry baskets filled with stuff we are going to photograph for the book, including the baby burp cloths which are still not finished. Steve's equipment is a tangle of cables, cases and shiny umbrellas that look like leftovers from a moon mission. It's not obvious to me how this is going to go.
Well, it really was magic. It was like when Penn and Teller explain the trick to you, then do the trick again and you still don't know how they did it. We first met Steve and Sue in their Manhattan studio, which looked like Hollywood's idea of a photographer's loft: industrial, high-ceilinged, with a huge light table in an otherwise empty room. It seemed impossible that these people would want to work on a knitting book. Surely they were too busy being cool. But they kept talking to us, and they never blinked when we said we would be photographing homely handknits like bath mats and baby bibs. We could not believe our good fortune. Steve told that us that on a good day, they take 10 shots. This seemed ridiculously slow to us, who rou-tinely take a zillion (blurry) (ill-framed) shots of a sleeve when we're writing about a knitting project on our blog, masondixonknitting.com. Snipsnap let's get it to it, we thought. But months later, now that we're huddled around that dishcloth, debating whether soap bubbles will photograph well, worrying whether the dishcloth looks sincere enough, I begin to wonder if we will get one shot a day. We move on. We wander through the house, figuring out where to shoot each item. Steve and Sue communicate at some frequency only dogs can hear. We conclude that they can read each other's mind. They go 10 minutes without a word, in the tiniest attic bedroom of this rambling old house, climbing into the closet to get the right angle, futzing with the lighting in order to photograph a blanket casually draped around a bedpost. The dozens of black flies swarming in the window behind the bed worry us—a bit too much plague. Steve doesn't seem concerned. Kay constantly works on the baby burp cloths. Mary Neal presses hand towels. Never have I felt less necessary. At intervals Steve lets me look through his lens. From its well-used appearance, his Hasselblad has clearly taken a million photographs, but to me, the small, square image is the freshest thing I have ever seen. Piece by piece, Steve and Sue transform our baskets of precious, lumpy handknits into one lovely still life after another. Not only do Steve and Sue seem to communicate in some secret code, they also understand instinctively how we want the photographs to feel. We traveled to four locations with Steve and Sue: the Catskills house, Kay's apartment, a Manhattan townhouse and a house in Southampton. Today, as I flip through the finished book, seeing all these places lurking in the background, I marvel at the way Steve and Sue created a single mood for these photographs. We cared desperately about the way these pictures ought to look, yet we had no idea how to do it. It was an education to watch Steve and Sue make it happen so easily, and with so few words. An education, and a relief. The black flies? They vanished in a perfect exposure of bright light from the window. As for the dishcloth? Its humble, tender soul is caught on film, right there on page 19. Inspiration for simply elegant projects Believe it or not, the low-tech craft of knitting has a high-tech presence on the Internet. Online knitting magazines, knitting podcasts and countless knitting blogs are great ways for those of us who practice this solitary craft to find ideas, inspiration and connection with other like-minded folks. No one knows this better than Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne, whose wildly successful blog masondixonknitting.com not only brings together two knitters—one from New York, one from Nashville—but also brings in knitters from around the world. In their new book, Mason-Dixon Knitting, Kay and Ann infuse every page with the friendly humor, personal stories and down-to-earth style that have made their blog so popular. This book is great for those of us who tend to take our knitting too seriously (one sidebar is titled "Mistakes You Will Definitely Make"), or who think knitting has to be difficult or complicated. The projects included here are mostly simple ones—dishcloths, hand towels, felted baskets—but, more importantly, they are projects that people will actually use, not just fold up in tissue paper and cherish from a distance. It's also important to point out that "simple" does not equal "boring." As Kay says, knitters can use their patterns like good cooks use recipes—as inspirations to make the projects uniquely their own, as complicated or as straightforward as they like. For me, the most motivational section of the book deals with the variations on the log cabin blanket pattern. For years, I've suffered from Fear of the Afghan—even a baby blanket seems like an unbearably tedious process that results in one big square. The log cabin blankets that Ann and Kay include here, though, are exquisite in their simplicity but infinitely varied in their design. With Kay and Ann's encouragement, humor and common sense, even new knitters can overcome their fears and feel capable of creating something entirely their own. —NORAH PIEHL A former editor of BookPage, Ann Shayne rediscovered her love of knitting when she left the workplace to stay at home with her two young children. She met her co-author, Kay Gardiner, on a knitting message board in 2002, and the two began an e-mail correspondence that led to the popular blog, masondixonknitting.com. Their first book, Mason-Dixon Knitting, has just been published by Potter Craft.
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When we decided to write a book about knitting, Kay and I had a clear vision of what we wanted to create. Ours would be the knitting book we always wished we could find. It would have stories, a wide variety of cool patterns, and most of all, glorious, lush photographs which convey the warm-hearted wonderfulness of handknits. As we worked on the book, certain elements fell into place. Patterns: check. Stories: check. But the photography? Yikes! It loomed like a soul-sucking black hole. We knew nothing about photography. At some point we knew we had to start the photography process, but the word Hindenburg lurked in my mind. There was no way the photographs could come together. We avoided setting a schedule for the shoots. Maybe MAGIC would happen and some beautiful pictures would turn up.