For my first Craft Mafia post, a black and red sweater!
One of the advantages of living and knitting in Chicago is the great resources available. Chicago has a lively knitting community, and the opportunity to take part in skill enhancing workshops. This sweater is about fifty years old, and is from the collection of
Susanna Hanson, a Seattle based teacher, who translates the Bohus Stickning patterns from Swedish for the English speaking market, and taught a workshop in Chicago a few weeks ago. I spent the day making a little cuff in the Bohus style of knitting, using fine wool and angora blend yarn, on size 00 needles. If you know knitting, you can appreciate how tiny that is. Susanna brought her collection of vintage Bohus sweaters for us to touch, examine, and photograph.
Bohus Stickning was an enterprise that lasted from 1939-1969. Wives of unemployed quarry workers were employed to knit, mostly after work or household chores were done, to supplement the family income. The sweaters were sold to wealthy tourists. I tried to re-live the Bohus experience, finishing my little cuff at about 1:30 AM the night after the workshop, with my man snoring away in the next room. I wear the cuff pretty frequently (which is still waiting for its mate), mostly for inspiration to push my knitting skill levels further. Of course I am considering the possibilities to incorporate some of these techniques into my dog sweaters. The use of color for these sweaters is different from most stranded knitting. Many pieces are knit flat, then seamed, so the color work is made more difficult having to reverse the charts to keep the pattern on the wrong side. Texture stitches are worked along with color, to move the colored yarn in different directions. The combination of color and texture results in a garment that is alive with color, and to me, just seems to glow.
