The Knitting Fiend

 
 

Sail the ocean blue
in the Nina, Pinta and
Santa Maria.
 
 
 

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I bet you wish your husband or boyfriend owned this splendid intarsia sweater to wear on Columbus Day! He could wear it twice this year: Monday when we actually celebrate and on October 12th, the official day.

 
 
 
Why did I knit this?
I watch Bill Cosby reruns
and think it’s in style.
 
 
 

It’s often easy for women of advancing years to delude themselves into belief that everything was better when they were young. In my youth I became aware of this risk and vowed I would not succumb.

To help me keep my vow, I have made it my practice to examine the covers of McCalls Needlework and Crafts, concentrating on those from the 70s and 80s, when I first began to knit.¹ How do I examine a huge number of covers similar to the beaut pictured to the left? Ebay!

Though the images on ebay are often good enough to convey the “total 80ness” of the covers, unfortunately, they are generally too small to reveal the “interesting” details I would highlight in a Haiku. While you can see very crafty Christmas ornaments the size of a your chest, but you’d really need to squint to see the 80’s puffed sleeves pictured to the left.

But, today, two separate ads showed images of a sweater with intarsia so bold anyone could see it in the tiniest of images. And so I bring you this:

 
Huge hot pink trefoils
rise up on this woman’s chest
Classics from McCalls.
 

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1. Since I knit during the 80’s, I bought and kept a number of these along with some knitting periodicals printed by Better Homes and Gardens. The contents of these two periodicals have often been the subject of Haikus and sometimes my musings on the splendors of 80’s knitting. (Haiku’s: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8. Splendor of 80s knitting:
1, 2 & 3, 4.)