Joy

Knitting, like any passion, can take you many wonderful places.

Today I was browsing in a local independent bookstore and noticed that the woman at the counter was knitting a sock. We got to talking and one story led to another, as they do, and pretty soon Joy, that was her very appropriate name, was drawing out a design of a tulip as she spoke of the history of this design and its relevance to her family.

It turns out that Joy's family enjoys the heritage of several peoples. From Scotland to the Americas. The rich result is that she was taught to knit by her grandmother, along with her brother. Girls were encouraged to learn color stranded knitting, while boys were encouraged to learn cables and single color knitting. The reason given is that you don't want to be burdened with multiple colors while out fishing. This of course led to the story of how drowned fishermen are identified by the patterns of their sweaters. We discussed the origins of colored knitting being in the economical use of yarn ends, and the family patterns of stockings. And then Joy launched into how these patterns can come back to you in interesting ways.

She told the story of her father responding to a painted pattern on a bus on a reservation. Joy drew the pattern out for him without having seen it, amazing him until she revealed to him the ancestry of the pattern. The tulip pattern on the bus, which her father initially considered just some "hippy" decoration, was a traditional decorative pattern of their tribe. This pattern was adapted from pattern books the French missionaries brought to the Northwest territories in the fifteenth century based on wallpaper designs and embroidery. The pattern was adapted by the Indians for use in their own textiles and is in fact knitted into fabric.

My thanks to Joy for this wonderful lesson in the web of pattern and design and how we all contribute and draw from the wells of our complex communities. I wish I had a picture of the drawing Joy made to cast into this modern well of the Internet. Web 2.0 at work.