Knitting Loses Grim Aspects, Wins Converts

Knitting once had something grim, fateful and forbidding about it. The Fates, those sinister and malevolent old women, always were either spinning or weaving or knitting.

Heinrich Heine, in one of his most charming poems, depicts how Dame Misfortune enters his home, tells him she is in no hurry to leave and settles down and begins to knit.

Then there were the Petroleuses, those grim women-fiends of the French Revolution, who sat gloatingly around the guillotine, clicking their knitting needles, while all the fair ladies and gallant lords of France, who during life often lost their hearts but always kept their heads, were now, in death, losing their heads yet maintaining proud and undaunted hearts.

Yes, knitting seemed always, somehow, connected with tragedy -with the dark and dismal forces that brood over and threaten life.

ALL CHANGED NOW

And now suddenly all this is changed. The modern woman has taken knitting to her heart and has turned the ugly duckling into a dazzling swan. Knitting needles have won new grace and charm and the woman of today handles them deftly and elegantly, with consummate coquetry, as if she were an Andalusian and her knitting a fan.

Wherever the modern woman goes, her knitting goes with her. At the beaches, in the subway, in commuters’ trains, at teas, in the lobbies of hotels, in the parks-everywhere she plies her needles-sometimes it is only one large circular needle with two points-and fashions dainty and delightful things, such as sweaters, scarfs, bathing suits and berets.

And this touch of domesticity, this display of a feminine craft, gives to the modern, emancipated woman, a new and distinct allure, an allure which has robbed knitting of all somberness and assures a place in the sunshine of fashion’s favor.