Well, no rain so far, but it has gotten colder again so there’s hope that the winter might still happen. Since I much prefer cold weather to hot, I’m happy with winter sticking around awhile. Plus it’s good weather for checking out the sweaters and shawls people are wearing as well as the hand knitted goods for sale on the street.
The above shots were actually taken in Dharamsala last time we were there. It seems like every vendor has at least a few items knit or crocheted by mom or grandma for sale next to the prayer wheels, bags of yak cheese, blankets, hair ties and hot sauce. The quality varies a lot along with the quantity, but the styles tend to be pretty consistent as people don’t work from written patterns, but from traditional styles and motifs they learned from others and keep in their heads. No two socks or hats are identical as they vary colours, designs and repeats on each new item, but there is no mistaking the distinctive Himalayan regional style of construction and colour use.
I wish I had a better picture of the sweater this woman is wearing.
Unfortunately, it’s cropped out of a crowd scene and any attempt to enlarge it just makes it more blurry. It’s a good example of the colour choices and sweater pattern designs used up in Ladakh. The colours are bright, but not as screamingly psychedelic as those used by the Indian knitters around here. A lot of that has to do with the yarns available - wool and wool blend yarns have dyed colours that are more subtle and relatively more “natural” (very relatively) than the bright acrylic yarns than are what we can get in our local shops in Rewalsar. According to my sources (waving at Tracy and Rinchen) you can find yarn up in Ladakh that is actually related to a sheep! More usual, is the yarn I used to make this hat in a moment of deranged whimsy:
I saw this glitzy, sparkly, plastic yarn in the shop and decided that I absolutely HAD to have some of it with which to knit a watermelon hat.
Now, around here, that’s not odd at all. Okay, well the watermelon motif might be a tad unusual, but not the use of the sparkly yarn nor the colour combinations. In fact I’ve probably got enough of this left over to knit some kid a sweater to match the hat. You might remember this sweater from pictures of the Christmas party:
Jyoti is our landlord’s younger son and this yarn used (probably by Grandma) to knit his eye-stabbing pullover in this particularly vivid shade of light purple, is the rage this year in Rewalsar! When I discovered this fact - and because I am a magpie at heart - I went to the various yarn shops in town (we have 3 in this tiny village - that’s how popular knitting is in the region!) And found that it was all sold out. Every scrap of the purple and the bright sky blue had been snapped up early in the season so that every fashionable young boy could have a new sweater designed to make them visible a night, to a car half a kilometer away even in the densest possible fog cover! Among young girls, who are less likely to combine it with a bandaged scalp wound as an accessory, the preferred shade is a white so pure and so sparkly that a group of schoolkids can cause snow blindness on a sunny cold day. What I find surprising however is that, for a yarn that really does look like nothing so much as that crinkly plastic fake grass used in the West to line children’s Easter baskets, it’s surprisingly soft to the touch.
Not everyone wants bling. Fortunately. There are plenty of other mind-bogglingly bright colours of knitting yarn in these shops and even more subtle pastel shades favoured by older ladies, gentlemen in government service and some very young babies. Yellow and beige are quite popular with this set and one even sees a tasteful off white from time to time. If you go far enough afield you might even find yarn that would please the boring tastes of Westerners like me. Lena scored on one of her trips into Mandi, when she found a high quality yarn store that carried a small quantity of really nice wool blend knitting yarns in heathery colours.
At $20 US per kilo, it was really really pricey for the average Indian knitter who is accustomed to paying less than half that amount for the best of the acrylic stuff. But I had no objection to paying that amount, nor did the handful of Indian knitter friends I contacted in places like Bangalore and Mumbai with higher-end economies and absolutely no way to get their eager hands on real wool. We pretty much bought up his stock at that price and I spent a week packaging, weighing and shipping off courier packages to my South Indian friends. I did keep enough to do some knitting myself once I’ve finished the other projects at the head of my queue. I’ve let myself swatch
in order to choose a pattern and a colour, but have vowed not to cast on for the Winter Branches sweater until I’ve got a few more finished objects under my belt!
I’ve notice that, around here, knitters are very production oriented - they are knitting garments, not as a hobby, but as either a necessity for themselves and their families or for money. So what gets started has a purpose and the individual works steadily on a single garment or item until it’s finished. No basket of UFOs (that’s UnFinished Objects in knitterspeak.) No casting on, deciding halfway that you don’t really like that lace patter and ripping it out and trying a few more before deciding to complete it. You knit and you keep knitting until you have a sweater or a scarf or a hat. Then you knit something else. It’s what your hands do throughout the winter, if you’re the family knitter. It’s not at all uncommon to see groups of women walking along the path talking and knitting as they go. Or sitting and waiting for something or someone with their knitting in their lap stitching along.
I went to town yesterday for lunch and to get out of the house. I took my own knitting in progress:
along for the ride. Part of any trip to town involves sitting and drinking tea - at least once and usually several times per afternoon. Drinking tea is the warp which gives the social fabric of life in Asia it’s structure and cohesiveness. News, gossip, money, goods, letters, sympathy, advice and much much more all change hands during the ritual of sitting outdoors (even in iffy weather) drinking a tiny glass of nuclear hot, insanely sweet spiced chai. It’s the perfect time to pull out the knitting and let one’s hands do productive work while the mouth, eyes and ears are otherwise occupied. The project above is perfect for social knitting: nowhere near done yet, but no pressure to complete; a pattern that has enough variation to avoid boredom and yet repetitive enough that an experienced knitter can easily memorize the pattern and execute it without looking at every stitch. Plus it’s pretty, bright yarn that changes constantly and that’s always fun to watch unfolding.
As usual, knitters have an instant bond. I’ve knitted my way around the world now and I’ve found that needlework, the process of creating something useful/beautiful/fun out of sticks and string, is a practice that transcends language, culture and even age differences. I’ve had old ladies in the plazas and mercados of Mexico examine my stitches and give me advice and critique. I’ve had knitters in almost every country ask me (with gestures as often as words) if it’s as complicated as it looks to knit socks in the round on tiny double-pointed needles (it isn’t.) I once taught an impromptu class on simple lace knitting during a layover in the Singapore airport when one of my fellow passengers - who had watched me during the flight - asked me to show her how to work the old shale pattern I was doing. We ended up gathering a small crowd of knitters from several different countries who saw what was happening and came over to watch and ask questions. And I’ve had a few who have seen my knitting style, forcibly try to take my knitting away and show me the “right” way to do it! I’m a “thrower” - taught many many years ago by my mom who had severe arthritis and hand deformity which permitted her to do that particular method only and then again, in my mid-twenties, by an old gentleman from Hong Kong living and teaching in San Francisco. I “pick” only when doing two-handed colourwork, otherwise it just slows me down. Anyway, as usual, I wasn’t the only knitter out on the street. I took this picture seated at the Kora Cafe (best real coffee in Rewalsar) of a woman who had found a nice sunny spot on a cold day:
She’s wearing a hand knit sweater in a stitch pattern I see a lot locally. It was getting threadbare at the elbows though and I couldn’t help but wonder if the one she was working on now is for her or for some other married lady. The fact that she’s Indian and the bright red colour of the yarn she’s using means that, if it is a sweater, it’s almost surely for a married woman in her childbearing years as red is a colour almost exclusively worn by such. Oh, babies can wear it too, so it might have been a baby garment, I couldn’t get close enough to tell, though we did nod and exchange smiles more than once.
So many images and things I still have to show. I have quite a backlog in my photo gallery and there is something new to look at every day. As I try to get back in the habit of regular blogging, I find that I am often surprised by whatever tangent my writing hies off on that day. I’ll think, “oh, let me show you the interesting jewelry worn by the women from Kinnour” and, next thing I know, I’m writing about food and farming. Or I’ll want to do a pictorial on cheese-making and instead it will be watermelon hats and random knitting thoughts. So it goes. There’s no lack of interesting visuals here, that’s for sure. But right now I need to go and bake some bread and maybe even make a pizza for supper tonight. Around here, the domestic arts that I had so little patience with as a child growing up in a major city, are necessities rather than options and hobbies. Things like baking a good loaf of bread or knitting your kid a warm sweater for winter have to be done by someone. I’m glad now I learned these skills, they are just more enjoyable when the end result actually makes a difference between some and none.
