Mossy Cottage Knits

Adding to Your Edumacation

For someone who has no interest whatsoever in actually learning how to knit, Cuzzin Tom has certainly immersed himself in the history and the culture of knitting, especially as it relates to MongoLEEans. For example, he recently sent me this excerpt from The Desert Road to Turkestan, written by Owen Lattimore, and published in 1929. I tease, I tease, Cuzz, but, really, this was good stuff!

“The idle weeks of the ‘herding camp,’ as it is called, are the best for the men as well as the camels. The men are given leave in turn to go to their homes, and even in camp extra men are taken on to help with the herding, and the regular men do only one day’s herding and one night on watch, followed by five to seven days “easy.” During this time they are busy with the curious pastime of knitting. The trade in camels’ wool or hair, as it is indifferently called, is new, and has been developed entirely by the encouragement of foreign merchants. Younghusband, in 1887, observed that the trade was just beginning. A picul of camel hair was then worth about taels 5.00 in Tientsin. It is now worth as much as taels 70.00 for a picul of 133 pounds. Before the foreign demand, the hair shed by camels used to be left to blow about the desert, sometimes rolling into huge balls. A camel sheds on the average about six pounds of hair, with another pound and a half or two pounds of coarser, less valuable hair from the mane and the bunches of hair above the knees, on the forelegs.

“Knitting is a newer thing still. The caravan men say that they learned it from the White Russian soldiers deported from Chinese Turkestan. Some hundreds of these men were sent down to the coast, divided into small parties traveling with different caravans, and their way of knitting and crocheting socks was eagerly learned by the camel men. All of the hair from the camel herd belongs, of course, prescriptively to the owner, but in fact he loses a great deal of this because it has become a perquisite of the men to use as much as they like for making socks for themselves. They never steal the hair to sell in town, but they do make a lot of extra things on the quiet, which they sell. Long scarves knitted or crocheted by camel men were all the fashion among the richer Chinese at Kuei-hua when I was there. When we first started, many of the camels had not finished shedding, and it was an amazing thing to see men knitting on the march; if they ran out of yarn they would reach back to the camel of the file they were leading, pluck a handful of hair from the neck, and roll it in their palms into the beginning of a length of yarn; a weight was attached to this, and given a twist to start it spinning, and the man went on feeding wool into the thread until he had spun enough yarn to continue his knitting.”

Er, apropos of nothing, Cuzz, I thought you’d be interested in this page on the FBI web site.

Thank you everyone for the kudos on the Superdeeduper Ultimate Extreme Over-the-Top Cascade 220 Stashbusting Dulaan Scarf. You can imagine how easy it is to knit! The quick 'n' dirty specs are:

• Any leftover balls of Cascade 220 or similar worsted weight yarn (in my case, I was able to knit 11 colored stripes before I had to repeat)
• A leftover ball of black Cascade 220 (or similar worsted yaddayaddayadda)
• Size 6 needles
• 30 stitches
• First and last eight rows and leftmost and rightmost six stitches in seed stitch. The rest in stockinette.
• The colored stripes are about 1.5 inches long, which works out to 12 rows (for me, anyway, the World's Tightest Knitter)
• The black stripes are four rows.
• The scarf is only about 6" wide but it's meant for a wee one.

And don't let the thought of weaving in all those ends deter you, Norma. They're actually a great excuse to take a break when your hands are tired of knitting but you're not ready to give up on all fiber-fondling for the evening. Besides, don't forget how noble weaving in ends can make you feel when you're actually just farting around on the couch watching "Surface."