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Not having met the author of this stunning, technically audacious knitting book, I imagine Debbie New as a renegade topologist, an explorer in the branch of math that unravels the almost mystical vagaries of knots and labyrinths....
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Not having met the author of this stunning, technically audacious knitting book, I imagine Debbie New as a renegade topologist, an explorer in the branch of math that unravels the almost mystical vagaries of knots and labyrinths. Like a traveler who delights in the adventure of the unknown, the author advises her readers, "Just remember that if you are wrong, so much the better, as it will both teach you something and lead you somewhere new." And this is only on page twenty-nine. I first encountered Debbie New in the nether pages of A Gathering of Lace, a coffee-table collection of knitted designs, where her knit coracle stood out among the shawls, gloves, and vests. Lest you not know what a coracle is, it is not something one either knits or wears. It is one of the most ancient and unpredictable forms of watercraft, traditionally fashioned from hides stretched over a small, round, wooden frame. A coracle appears in the classic adventure novel, Treasure Island, where its unsteerable nature nearly causes the young hero to perish. Instead, the goatskin bowl and its lonely passenger surrender to the chaos of the waves and end up in exactly the right place at the right moment. The young hero of Treasure Island mercifully falls asleep while being tossed about on the waves, but not Debbie. I suspect there is nothing she loves better than dashing with wild abandon, wide awake, into the bubbling sea of creative possibility. Debbie knit her boat, undaunted by the fact that knitting is made of holes, and in fact she chose the holiest form of knitting, lace. She ignored her mathematician son's attempt to guide her with his treatise on "Coracular Applications of the Knitting of Hyberbolic Discs" in favor of following her own freeform, coracular-like intuitive movements. No, the gleeful mind that fills this book's oversize pages could have been no more likely to stop to take direction from a treatise than a coracle would be likely to sail obediently from point A to point B. Now mind you, Debbie could not have been afraid of math. This woman is a scientist as well as artist, fluent in multiple specialties in both fields. In the field of science, she worked professionally as a microbiologist and a biomedical engineering inventor; and in the field of art, as a symphony violinist, potter, and as is obvious in this book, a visual artist and knitter. And if this is not enough, the frontispiece, a page from her notebook, makes one immediately think of Leonardo da Vinci, another scientist-artist. Throughout the pages of this well-named book, Debbie seizes the unlikeliest elements of various textile disciplines (note the humor of the word discipline, implying orderliness, logic, sequence, predictability . . .) and flings them together until the bright darting glimmer of connections between elements catches her eye. In one of these alchemical moments, she slides yarn off the knitting needles as if it has not leaned on them for centuries, and instead pulls loops through loops with a little embroidery needle, using cheesecloth to keep the whole thing from unraveling. Then she pulls out the cheesecloth as well and lo and behold: we see a garment, "The Spider's Vest," that is knit, yes, but could not have been knit on knitting needles. And need I say that it is also beautiful? In what I suspect must have been an extended frenzy of creativity, Debbie invented Ouroboros knitting, which marries mythology, topology, knitting, geometry, color theory, Houdini, and dare I say, a bit of schizophrenia or at the bare minimum, multiple personalities, which would account for the apparent multiple brains that are networked in Debbie's head. The results, which are modeled by handsome and insouciant New family members of all ages, from infant to elder, are reminiscent of Welsh tapestries, ancient Persian garments, and neon traffic patterns revealed by long-exposure photography, not all in the same garment, thank goodness. I tried standing on my head to figure out the pathway for her "Some Assembly Required" sweater, but my single feeble brain gave up. Even
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