GLORIOUS YARN : For Kaffe Fassett, Knitting Is Not Just a Hobby. It’s a Mission That Has Changed People’s Lives

RIGHT BEFORE KAFFE FASSETT CAME TO THE UNITED STATES TO DO A SERIES OF KNITting workshops and promote his new book, he was asked to a dinner in London given by the American ambassador. The ambassador had invited the Queen of England, and to meet her he assembled 20 Americans, all living in Britain, all distinguished in their different fields. An author, a ballerina, an admiral, a Rhodes scholar--the British papers immediately began referring to them as the “American top 20.” Kaffe Fassett, who grew up in Big Sur and has been living in Britain since 1964, was among those chosen. When the queen asked him what he did, he told her, and, he recalls with pleasure, she said immediately, “ ‘Oh, knitting; even I can do that!’ ”

Yes, says Fassett, that’s exactly the point. “What I love about knitting is that it’s humble and practical,” he says. “It’s just making a sweater or a sock. You’re not only making a handsome and colorful object, but the process is a soothing, life-enhancing activity.”

The objects that Kaffe (rhymes with safe ) Fassett designs and knits are more than handsome and colorful. They are works of art, revolutionary works of craft, many-colored masterpieces that break all the sacred rules of hand-knitting--and they are, he insists, well within the reach of your average, everyday home knitter. He makes his theory a reality by leading workshops for average, everyday home knitters. Like me.

When I went into my yarn store in Cambridge, Mass., and announced that I was going to California to take a knitting workshop with Fassett, everyone was suitably impressed. Fassett is a superstar of the knitting world; it was the equivalent of announcing that I was taking the weekend off to study ballet with Baryshnikov.

I can remember buying Fassett’s “Glorious Knits” not long after it came out in 1985. I was browsing in the yarn store, turning over one pattern or another, looking for patterns suitable for beginners, for those marked “very easy.” Then I saw this hardcover book, and on the cover was a woman wearing a stupendous yellow sweater. It was big and loose and draped comfortably over her body, and it seemed to be made out of 15 or 20 shades of yellow and gold and brown, patterned with large geometric stars in blue and gray. I flipped through the book. I had never seen anything like these designs; my very limited knitting life had included a couple of laboriously constructed sweaters knitted during my pregnancy, along with some booties that had turned out to be just as useless as all the other booties ever knitted. I had made my share of scarves, and, of course, I had, in a plastic bag in my bedroom, the obligatory Unfinished Sweater, a rather nice teal blue.

But I had never seen anything like these designs. Each pattern was based around a geometric motif--large steps, small steps, ikat stripe, outlined star, floating circles--and all of them knitted with what looked like hundreds of different colors. I had never seen anything so beautiful, and that is almost not hyperbole. I looked at the introduction: “Like many other crafts, knitting has the potential to create magic in our lives,” it began. Whoever was writing, I believed him. I stared down at the photograph of the author in his studio: He sat barefoot on a stool in front of an enormous tapestry of Chinese vases. Next to him was a table, and piled under the table were neatly folded sweaters, glowing with those colors, dancing with those patterns, and above the picture were the words, “If knitting with colors turns out to be your particular road to self-expression, then you will have started on a marvelously rewarding and adventurous journey.”

And so I bought the book--a hardcover book of obviously complicated knitting patterns, patterns I doubted I would ever be able to make. I was a medical student and not particularly wealthy; buying any hardcover book new was an unusual self-indulgence. I felt like a fool. But I knew that I had to own this book, had to get these pictures home and look at them one by one.

I was not alone. “Glorious Knits” sold more than 350,000 copies worldwide, a remarkable track record for a knitting book.

And now, with a mild sense of embarrassment, for the very first time in my life, I find myself writing an it-changed-my-life sentence. I have never gotten religion. I am deeply suspicious of all things New Age, and you will never catch me coming back from a workshop to announce that I had found my “inner child” or mastered the art of shaman drumming. But Kaffe Fassett’s knitting designs changed my life. Look for colorways, he wrote, systems of color and shade that work together. Look at the world around you, at the colors that exist together in nature--and above all, look at the way colors work in decorative objects, in tapestries and porcelains and mosaics. It changed the way I looked at knitting; it changed the way I looked at the world.

I became someone who bought up single skeins of every color yarn that took my fancy, bringing them home against some large multicolor project I would someday do. Then, little by little, I began to do those projects. A scarf or two, a few easy striped sweaters for my son, then one for myself. As I advanced from medical student to pediatrician, I also advanced from timid, aspiring, sometime knitter, scared of patterns, to fanatic knitter-in-residence, with a bag of multicolor yarn. Knitting helped me get through my residency, kept me awake at conferences, comforted me when the world of the hospital seemed particularly unforgiving, particularly sad or scary. Sleep-deprived and distracted, I had no concentration to spare for perfect, classic knotless garments. I mixed colors and changed patterns around, and it worked. On some very fundamental level, I had been liberated.

“The first thing you have to do when knitting with colors,” Fassett wrote, “is clear your mind of some inhibiting preconceptions and prejudices that have built up over the years. For instance, I never worry about running out of yarn and mixing dye lots, and I often combine all sorts of yarns in the same garment.”

It is not possible for the non-knitter to understand what heresy this seemed; knitting is a craft bound severely by rules and regulations. When I bought wool to make my baby sweaters and my scarves, I would see printed on every skein the warning: Be sure your wool is all from the same dye lot, be sure you have enough to complete your garment, because if you come back and buy more it may be from a different dye lot, and there may be subtle variations in color--a disaster. Most knitting books warn you never to mix different weights of wool and, above all, not to tie knots in your work. Then along came Fassett, who said that subtle variations in color were terrific. Different weights of wool, that makes it more interesting. Knots here and there, no problem.

I bought all the books: “Glorious Needlepoint” (even though I don’t do needlepoint and don’t plan to start), “Glorious Color,” which was coordinated with his retrospective exhibit of knitted garments and needlepoint tapestries at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (the first such exhibition ever for a living textile artist), and “Family Album,” done with Zoe Hunt, a collection of sweaters for adults and children. I read the story of his life: brought up in Big Sur, he chose the name Kaffe from a children’s book, trained as a painter, moved to London in the early ‘60s, discovered wools on a trip to a mill in Scotland, bought 20 colors, learned to knit on the train ride back and used all 20 colors in his very first sweater.

So this is why it was a big deal for me to be sitting in Monterey, about to begin a several-day workshop on knitting with color with Fassett, who was traveling on a tour connected to the publication of his newest book, “Glorious Inspirations.” I was nervous and thrilled and also somewhat apprehensive. He would see me knit, and I have no talent at all in the visual arts; I would see him knit, and what if he turned out to be overly slick or just not very nice? What if I went home, and all his patterns had lost their magic?

DAY 1. I AM ONE OF THE LAST TO ARRIVE AT the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and our little group is led upstairs to the meeting room. The center of the room is occupied by thousands of balls of yarn, arranged in a kind of color wheel. A lake of yarn, a field of yarn, a thing of beauty all by itself. There are a number of women sitting in chairs around the yarn, talking quietly, drinking coffee and juice. And over on the side are Fassett and his assistant, the two of them needlepointing away for all they are worth on a long strip done in oranges and browns. Fassett is 54, with dark hair and remarkable light eyes; he himself, the master of color, when later asked to describe them, can do no better than “light gray blue.”

With minimal introduction, they start the class by marching us back out of the room, on an expedition around the aquarium. Fassett’s assistant, Brandon Mably, short and energetic and resplendent in a Fassett-style waistcoat paired with a sequined baseball cap, serves as a kind of point man, or maybe bird dog; he scouts the exhibits ahead for particularly fascinating collections of color. He hurries back to report that we absolutely must look at one particular bit of reef, and we crowd around the tank. Fassett points out to us the magenta hue of a sea cucumber’s foot next to its orange, tentacled head--”the Phyllis Diller hairdo.” We move as a determined group through the aquarium sightseers, the families with strollers and children on class trips; they are all looking at fish, reading labels and identifying organisms, but we are looking only for color.

Back in our conference room, we watch a slide show, starting with pictures of Big Sur and Wales, Mably’s home. “I worked from those grays,” Fassett says, showing us a picture of Mably in a stone quarry. On to more designs, some of them breathtaking: the Roman glass shawl, with hundreds of tiny circles on a muted, variegated background, the “foolish-virgin” jacket with strong folk-art figures. And also pictures of the colors and the objects that inspire them: the reds of a Chelsea flower show, the Red Fort in India. Plugs for Fassett’s knitting kits; this is available, that is available. And some statements of knitting philosophy: “When you run out of yarn is when the fun begins,” Fassett tells us. “It’s a very organic and exciting way of knitting.” He speaks with British intonations, and though he is obviously strongly connected to the designs he is showing us, he is also obviously giving a talk he has given many times before. As a group, the students seem impressed but a little intimidated.

And now to the real business of the workshop. Each of us chooses a card to work from, a picture of a painting. A Matisse odalisque, a Klee composition, bold flowers on a black background, an Indian miniature. I end up with a Monet painting, purples and greens lower down opening up to tans and golds of sky, with tall, skinny poplar trees. We are instructed to paint with yarn; we are not trying to reproduce our cards, but we are working from their colors, each producing a piece of knitting inspired by a painting, reflecting the palette of the painting. And using a minimum of 20 colors, Fassett says, more if possible. Use 30 or 40. So we kneel among the yarns, trying to match colors out of the cards. We take our yarns back to our seats. We cast on.

I had promised my fellow knitters in Cambridge that I would ask Fassett what he really does with all the little dangling ends. When you knit with many colors, joining in yarns all over the place, you are left with little tails at each intersection. I tend to leave these hanging, then go back over the finished garment with a crochet hook and twist them in. This is a tedious, not to say maddening, task. Fassett, in his books, speaks of working the ends in as he goes. And now he proposes to show us how, so we leave our chairs and gather around him, watching his fingers as he knits.

It is like watching an artist whose work has always meant an enormous amount to you paint a brand new, never-before-seen painting. But that’s not all. It’s the way his fingers dance. Yes, they are using many colors, and yes, they are neatly tucking the ends in as he goes, knitting American-style, yarn held in his right hand, pulling up the color he needs for each stitch. Sure and quick and much more complicated than ordinary knitting. He sits next to the big window which looks out over the bay, working out a new knitting pattern, lime green and tangerine trellises climbing up a background of richer, deeper colors. He is making up the pattern as he goes along, telling us he will later give it to one of his assistants, who will sort out the stitches and chart the colors for someone else to follow. The pattern grows under his hands, and his fingers dance.

AFTER FASSETT’S APPOINTMENT WITH DESTIny on the train from Scotland, he began knitting one-of-a-kind garments; some of these appeared in a four-page spread in British Vogue, and many more were purchased by the wealthy and discerning. His designs were soon recognized as something completely different in knitting designs. He began designing his own line for Rowan Yarns and put together kits that contain instructions and all the materials necessary to complete a project. For yarns and knitting kits, he works with Rowan, for needlepoint kits with another British company, Ehrman. The knitting kits tend to be quite expensive; ranging from $195 to $550, they allow you to replicate almost exactly the complexity of the most elaborate, most difficult sweaters as Fassett and his assistants knit them. Which is precisely what Fassett claims, over and over again, in his books and in person, that he doesn’t want you to do; he wants people to take over his ideas, adapt them to individualized color schemes, change them and remake them. So why the kits? “The kits are to pull people’s plug out; they’ll do a couple of kits, then get on to doing their own thing.”

After publication of “Glorious Knits,” Fassett became an international celebrity. “My sisters think it’s very strange that I’m famous in other countries. We had a woman faint one time at a lecture.” In Great Britain and Scandinavia, he has been on television repeatedly. He did the exhibit at the Victoria and Albert in 1988, and since then it has been touring the world--in December it will open in Vancouver. It has not yet been brought to the United States, which annoys the artist. “My feeling is that museum directors are a bit cautious about something as humble as knitting coming into their hallowed halls. They don’t see how we’re tapping into Persian carpets or mosaics in this work. I see it as on a par with patchwork quilts, which have now made the grade.”

Many of Fassett’s inspirations come from the world of decorative arts. His newest book, “Glorious Inspirations,” is a collection of sources, objects to inspire needlework or knitting. Japanese fish tattoos, porcelain boxes sculpted to look like fruits, inlaid Italian wooden tabletops. He encourages the re-translation of the colors and patterns that talented eyes have drawn from nature and encourages the connection to traditional images and designs, even while changing the colors, the backgrounds, the rules. “I don’t want to get wingding modern. I want it to have that grounded familiarity you get with old traditions, handsome simple motifs that we’ve loved in icons and Persian carpets,” he says.

The double layering of one craftsman taking inspiration from another’s interpretation of the world adds texture and complexity to the process of design as well as to the knitting itself. Fassett’s readers and students are encouraged to join the chain of decorative arts, adapting someone else’s adaptation, giving it a new form and, of course, a new function, making a soup dish into a sweater, a mosaic into a pillow.

“When I painted, I always wanted to see my paintings in the environment of the world. You can put all the complexity of paintings and richness of color into a garment,” Fassett says.

It’s a consuming passion. Fassett has, he says, no social life. “I’m a total workaholic.” In his studio in London, he employs several knitters, working on his original designs and on the special garments commissioned by the rich and famous. And then there are the convicts. Fassett and Mably have worked with murderers at the notorious British prison Wormwood Scrubs, where inmates are allowed to do needlework in their cells. The murderers, Fassett says, are “timid” about knitting and more likely to start with needlepoint; they go in for “quite exciting color.” There was one prisoner who did knit, and enthusiastically: “I asked what he was in for, and it turned out he was a thief; he used to steal Missoni sweaters. So he knew the value of knitting.”

WE ARE BACK IN OUR SEATS NOW, OUR CHOsen yarns piled around us, knitting without patterns, knitting with all those colors. What we are doing feels downright weird and wrong to some women, striking off into the unpatterned unknown. Fassett keeps encouraging us: We should do a little, then hang our work up on the wall with pins and step back to look with him at where we’re going. Most people seem to feel shy about doing this. Finally one woman hangs up a narrow strip of knitting, steps away from it and complains that she can’t see all the different colors she has carefully used in her piece. “Yes,” Fassett says, looking with her from across the room, “you worked very hard for that dark smudge.” We all laugh, and then he is much gentler, encouraging this knitter, telling her to look at her card, to stop focusing on the darker end of the spectrum, to try for “luminous--get more luminous.” He is in the center picking out some colors for her to add in, down on his knees snatching up balls of yarn.

As we sit and knit, even without patterns, we are relaxing; we are, all of us, people who are happy knitting. Sitting in a big circle around the yarn, knitting and listening to the water noises from the bay outside the window, we introduce ourselves, moving around the circle. “I’ve been knitting for years, and I love it. It’s what I do instead of collecting knickknacks, I buy yarn. The two spare bedrooms in my house are for yarn,” says Penny Boone, from Torrance. Ann Hodge is a retired elementary-school principal from Niagara Falls; when she travels, she says, she likes to go looking for interesting yarns. Says Lorraine Perry, a science teacher in San Francisco: “For me, there’s always been a conflict between arts and sciences--a knitting conference at the aquarium is perfect!” Kathleen Dowell from Fresno describes herself: “I do dental hygiene to support my knitting habit.” Norma Westwick from Sacramento confesses: “When we went to Europe, I bought yarn in every country. My ex-husband didn’t like me knitting while we were watching TV, so I gave it up for a while.”

“The knitting or the TV?” someone asks.

“The husband!” she answers, to general applause.

Our knitted swatches are growing. People are unwilling to break for lunch, hanging on for one more row, a few more colors. I look at the swatches around me, and a number seem to me supremely organized, falling into natural patterns created by people with excellent visual instincts. My own is fairly chaotic: lots of colors flickering in and out. If I hold my head on one side and sort of blur my vision, I guess it looks a little bit Impressionistic.

After lunch, we knit the afternoon away. Fassett is still needlepointing long strips, putting his work down to comment whenever someone pins her swatch on the wall, something we are all still quite reluctant to do. He urges us to come forward, urges us also to relax and talk a little more. He even suggests that we might sing. Some workshop groups do. But we are not so cheerfully spontaneous.

My swatch, like those of the others, is beginning to trail a large rat’s nest of yarn; every time I add in a new color and use it for a couple of stitches, I leave the rest to drag along, thinking maybe I’ll want some more a few rows down the line--but by a few rows down the line, I have been seduced by some new, paler purple, some flesh-pink chenille.

By the end of the afternoon, many of us are confused. Are we making messes, or are we painting with yarns? It still feels peculiar and irregular to be out here, now well into these knitted squares, making things up as we go along. “I took my mother to one of these classes,” Fassett says cheerfully. “Afterward, she didn’t knit for two years!”

“This is so easy--why did I wait so long?” asks one of the women. I actually feel silly that I needed someone to come along and tell me that I didn’t have to follow all the rules. And I wonder: Did Fassett see his way around conventional knitting because he is a man, and therefore by definition unconventional as a knitter? There are, after all, no men in this workshop; Fassett and Mably refer to their students as “our ladies.”

“Men don’t come to workshops,” Fassett says. “They’re so cheeky, they don’t think they need workshops. But men are attracted to the geometric patterns, which they come to terms with very quickly.”

I have worked with a fair number of women who, like me, bring their knitting to the hospital. It was common among nurses in the intensive-care unit, especially working the night shift, since it was something that could be done at the bedside of very small, very sick babies. It introduced an element of warmth and timeless domesticity into that high-tech scene. But the couple of men I have known who have tried to knit at work have created a stir; I can almost believe that male knitters must have special force of character in order to persevere--at least in public. And that, of course, seems like a special pity. Wouldn’t the world of male doctors profit from the dissemination of an activity that reduces stress, encourages creativity, gives off an aura of approachable humanity and regularly produces warm, handmade garments for the folks back home?

“When I first started to knit,” says Fassett, “I used to think, ‘This is something that could put the world to rights.’ I know that creativity is my salvation and my sanity; I can’t help feeling it would be a tremendous boon to other neurotic, frustrated people.”

DAY 2. PEOPLE HAVE LOOSENED UP A little. One woman says she had a vision last night and now knows exactly where she is going with her knitting. Another announces that she decided to disregard the rule Fassett made yesterday about no ripping out. She went ahead and ripped out some bad stuff, she says happily; after all, isn’t Fassett the one who tells us to break rules? I have also had a vision in my little way; the night before, I had imagined the randomness of my piece resolving into solid vertical patterns. So I pick six colors and find my way out of a somewhat confused patch of blue sky (with a couple of different blues and even a purple mixed up in it) into five broad stripes, climbing up.

Mably is traveling around the circle, both he and Fassett insisting that we have to be braver about pinning our work on the wall and stepping back to regard it. We need that perspective to see what colors are called for, where we should go next. But we are all still painfully shy. Fassett and Mably warn us that the day will end with a “crit,” for which all the knitting will be displayed, with Fassett discussing what each of us has done.

Mably insists that I hang up my swatch; he and Fassett stare at it. I need to break up those vertical blocks, speckle them with pink and green, Fassett says. This is how his designs become more and more baroque; spotted stripes, checkered borders. I add a single strip of green. Other swatches go up on the board, some very lovely indeed.

Fassett himself seems more involved and interested than yesterday; With real knitting projects to comment on, he is lively and excited. He seems to care about each and every swatch; the colors speak to him, and he answers. And he seems to be looking forward to the crit.

Lunch. More knitting. More knitting talk. People down on their knees among the yarn, looking for that one last color. And then, finally, the crit. All of our swatches are pinned up on the wall, each next to the card that supposedly inspired it. Fassett takes his position beside this wall of knitted squares and colored cards. And here is the most remarkable surprise: The wall is beautiful. Each swatch is clearly related to one of the pictures, and the pictures do not necessarily go together in any way, but what we have made is a patchwork of color and the reflection of color that is truly, to use Fassett’s word, glorious. I cannot believe that we have done this, created this group work of art, or that my own square of would-be-Monet purples and golds and blues and greens is really glowing up there on the wall, a luminous patch of water-flower colors and sky.

Fassett goes through each swatch, looking to see how the colors from the card are used, how the piece works as knitting. His highest praise is to tell someone, “This could be a sweater.” But he has something kind to say to everyone: “This is very emotional color, but that little scrap of turquoise is the jewel of the piece . . . that peach is wonderful with the gold; that swatch I could see turning into a jumper (pullover) . . . this one finally deals with the greens in that card, very good. . . .” He points to mine, and I am suddenly tense. “Look down here at the beginning, very tight with dark shadows; did it come up to the light! There’s a wonderful underwater sunlit quality.”

And now, at the end, people are photographing each other next to the wall of swatches. It’s time to drive down to Big Sur for dinner at Fassett’s family’s restaurant, Nepenthe. Mably is gathering up the yarn, sorting and packing it. Surreptitiously, I am taking more bits and pieces of the colors in my swatch. Who knows, I might do more of it someday. But what I am really imagining is a wall in my house covered with 10 or more of these color experiments. What a thing to do when your life needs color and creativity: Pick a painting, match the colors, knit a swatch. Paint with wools.

It’s true, I still think, that I have no particular talent for the visual arts; all around me are people with better senses of pattern, surer hands with color. But even so, there is a distinct messianic fervor behind the workshop, behind the books, behind the man. “Half my creativity is from my own personal statement,” Fassett says. “The other half is dragging the world along on my trip.”