Finny Girl

Dear friends,

Since I last wrote, Marianne and Thaïs have taken up their posts in the holiday windows at Les Tricoteurs Volants.

Marianne

Thaïs

I want to thank you for all the support that followed my letters about the creation of this display. My nerves are delicate these days–whose aren’t?–and I was dreading the wave of negativity that has followed almost any post I’ve made elsewhere about knitting for dolls.

Of course I should have known that readers of Modern Daily Knitting are a cut above. Kind, thoughtful, intelligent, startlingly attractive, and possessing uncommonly good taste.

You emboldened me to pick up the needles to dress yet another doll.

When my friend and colleague Melissa Leapman announced a virtual knitting retreat with an “Under the Sea” theme, I offered to present a knitted mermaid.

I first thought I would knit the entire mermaid, head to tail. Then I remembered Louisa, a 10″ (25 centimeter) antique doll whose clothes were in bad shape, leading to her sad sequestration in a workroom drawer.

Poor Louisa.

Why not kit her out as a mermaid?

There wasn’t much time to make it happen. This would be deadline knitting. Deadline knitting is seldom a pleasure.

I started (as I often do) by collecting images, shuffling and re-shuffling them, immersing myself in the idea, becoming even a bit obsessed by it. I re-read Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (a story I frankly do not enjoy) to refresh my memory of his physical descriptions of mermaids. I even dipped into the lore of mermaid-adjacent figures like Mélusine the serpent woman, Rusalka the water sprite, and the sirens of The Odyssey. (The Sirens were of course part bird, not part fish, but there is enough confusion about this that the French word for mermaid is sirène.)

A Multitude of Mermaids

I also started swatching, pulling book after book off the shelf in search of patterns suited to fish scales, netting, flowers, seaweed, pearls.

Bird’s Eye mesh from Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns (Schoolhouse Press)

The deadline was shrieking closer. Louisa was still undressed. So how was I smiling to myself as I swatched all through a grey afternoon, listening to a compilation of watery hits like the “Song to the Moon” from Dvořák’s Rusalka?

Who smiles while they swatch? I mean, Clara Parkes does, probably. But not me.

I didn’t truly understand until I was putting the finishing touches on Louisa’s ensemble. In the end, I’d decided it ought to be a weird-yet-elegant travesti like the ones Worth used to cook up for society costume parties. (I loved the idea of her little shoes peeking out from the tail.)

Making clothes for this doll had allowed me to do something I hadn’t been allowed to do much for quite a long time: play.

This was a wholly unserious piece of knitting. Not only was it for a doll, but the concept itself was fantastical. I wasn’t attempting to create (or re-create) real-world clothing, so there was no need for even the semblance of practicality.

I was free to use whatever colors I liked, whatever yarns, whatever stitches–and that gave me permission to try out fantasies from Barbara Walker, Mary Thomas, and whoever else without considering for an instant whether the result would be fashionable or sensible.

I could, and did, mess around like a child who follows instructions to a point, then starts to ask, “What if…?,” pursuing curiosity without worrying about the outcome.

I came away from this project not only feeling proud, but refreshed. Inspired. Ready for more.

Play, I firmly believe, is essential in learning how to do anything. And since we never know everything about anything, we really ought never to stop playing. Lately my outlook on knitting had become terribly serious and goal-oriented, and I think that as a result my knitting had suffered.

In the time it took to dress three silly dolls, I could have made several useful, practical, manly sweaters. But I doubt that I’d have learned more from them. And I doubt they could have made me this happy.

Cordialement,

Franklin