Something New from Something Old

About a year ago, I read one of Deborah Newton's older books on designing sweaters and then bought used copies of many of the reference books from her bibliography. Most of these books were available on Amazon, Abes's books or Halfprice for a fraction of their original price, plus shipping. Some of the books I was not able to get so cheaply was a series called 'Bauerliches Stricken,' which is a set of three books, written in German, and published in 1983, by Lisl Fanderl.

I currently only have books 2 and 3 of the series, and haven't been able to find book 1 for sale on its own. The books are stitch dictionaries and the patterns are complex and appear to have been designed for knitting in the round, because cables are worked on consecutive rows, which would not be a problem if you are always working on the right side. And most of the example garments shown in the book are socks.

It is always my pleasure to enable the relaxation of the children

We are on vacation in Oxnard, renting the beach house we usually rent for our 'escape the heat of the Los Angeles' and lucky for me, my daughter Natalie's friend Jen, who spent part of her high school years in Germany, is visiting for the weekend and has helped me translate some of the key passages in the books. My husband had already translated the title and said that it means, "Craftsmenlike Stitches." Some helpful previous owner of book 2 had figured out the chart symbols, which are not the standard ones, and taped in a translation in English, for which I am grateful.

With all this help, I have been able to use these books to develop some chunky headbands for a yarn company that kindly sent me samples of some of their new yarns. We took photos of Natalie and Jen wearing four of the designs this morning. Below is the book's chart for a pattern from Innsbruck, Austria, and my slightly simplified version of the inset of that pattern on the right. Since my pattern is being worked back and forth, I modified it so that none of the tree branches start on a wrong side row, because that would just be too difficult.

I am just hoping that there are some knitters out there who will not mind cabling on the wrong side of their work. It's fun and easy, really it is...