PURL AND PLAIN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 303, 22 December 1932, Page 13

PURL AND PLAIN.

THE CLICK OF THE NEEDLES. Lives there a man with soul so dead who never to his wife, sister, aunt, cousin, niece, or female acquaintance has said: "What, knitting! I know, 'two purl, two plain'!" All the horrors of gift tie and handkerchief have been more than obliterated by the fatuities uttered by men at the sight of a woman with a ball of wool and a pair of knitting needles.

This year (states a writer in the "Manchester Guardian") their humour will have full scope, for all the signs are set for a knitters' winter. Counters groan beneath heaps of nuilti-colourqd and multi-priced wools and silks. Red, yellow, green, and blue, the slim and pliant needles lie ranked in rcidiness for the active fingers as yet unprovided. In trains, buses and offices, round the fires, and over bridge tables patterns are discussed and exchanged. "Oh! I know someone who did that jumper. It looks awfully nice. Only she did it in rose and blue, instead of brown and orange." "I think 100 sounds a lot in four-plv. I should cast on 94, if I were you." Coats, pullovers, scarves, caps, socks —the percentage per head of the population of Great Britain must, one would imagine, already run into double figures. But still there would appear to be no woman who has achieved a beret to match every garment, or a jumper for every mood. In no place is this outburst of energy to bo viewed at a fiercer pitch than at the winter tennis club. Raindrops may blur tlio window-pane and hail rattle on the roof, but what woman feels that her time is wasted while her knitting has grown half an inch? In vain should one hope that the leisured tranquility of the knitting world might remain untouched by the speed mania. "Have you seen the jumper Rosalind has knitted?" passes round the awed whisper. "She only began it on Friday night and she was wearing it on Monday." "Yes, that , new idea, one very fat needle and one thin one. You get along marvellously quickly." Driven by some strange necessity to complete the garment in hand, Rosalind knits doggedly at tea, between sets, almost on the court. And now fashion's latest novelty has yielded a fresh weapon to her hand. How sad that such passionate urgency should lapse the moment the last stitch is cast off! When you meet her three days later she is "still knitting — something new, something exciting, and, "I must finish it before next week-end."

Grouped round the pavilion, indeed, may be found knitters of every sort. There is the expert, whose results are admirable, but who is delightfully vague as.to method. "Yes, but what do you do when you get to the neck?" you query. "Oh, I don't know. I just make it'up as I go along." And you take your questions elsewhere. There is the "unfortunate" knitter, whose workmanship is beyond exception, but whose finished masterpiece, by some luckless chance, never quite ' fits the destined recipient. "Yes, it is a little wide across the-shoulders," she exclaims cheerfully. "Oh, well, perhaps it'll shrink the first time it is washed." There is the impatient knitter, who hurls off eighteen inches, decides abruptly that it is wrong, and; tears it ruthlessly to pieces. One moment there is an almost finished jumper in her hands; the next you come across her winding up an unhappily crinkled ball of wool. And there are the plodders, counting laboriously in hushed tones, never deviating by one slipped stitch from what the book says. Against such an overwhelming force of example even the strongest resistance niiist at length give way. Shameyou creep into the local wool emporium, pick a pattern ("Something simple, please"), and savour the most delectable moment of the knitter's life when the whole skeined rainbow lies at your choice. "I'll take six ounces of this." The instant of exhiliration has passed and already forebodings cross your mind that ere three weeks have passed you will loathe the sight of that now-so-pleasing green. And next Saturday afternoon, as the October shower passes away and the sun shines forth, "We're just going on.

Areii't you coming? . . Hallo! I thought you never knitted!" And already the furrowed brow and the agonised reply: "Oh, wait a minute. I've just dropped a stitch!"