|
|
"My mother was a master knitter," she said, "but I do not consider myself to be one. When looking at my mother's volume of work, we know what it should be."
She pulled garments from storage that her mother had made, some as long ago as the 1960s. The sweaters do, indeed, reflect a master's touch, with perfect stitches and flawless patterns, but to novice eyes they appear no more perfect than those produced by Falls Village's own master knitter.
Mrs. Jasmine is never far from her knitting needles, filling in spare moments throughout the day by making an endless parade of knitted garments for her favorite charity, Warm Woolies. Warm Woolies, founded in 2003, works in some of the harshest climates in the world, delivering cozy vests, mittens, hats, and slippers to orphans in Russia and other disadvantaged countries. It was introduced to Falls Village last winter by Ashley DeMazza as an outreach mission of the Falls Village Congregational Church. Over the past year, Mrs. Jasmine has made at least 30 garments to be sent abroad.
Mrs. Jasmine, 70, has been knitting steadily since she was 6, but she still has more projects planned than she can ever hope to finish. She recently led the way into two basement rooms in her home, both amply stocked with skeins and spools of wool. "My grandchildren call these my 'rainbow rooms,'" she said and, indeed, the luscious colors of the dyed yarn cut through the November gloom of the afternoon. "If I live to be 150, I will never use up all the wool," she said.
That is probably true, but only because more wool keeps coming. Mrs. Jasmine's husband, Dennis, is a farmer and she shares five sheep kept at the farm with the land's owner, Betty Deeg. "Alan Lovejoy shears them for us, and every year I take a trip to Harmony, Maine, to the Bartlett Yarns mill," she said.
The mill, established in 1821 along the Higgins River, is thought to be the oldest continuously operating yarn mill in the United States. Some of its equipment dates back to the days of the Industrial Revolution and Bartlett still spins its yarns on a mule spinning frame, one of the last of its kind still operating in the United States. This device duplicates a hand-spinner's motion, producing a loftier yarn with a soft twist.
The women do not get back the full volume of the fleece they take to Maine in yarn. "Grease wool"-the fleece as it is taken from the sheep--produces 45 percent of its net weight in yarn, so 10 pounds of grease wool will yield about 4.5 pounds of yarn. Customers pay for processing their wool at Bartlett Yarns, but Mrs. Jasmine said the final price is still less than the wholesale price.
"When I was teaching, I couldn't afford the time to take the wool there, so we would ship it," she said, pulling a skein of the finished product off a shelf to show its beautiful quality. "Now I like to take it up and spend a few days on the trip. The mill itself looks kind of creepy-in fact, it was used in a Stephen King movie." The movie was "Graveyard Shift."
The mill may be spooky, but there is nothing chilling about the wool that comes back. Unlike many yarns used in American clothing today, it is pure wool and has no synthetic elements.
"I like wool," Mrs. Jasmine said simply. "There are beautiful yarns out there today, but they blend into a modern lifestyle. The socks that are the warmest are made of rag wool, but people have their washing machines, and what happens if you put wool through a wash cycle-it comes out this big." She held her hands up and shrank them together. "So wool is now super-washed and has nylon in it. Yes, you can wash it, but it loses some of its warmth."
Although she prefers pure wool, sometimes she uses the fatal wash cycle to make it even warmer. She knits caps and mittens that are then "felted" to make them even more dense and warm. "[In the Netherlands] mittens for fishermen would be made of wool, which is the warmest thing you can wear, and then they are felted. When they are wet they will still keep the hands warm because the fibers are so dense and there is air caught in between."
She explained that felted garments are knit larger than desired and then put through a wash cycle. "You want to put it in a pillow case because pieces of the wool will come off and you don't want it all over the place," she said.
The knitter stops the cycle to examine the garment and, when it is the desired size, removes it to dry. "You give it a couple of agitation turns and then stop it to see if it is the size you want. Fulling is much the same," she said, "You agitate the garment in warm water and then shock it by putting it into cold."
This process produces a finish most commonly seen in "boiled wool" jackets. "But with boiled wool, they do not make the [garment] first," she explained. "They process the knitting and then cut the boiled wool like fabric and stitch it together."
Like many skills that were once commonplace, knitting and other needle crafts are becoming lost arts. "Knitting is not an inexpensive hobby because wool is very expensive," she said. "And it costs more to knit a sweater than it does to buy one. A lot of people say, 'Why spend all that time?'"
The answer, she believes, is in the therapeutic quality of the activity and in the satisfaction of making something beautiful. Mrs. Jasmine was a teacher for more than 40 years, working much of that time with special needs children. "I came to the United States in the early 1960s as a summer school teacher," she said. "I got a job with the Pleasantville Cottage School for emotionally disturbed children and I liked it so much that I extended my visa. I stayed for two years, but eventually I had to go back because you just can't keep extending a visa.'
She applied for a green card and was back in the U.S. within months. "When I came back in 1965, my mother gave me a flashlight," she reported with a smile. "She had just read about the big power outage that shut down the Northeast and she thought I should have a flashlight."
Mrs. Jasmine has remained in the United States ever since, teaching at Kolburne School and Hillcrest Educational Center in southern Massachusetts. While working at the schools for disturbed children, she fought for and introduced needlecrafts to the student populations. "I don't think it is hard to teach knitting," she said, "but when you are teaching special needs kids, they get mad and throw things at you. Our kids were so full of rage."
She said the school administration worried about allowing the students to have pointed knitting needles but eventually let her teach knitting in her classes. The young people could not have needles in their dormitories or other rooms on the campus, however, so she argued that there was nothing dangerous about a crochet hook.
"The school found it was very therapeutic, very calming for the students," she said. "One psychologist came and thanked me. It was calming for the adults, too. We had one childcare worker, a big, black man from Africa, who had an aptitude for crocheting. When the kids saw him doing it, they wanted to do it, too."
In all, she spent nearly 30 years working with the students in the two schools before retiring five years ago, but she has had other needlework classes in other venues over those years. She teaches adult education classes at Housatonic Valley Regional High School in Falls Village, where she says she gets few new knitters. "When they first asked me to do it, I wrote a beautiful lesson plan," she related, saying she offered to teach basic knitting skills. No one signed up and she recast the course description to invite knitters to come with their problems and their questions. There has never been a dearth of students since.
Each month, on the third Thursday, she invites others to Knitting with Akke at the D.M. Hunt Library in Falls Village, which is open to anyone over the age of 10, experienced or not.
"We've been meeting for more than five years now and it is very loosely organized," she said of the free sessions at the library. "We meet from September to May but not in the summer. There is a core group, but anyone is welcome to come. It's fun because we stimulate each other. I'm always learning new things."
At present, she said, she is learning a new way to knit socks. "I can knit a pair of socks on four needles with my eyes closed," she said, but added that it is more challenging to knit a pair at a time using circular needles.
The project starts with dying a panel of knitted material. "You dye the block of wool and then you unravel it and knit both socks at the same time," she explained. That way the pattern in both socks is exactly the same."
She said a fellow knitter started the project with her but has since given up. "She is going to do it the old-fashioned way, but I am going to persevere," she said.
Mrs. Jasmine's hands are never still. If she is not knitting, she turns her attention to crocheting, tatting, doing embroidery or cross-stitching. 'People are always asking me how long it takes me to make something," she said. "I don't know. When I look at my day, I might knit 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there. After dinner, I might knit for an hour. Last year, I worked at Mohawk Mountain and, when I was not waiting on customers, I would knit. Then I could turn out a pair of mittens or socks every day."
One thing she is sure of, however, is that she will keep making warm clothing for children overseas. "We will have another Warm Woolies knit-a-thon," she said. "Last year we had one on Martin Luther King's birthday and another on President's Day." Those seeking more information may call Ashley DeMazza at 860-824-1437.
