The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog

My jaw dropped when I first encountered Steampunk, a Finnish-language pattern by Hanne Piirainen for leggings with elaborate stranded patterning of flower-like gears interconnecting over the entire fabric of the garment, with two strategically placed focal points: on the crotch and on the butt. I posted the project to my Ravelry group “The Interior of My Brain” during my daily run-down of things in my friends’ activity that catch my eye, with this wistful comment:

“I am filled with unrequited love for these pants/leggings, because I don’t have the body or the courage to wear them, with their strategically placed flower motifs at the crotch and butt, and the fact that the pattern is in Finnish (of course! Who else designs this way but a Finn?) and there’s too much in it for me to improvise, even if I were evolved enough to not care what people thought if I wore them in public. Give me another 15 years to get that transgressive. This design is way out of reach for me for so many reasons, but I love it madly.”

But I couldn’t stop thinking or talking about those leggings, modeled by a man on a scooter looking nonchalantly over his shoulder with one foot on the scooter and the other on the ground, to better display the frontal bullseye.

My closest advisors, my older daughter and Melissa, were smitten by the pants and insisted I could pull off the outrageousness, and my husband chuckled with amusement when I showed him the picture. I love seeing old women wearing outrageous things. I love it when old women stick their thumbs in the eye of a society that deprecates them and assumes they’re soft-headed, and makes the agists and misogynists look twice. In my opinion, a healthy and cognitively sound 80-year-old woman has more freedom than anyone else to be any way she wants to be because people expect so little of her. I call it “the dotty old lady card”, and playing it feels like a strike against the machine. I’m not dotty, and I’m past playing along with dumb stuff because I need to get ahead. Where I am is just fine with me, which is a very privileged thing to say and I’m grateful to be able to say it. Now that my time is my own, it has become very valuable, and while my brain and eyes are sharp, and my hands are skilled and steady, and my body is still fit and mobile, I have no time to waste. Why wait until I’m 80 just to shock people into questioning their bad assumptions about elderly women? If not now, when?

I ordered the book, Puikoilla Peltolassa Hurmaavat hameet valloittavat villahousut, from a Finnish website that had an English-language page, and when it arrived, I ran right over to Lovelyarns to show it to Melissa. It’s a big, heavy, hardcover book and not all that easy to carry, so my brisk ambulation was a measure of my excitement, which Melissa shared, as I expected. We spent a lot of time admiring not only the designs for skirts, pants, and leggings, but the great shoes the models were wearing. Melissa was particularly attracted to some cabled and bobbled leggings and started looking around the shop for appropriate yarn, so when I got back home, I went back to the website and ordered a copy for her as a birthday present. That was how our Finnish pants knit-along came to be.

Sometimes “now” doesn’t mean exactly now. It was spring and we both had projects in progress that we wanted to finish, so the soonest realistic time to start our KAL would be fall, but that turned out not to be realistic either, although I did choose yarn from my stash and knitted a swatch. The yarn was two Wollmeise lace colorways, one a dusty pink and the other a dusty brown, each color held double and knitted on U.S. size 6 needles. My gauge was slightly larger than the pattern’s gauge, which was a good and intentional thing, because I wanted my pants to fit like baggy sweatpants, not like close-fitting leggings that show off more details of my body than I want to share with the world. Especially if I was going to wear pants that drew the eyes of the viewing public to focal points on the most tender parts of my body.

After I made the swatch, another six months went by. Then Melissa got her yarn and started learning Finnish knitting vocabulary so that she could follow the instructions and charts, and she cast on. In a blink of an eye, she had knitted the waistband and was doing the short rows to shape the butt of the pants. I wasn’t really ready to start a new project, but if we were doing a knit-along, I had to knit along, so I cast on too and let Melissa decode the chart and instructions for me. We both used Google Lens to translate the page of the Finnish book, to the extent of Google’s shaky grasp of Finnish. The translations needed translations, but Melissa is a knitting pattern whisperer by profession and told me what the pattern and chart were trying to communicate, so I cast on and knitted the texture pattern the chart described for the waistband casing, then the short rows, then the beginning of the patterning. The pattern starts the chart at some random place that didn’t make sense to me, so on my first attempt, the back center of the patterning found itself on top of my right hip, which is not anatomically correct, since it’s supposed to align with the crotch. I had to frog and recalculate so that the patterning would align with the intended body parts. It was a big relief to get everything in the right place so that I could get away from weird translations and just follow the chart.

Stranded knitting is my happy place, and it was enormous fun to build this complex and unpredictable patterning that required intense concentration to render accurately. I rendered it 100% accurately too. There are no places where I misplaced a stitch. At least, not where it was my fault. The really frustrating feature of the pattern was that when one chart ended, another chart began, without any visual clues to show how they were supposed to align, other than counting, counting, and counting again. The patterning is irregular, although it makes perfect visual sense after it has been knitted. It would have been really nice if the new charts showed the patterning for several previous rows with a clear delineation of where the new chart began. Or at least a few detail photos! Finnish knitters are much smarter than I am, so I suppose that knitters who use Finnish-only patterns don’t need such hand-holding.

But riddle me this, Batman! How is it possible that in a world in which Finnish knitters exist and knit the world’s most complicated knitting charts at the speed of light, a year and a half after the book was published, no other knitter contacted the publisher and designer about the fact that there is no way to knit the charts for the join at the crotch and the legs so that the charts align the way the photographs show? Please believe me, I counted the stitches over and over, did the math, tried to tape the charts together, started knitting the chart at different starting points in the stitches and rows in search of that magic place where the motifs flow smoothly into each other without a weird line and out-of-nowhere motifs, and finally gave up and knitted the charts I had exactly as they were. It’s not me, Finnish pants pattern, it’s you. I knitted you 100% accurately, but you’re missing maybe about five rows. Maybe more. The publisher had no errata to share with me. The designer hasn’t responded to requests for clarification. Is it really possible that I’m the first and only knitter in the entire world to have reached the crotch divide and knitted the leg charts for this pattern? But the actual fact is that the misalignment has negligible visual or logical effect in real life because the patterning is so busy that it hides in plain sight.

Meanwhile, Melissa had finished her pants. The pattern for her pants was written and charted perfectly. Her active knowledge of Finnish knitting and grammar got quite proficient.

I had to put my pants on another month-long hiatus during birthday season, while I worked on the birthday sweaters and went on a focused campaign to finish the 2022 birthday blanket in time for the 2023 birthday. But once I got all that off my plate, I could focus on the legs of my pants, and it was pure happy-place stranded knitting. I whizzed through the charts, relatively speaking, and got down below my knee, when I got a very strong sense that I wouldn’t have enough pink to finish both legs. I had to make a design decision that would get me down the length of my little stumpy legs and not look terrible.

Melissa and I conferred. She was skeptical of my original idea, to replace the pink with a lime green and carry on with the brown. Not that shade of green, she said, and if I didn’t replace the brown as well, it would just look as if I was running out of pink. She suggested a green and blue pairing in a shout-out to the 1960’s, and I immediately visualized the lime green with navy blue, which is a combination that I saw a lot in the 1960’s and always disliked. No, no, not like that, she said, and spent a moment googling on her phone to find psychedelic-era pictures of pink, brown, soft blue, and acid green. She described the effect of color gels applied to photographs, and that clicked for me. So I went on a stash dive. Eventually I found my combination, a slightly grayed acid green in the color of a newly sprouted leaf, and a slightly grayed medium-light aqua, whose chroma was consistent with the dustiness of my original pink and brown. The value contrast between the green and the aqua was fairly analogous to the value contrast between the pink and the brown, so the green would replace the pink and the aqua would replace the brown, to preserve the logic of the patterning. Just in different colors, like a color gel on a photograph.

I cut the yarn for the first leg and picked up stitches on the crotch strip for the second leg. I was curious to see if the chart join on the second leg would misalign the same way as the first leg, and it did, which was further confirmation that the charts were messed up and couldn’t be blamed on user error. The good news was that repeating the misalignment exactly the same way on the second leg made the misalignment look intentional. The knitting on the second leg went even faster than on the first leg, and in the relative blink of an eye (about a week), I was at the point where I ended the pink/brown pairing on the first leg with about 20 grams of pink left over, which was just enough for a folded hem for the two legs and nothing else. I had lucked into the perfect place to start the new color scheme, and to my delight, the pattern flowed into the new colors without any visual interference, exactly like a gel filter on a photo.

I knitted down to the middle of my ankle bone, because I didn’t want the bottom of the knitting to drag onto the ground, then went back to what remained of the pink to knit a garter stitch fold line and about an inch of hem. It took just a few more days to finish the first leg and to fold the elastic into the waistband casing and sew it in.

While I was knitting the lower torso, I was amused and maybe a little concerned by how far down my thighs the legs divide was going to land. Was I going to bring back Hammer pants? The legs were very big and roomy, and even though there were decreases five rows apart on the inside of each leg, the legs didn’t look very tapered at all. The crotch lands well below my actual body part, but it’s not Hammer pants. It’s big cozy sweat pants. Prior to washing and blocking, the pants fit me the way I wanted them to, but the yarn I used, Wollmeise Lacegarn, is a superwash yarn that stretches when washed and laid flat to dry. I might have decided not to wash the pants at all, but the pants had been in progress for about 7 months using yarn that I’ve had for many years, so they needed a good cleaning even before I wore them. So I washed them, wrung them out in the spin cycle, and threw them into the drier for a while. They were still damp, and when I held them up against my body, the waist came up to my armpits while the cuffs were at my feet. Back into the drier they went and stayed there until they were pretty completely dry and had returned to their intended size. The fabric was fluffy and cozy. When I wear them, I feel as if I’m wearing pajamas. They’re a little porous to wear outside on a cold windy day, and they lack pockets, which is a serious deficit, but I love wearing them.

As for the bullseyes, I’m a little ashamed to say that generally I chicken out on wearing them with tops that show them off. Most of my sweaters cover them, and it’s less stressful not to be so exhibitionist and transgressive. But exhibitionism and transgressiveness are a viable option when I’m in that kind of mood.