The Boston Globe today had the obituary for acclaimed knitter Barbara Walker, who died last month; I'm not sure why the delay, but they picked up the NY Times obit, with a good-sized picture, and kudos to the writer, Joanne Kaufman, for her vocabulary.
Nice use of "kniterati" in the first paragraph:
RIP, Barbara Walker.
She wrote what was the only how-to out there (and I know, I spent years looking) on knitting lace and that's how I learned. When I wanted to use some of her lace patterns in my shawls, I wasn't about to without asking her and how would I ever know how to do that or whether she was even alive? Copyright mattered to me.
ReplyDeleteMy friend Gracie Larsen, member of my local knitting group (whom I had no idea was famous herself--she was the co-founder of the Lacy Knitters Guild and the Lace Museum) asked me how my book was coming along. It was written and the shawls were knitted but I explained why it was stalled out.
"That's no good!" she exclaimed. She gave me the names and phone numbers of Barbara Walker and Meg Swansen, who of course reissued her Treasuries, and insisted I call them. Meg gave me the name and number of the person to contact at Martingale Press.
Barbara was in Florida and to my surprise lived near my son. It was the year there was a hurricane every single week, and we swapped hurricane stories. She told me of course I could use her patterns, but please attribute her. (I did on each one and it got edited to a single overall credit.) She told me so few people ever asked, but also how great it felt to see her work throughout the world of knitted things, knowing some random sweater she saw in the wild happened because of what she'd put into the world. Frost Flowers? You know where that came from.