Opening day

I think it's fair to say Stitches has become a pilgrimage. Knitters representing every conceivable manipulation of yarn in every imaginable make-up of warm fluffy stuff, come together at every raising of the Stitches standard. Stitches Knitting Conventions are as conveniently placed as possible, located in 3 Meccas of gathering groups: EAST in Atlantic City, MIDWEST near Chicago in Rosemont, and WEST in our newest Stitches venue Santa Clara, in the Bay Area in California.

The Stitches show hits the road every few months to reach new faces in knitting and what do we find? Old friends, familiar faces... a loyal growing family. Yes they come to knit and learn and shop, but they come back to share and knit and attain a higher stitches karma than the year before. The holy men and women of Stitches.

You can feel it after a time or two. Your first Stitches is so filled with the new and challenging sights and knowledge that the aura of holiness may be a bit veiled. On your second and third trip you begin to catch the knowing looks of Stitches old-timers. You are becoming one of them. They recognize you. You find yourself expounding on past events to newbies. You're recognizing knitting as your religion, a faith followed by many. Be lifted up at Stitches!

Knitting is ALL THAT and more. At the Opening Day Presentation Alexis Xenakis, Publisher of Knitter's Magazine and XRX Books, welcomed all the knitters who didn't want to miss their chance at industry forecasting and to preview Stitches Market. He announced that this was the biggest Stitches ever! Bigger even than East, in Atlantic City, that previously held that honor. He warmed the audience with gifts to the one that came from the shortest distance, the farthest distance, those that wore Knitter's patterns, and for the most original reason for attending Stitches. That newbie-knitter attendee, due to a death of an in-law, was left with bags of yarn, and every issue of Knitter's, including old mimeographed Stitches Convention info sheets. Never even knowing Knitter's previously, we can understand her curiosity.

Susan Lazear brought her fashion sense to knitters. Her perspective was in line with the group. You could hear the assents at her musings on designer self-discovery. Her awakening as a designer was like the lights coming on and being unable to shut them off.

In her tenure as a professor of design she has been able to isolate the key components of design. That's the analytical side, then she illustrated these concepts in practice. With www.-ease she referenced dot-com after dot-com. Each address a window into the fashion world just waiting for the right click.

Susan first outlined couture vs. ready-to-wear. Couture being the expressive outlet for designers. It is not meant to be sensible, or cost effective. Ready-to-wear is the mass-produced interpretations available to shoppers in the less than $10,000 range.

Susan likes a site called firstview.com. She goes there for most of her fashion pulse checks. It is a functional site, pulling out the images and video you want to see on collections, behind the scenes beauty, and shoes... every fashion focus you can think of. I noticed the collections are listed by date, not as in Spring, Fall, Winter 2005..., but "these collections came out on February 1st, 2nd, 3rd..." (editor's note: This is a great site to bookmark).

She also compared knock-offs vs. adaptations, where a knock-off is meant to perfectly imitate a design, and adaptations take off from a design, and are a lot more fun, and less illegal. In her discussion of fashions that began as existing garments she let us know that knits were never serious fashion until after WW1, when the men didn't want too give up their comfortably well-worn regulation sweaters.

Fads are an interesting fashion chapter whose story is sometimes told by designers, but is often written by the audience: the difference between trickle down, and trickle up fads. Susan identified the grunge look as a trickle up fad, created in the Seattle area. www.badfads.com is a very entertaining site to remind you of many of the ways fashion went astray for a very short, but highly memorable, moment.

In the spirit of Zeit Geist (in the spirit of the time), fashion follows life. Susan challenged us to recognize the direction fashion has taken for our time. It's "retro." She gave several examples including the PT Cruiser, and washing machines now available in colors like pumpkin.

The direction of fashion is not just anyone's guess. Forecasting services get the big bucks for predicting the coming colors and trends. A more modest service, in the guise of a fashion magazine View, to which Susan subscribes, projects 3 years out the fabrics and shapes of things to come to the tune of $300 for a 4 copy subscription. It is available by Googling Overseas Publishers.

Just for fun she said anthropologie.com is a fun fashion place for inspiration, but she wouldn't want to shop there.

Susan wants us to close ourselves in our own coolers to imagine textures and colors, to nevermind resisting the urge to design, and to look at grilled cheese in a new way. She sure has a way with fashion! (A bit confused? This may be one part of the program that "I guess you had to be there.")

Rick took the podium and took us all through the amazing sights of Piti Fillati. The slides of the contorted fabrics kept coming. How these unbelievable fabrics could be created with familiar stitches we use every day was mind bending. Remember the peacock feather knit? Rick aptly named one sweater the breast-feeding sweater. (You had to be there for that one, too. Sorry!)

One of my favorites was a New Look shaped dress, of deep red cables. From the tight nipped cabled waist, to the yards of cabled skirt, it was knit in the round. Very striking.

Rick supplied everyone who attended with a color card from Piti Fillati, of the Italian show's forecast picks to take to Market later in the day.