Smitty is Knitting

Tag: harlequin

  • WIP Wednesday: Diamonds are a girl’s biggest mess

    WIP Wednesday: Diamonds are a girl’s biggest mess

    Yarn management final boss

    In my last post I described my plans for a sweater inspired by Harlequin costumes and Venice, and how I finally found the perfect pattern in a 37-year-old issue of Vogue Knitting.

    I'm holding up an issue of Vogue Knitting magazine. My hand is visible in the lower left of the photo. The magazine cover features a blonde model with bangs wearing a black and white sweater that's knit in a houndstooth pattern. The title of the magazine is in turquoise blue, and at the bottom it reads "Time to knit!" in lime green. The background of the cover is bright white.
    A brunette model stands wearing the Harlequin Pullover, which has light orange and black diamons on the torso, black sleeves, and a coral pink cowl collar. She stands in front of a male model holding an umbrella.

    The pattern is #2 Harlequin Pullover by Anne Mieke Louwerens. I got started by pulling out literally every partial and single skein of DK yarn I had, determined to absolutely decimate my stash. I also frogged a sweater that didn’t end up fitting how I wanted, and used the yarn from that – Stipple DK from Yarn Hero in the colorway Dagger – as my main color.

    3 skeins of a multicolor, helix spun yarn with shades of black, gray, red, orange, and deep pink.

    This yarn is so pretty–and discontinued, which I only noticed last night when I had a sudden feeling that I would need more to finish. Whoops. I might be playing yarn chicken with this project, especially since I added two repeats of the diamond motif to make the sweater bigger. Published in an era before knitters were grading size-inclusive designs, this sweater is “one-size-fits-all”* (*read: would definitely not fit me). I’ll manage though. I should definitely have enough for the front and the two sleeves, and I can live with a contrasting back if needed.

    So far I’m most of the way through my front, which I’m also making a little longer with one additional row of diamonds, and finished one sleeve.

    a large piece of knitted fabric with the main color in a dark, marled yarn with black, red, gray, orange, and pink, with contrasting diamonds in purple, yellow, teal, red, brown, green, and gray.
    A sleeve, pinned to a white blocking mat. It's in the dark, marled yarn with black, red, gray, orange, and pink. It also has a roll cuff knit in orange yarn.

    But it wouldn’t be honest of me if I didn’t reveal the shitshow underneath:

    Many balls of yarn in multiple colors, tangled together in a big heap.

    Yep. I’ve knit intarsia before, but this is by far the most complicated intarsia project I’ve done, with the most colors in play at once. The yarn management is unwieldy–if I want to get up from working on this, I either need to finish a row so that all the yarn is on one side of my body, or I have to slide out from under it to avoid mixing all the yarn balls together. It’s like a really bad seatbelt.

    This project lives in the corner of the couch. A couch that belongs to my housemates, who I rent from, and their dog. If I work on this project every day, I can kind of justifying leaving it out, because putting it away means destroying the loose yarn ball organization system and having to spend a lot of time untangling when I want to bring it back out from the project bag.

    Obviously this project can’t travel, and suddenly I’m commuting again. I recently started teaching for a local university’s college readiness program, and now I’m teaching writing and composition to high school seniors at two different schools. So I’m back on that city bus, traveling from one to the other, and I physically can’t ride public transport without a knitting or crochet project.

    I’ve also been working on an improvised bandana for that cooler weather that’s supposed to be showing up soon. I’m using a lovely wool/cashmere blend, which I got from a yarn company that I will not name since they’ve since been exposed for toxic management. I had two balls of this, and used one to make a Wedding Necktie for my partner. Now I can match with my own neckwear.

    A triangule-shaped, unfinished bandana cowl knit in the green-gray color with rusty brown speckles.

    So beautifully mindless that it’s impossible for to lose my place when going over a pothole. I decided to use an i-cord edge, but now I’m worried that it’s too tight and causing it to curl in too much. I’ll see how it looks after blocking–if that can’t fix the tension, I’ll redo it.

    And that’s everything on the needles this WIP Wednesday. See you next time.

    A gif of a person with a mustache and shoulder-length hair, wearing swimming goggles and a Spiderman costume. In the first frame the caption reads "It is Wednesday, my dudes." In the second frame the person stands in a doorway and screams, the caption reading "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
  • Comedia dell’arte. Comedia dell’yarn-te?

    Comedia dell’arte. Comedia dell’yarn-te?

    Down to clown in Venice

    I began indulging my love for harlequin motifs with my Junco Sweater, but at the end of last month, I got to visit the harlequin homeland: Italy!

    My partner, who is a freelance assistant camera operator, worked on Cover-Up, a documentary about journalist Seymour Hersh and directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. He was invited to attend its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and I got to go with!

    This event was wild. Most of the time, I felt like I had snuck into the back door of a party I hadn’t been invited to. My partner noticed Mads Mikkelsen and was tempted to tell him how much he enjoyed his work in Death Stranding. I accidentally caught Tilda Swinton on camera trying to film an art installation. Willem Dafoe was hanging out in the hotel bar. I drank Negronis while watching people I can only assume were European royalty pass by in evening gowns. Guards walked around wearing military berets and machine guns. I was nervous to make sudden moves.

    The level of wealth was strange to me. It was strange to witness in person. It was especially strange considering that Cover-Up is about a guy who blew the top off multiple war crimes committed by American’s military, namely, the My Lai massacre during the US invasion of Vietnam, and the torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the invasion of Iraq. Hersh is a truly remarkable person who pursues the truth regardless of what people think, and what enemies he makes. He’s been accused of spreading conspiracy theories. He was the subject of angry, worried phone calls between Nixon and Kissinger. He’s on the left in this photo from Reuters.

    Director Laura Poitras, director Mark Obenhaus and journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh pose during a photocall for the movie “Cover Up” out of competition, at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, Venice, Italy, August 29, 2025. REUTERS/Yara Nardi

    The same day Cover-Up premiered, so did After the Hunt, a new Luca Guadagnino movie starring Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri. We passed the red carpet during their entrance but couldn’t see over the wall of photographers. But I do wish I had seen Roberts’s dress with my own eyes:

    Julia Roberts stands amiling on a red carpet. She is wearing a black gown with a low-contrast pattern of diamonds.

    Roberts wore Atelier Versace, a long blue-black gown with a low-contrast pattern of diamonds cascading down the skirt and rising up the shoulders. I thought this was a fashionable nod to the history of comedia dell’arte and Harlequin in its country of origin.

    In commedia dell’arte theater, Harlequin is a stock character, a servant and a trickster with two masters, undermining the authority of both. Which is also why Harley Quinn of DC comics makes such a good anti-hero: sometimes allied with the abusive Joker and sometimes Batman, she flips between her penchant for chaos and her moral agency.

    An illustration of a historical Harlequin actor. He is wearing a unitard of blue and red diamonds on a yellow backdrop, holding a sap, and wearing a black mask over his eyes. He is also wearing a cap that comes to a point in the back.
    Harlequin
    Harley Quinn in Batman: the Animated Series, where she appears in her original character design: she wears a two-pronged jester hat, with one red side and one black side. She is wearing a black mask over her eyes and white face paint. She is wearing a checker-patterned red and black unitard, with black diamonds on her leg, and red and black gloves.
    Harley Quinn

    Harlequin’s costume patterns range from diamonds to patchwork triangles, often colorful and bright, but sometimes black and red. And in Venice, those motifs manifest in Carnevale masks. As a former Catholic, I still feel drawn to the gilded imagery of Catholic religious ritual, and the way it has adapted (or appropriated, in many cases) pagan traditions. It’s catnip to a heathen like me.

    A trio of Carnevale masks. On the left is a white mask with red lips and wavy lines crossing vertically over the eyes, and a black cap shape over the forehead. In the middle, a mask with red lips and a gold mask over the eyes - this figure wears a crescent-shaped headpiece with gold, black, and red diamonds. On the left, a mask that is completely white except for a large golden filigree covering the foreheard, eyes, nose bridge, and cheeks.

    I also got to visit the Peggy Guggenheim collection, where they happened to have a temporary exhibit featuring the work of Helena Maria Vieira da Silva, a Portuguese abstract painter who mapped space using grids of colorful squares. I was really taken by this exhibit and Vieira da Silva’s style, and I think it’s no coincidence that she also worked in tapestry and stained glass – the way those forms naturally lead toward geometry, pixelation, and abstraction probably had an influence on her painting style, the signature use of a grid to create depth and find form in her depictions of movement, cityscapes, and interiors.

    “Ballet, or The Harlequins”
    “Maria Helena II”, a portrait of Vieira da Silva by her husband, painter Árpád Szenes

    Now that I’m back from Venice, I’ve been looking for ways to translate that interest in diamond motifs into knitwear. Through my searches on Ravelry, I came across this project by user SilasM.

    That was it, that was exactly what I wanted to make. The pattern is Harlequin Pullover by Anne Mieke Louwerens, an artist who has worked in textiles and knitwear design, painting, graphic design, and ceramics.

    But I had a small roadblock. I couldn’t find this pattern online anywhere, because it was originally published in the fall/winter 1988 issue of Vogue Knitting.

    A page from the issue of Vogue Knitting where the Harlequin sweater is modeled. Int he main photo, the model is acing away from the camera and a single line of orange diamonds on a black background is shown on the back. There are duplicate stitch bows adorning the tops of the diamonds. In the inset image on the bottom left, the models faces the front, showing the grid of orange and black diamonds and a coral cowl neck. In both photos, the model is standing next to a man in a suit, holding an umbrella. The model is a white woman with brown hair, wearing gold hoop earrings.
    The Harlequin sweater modeled in the Vogue Issue.

    But that’s why God made eBay, right? Luckily I found a hard copy of the issue from a seller on the site, who kept this magazine miraculously preserved for the last 36 years.

    After looking at the pattern directions, I’m already planning a couple mods. To feel truly in the piebald spirit of Harlequin, I want to make all the contrast color diamonds different colors. I’m also planning to add some shoulder shaping, and sleeve decreases to preserve some yardage. I’m split on the cowl neck. I love how it looks, but I’m partial to lower necklines. It’s added by picking up the stitches around the neck after the rest of the sweater pieces are grafted together, so I won’t have to make a decision until much, much later.

    The diamond motif wasn’t the only thing that caught my eye in Venice. Right now I’m also enamored with celestial imagery, which is all over the city (and other parts of Italy, according to my friend who has traveled more extensively there). So I was completely transfixed by the Torre dell’Orologio in San Marco Square, an astronomical clock tower depicting the 12 zodiac signs. It tells the time, and the positions of the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the astrological position of the sun.

    I also found plenty of inspiration in the tile floors at San Giorgio, a church and monastery. The island, San Giorgio Maggiore, is also home to a photography gallery, which had an exhibit on Robert Mapplethorpe while we visited.

    A tiled floor of white, red, and black stone
    A tiled floor of white, red, and black stone
    The facade of San Giorgio Basilica, a white marble building with a stone plaza, tiled in a geometric pattern.
    Fellow weebs will recognize San Giorgio as the location where King Crimson is revealed in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5

    In addition to Venice’s classic sights, we were invited by the Cover-Up production team to the Biennale Architetturra to see the installation “Calculating Empires” by Kate Crawford, a researcher who has been studying AI for the past decade, and artist Vladen Joler. I got to speak a little with Dr. Crawford, who was so extremely cool. The project is available to view online here.

    Also at the Biennale Architetturra was Necto, an installation made from knit fiber and LED lights. Read the full details here.

    A large knitted art piece is suspended on multiple brick columns in a large room, kind of like a giant spiderweb. Multiple lines of LED lights run through it, and dots of light can be seen throughout.
    This is what I was filming when Tilda Swinton’s tour group came through.

    And besides the “official” art, there were tons of murals and graffiti all around Venice. Much of it was anti-Amazon and anti-Bezos, since he had just completely shut down the city for his own wedding just a few months prior. Most of it was in support of a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

    A mural depicting Black immigrants with the words "No one is illegal"
    A building whose first floor is painted orangey-red and whose top floor has an intricate, diamond brick design. In the lower left corner the words "Dyles hate cops" and "Palestina libera" have been spray-painted in pink.

    And last, the two funniest images I took. On the left, a young man whose whole job is to carry a falcon around to scare pigeons away from this rooftop bar. On the right, a trio of suited, ear wire-wearing tough guy security guards at the Film Festival take a much-needed gelato break.

    A man wearing a white shirt and black waistcoat faces away from the camera with his hands resting on a guard rail. On his left arm is a falcon. We were at a rooftop bar, so some other rooftops are visible in the background. In the left foreground, there are a few people sitting at tables
    Three men in black suits and wearing wires in their ears stand in the street with cups of gelato. The man on the left is taking a bite. The man on the right is facing away from the camera. A third man is hidden behind the man on the right.

    There are worse gigs, probably.