May 2025 Membership Meeting
All that Time Knitting and it Doesn’t Fit!
How to Avoid the Bad Fit Blues.
By Martha:
This program will start with a tutorial on how to take accurate body measurements. If you want to participate in measuring, please wear a close-fitting garment (a T-shirt is fine). Martha will provide a form for you to record your measurements; please bring a pencil. If you have a flexible (non-metal) tape measure, bring it. If not, we will provide tape measures for you to use. We will discuss how to transform a 2-D knitted item into something that fits a 3-D body. Martha will cover:
- The important body measurements to ensure a good fit
- Techniques for shaping a knitted garment
- The types of ease and how they affect fit
- Time for questions on individual fit issues
This should be a fun hands-on program that will help to make your knitted items fit you! Please attend even if you don’t want your measurements taken. We’ll need people to take the measurements and record them.
⊗ Yarn will be available for purchase at this meeting ⊗
I learned to knit when I was 12. Our left-handed mom sent her right handed daughters next door to Sarah, a lady who could knit in a darkened movie theater. We learned to knit what my niece has learned is called “Russian Grandma Continental Knitting”.
A year or so later, I was still a scrawny little girl who wanted to wear cool teenage clothes. But the stores only showed little girl dresses in my size. Tiring of shopping every store in a 25 mile radius my mother pointed to our trusty Singer and told me to learn to sew. So I did.
I took every home-ec class in high school and followed that with a college minor in theatrical costuming. After college I made my way back to Manhattan where I worked in the costume shop of the Rockettes. I usually served as sample hand, sewing the first prototype of the pattern for a new costume. All the costumes were individually fitted on each long-legged rockette.
After that I landed a position in the wardrobe department of the soap opera All My Children, and stayed there for 3 years. I enrolled in graduate school earning a MA in historical clothing and textiles and taught as an adjunct instructor in the Home Ec. department of Queens College while raising my family.
I continued to sew for myself and my growing family; Halloween costumes, prom dresses and eventually wedding dresses. While I rarely sew clothing anymore, I still do frequent alterations to help my clothing fit better.
Martha Fine.