Mary Sauer's poem "Slip-Stitch Honeycomb" has been paired with Alexander McQueen by Sarah Burton. Featuring honeycomb-patterned mesh, layers of yellow sheer silk organza, and a beekeeper-like hat molded from tortoiseshell resin, this garment was featured in Burton's 2013 Spring/Summer show. To craft the accompanying poem (which comes from a larger untitled manuscript-in-progress), Sauer engaged with the work of Barbara G. Walker and the archive at the Tatter Textile Library in Brooklyn, New York. Sauer's project "explores knitted textile work as play, as subversion of efficiency."
— Paul Cunningham, Editor
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1. "Slip-Stitch Honeycomb" from A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara G. Walker. Pg 93.
2. Shtelmakh, Veronika. Slip-Stitch Honeycomb. Knitted textile recreated for the Barbara Walker Swatch Collection at BLUE: THE TATTER Textile Library. 2020. Entry/Object ID 2020.1.173.
3. Barbara G. Walker invented the top-down method of knitting sweaters, allowing sweaters and vests to be knit as one piece in the round on needles connected by cables, instead of in individual pieces that are stitched together. Walker was also the first author to compile exhaustive treasuries of knit stitches, beginning with A Treasury of Knitting Patterns in 1968. In 2020, the Tatter Textile Library in Brooklyn facilitated a community archival project, asking knitters from all over the world to recreate stitches in Walker's first treasury as swatches of blue and mail them to the library to be formally archived. They now have 487 textile objects in the Barbara Walker Textile Library, many accompanied by personal letters written by knitters who contributed to the project.
Mary Sauer is a writer from Kansas City, Missouri, and an MFA candidate at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. She is a Best Small Fictions nominee and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Timber, coastlines review, Cleaver Magazine, SWWIM, and Pleiades.
