Confession: I am a scarf-aholic. When waiting at an airport—in Paris, Rome, London, Tokyo, Milan, Bologna, Frankfurt— I go scarf shopping, spending the leftover euros or pounds I am carrying in my purse.
When I moved to the Berkshires, I found my addiction to scarves well satisfied at Karen Allen Fiber Arts in Great Barrington, which sells scarves from Paris (Epice, Sophie Digard, Catherine Andre), Tokyo (Nuno), London (Wallace Sewell), India (Kashmir), Italy (Alonpi and Botto Giueseppe), from Vietnam (Lepo), and even right here in Great Barrington: cashmere beauties designed by Karen Allen herself and knitted in her studio on Railroad Street.
How did an actress with a career in film and television end up as a fiber artist in this lovely little town of ours?
The short answer, that choosing the path is not always an easy process, is best told by Karen herself:
“I started knitting scarves as a child. My grandmother, whom I adored, was a prolific knitter, so it followed that I would learn and love to knit. While growing up, I studied textiles. I had a true fascination for fabrics, colors, texture, prints, and design. I used to stand as a child and look at fabrics, or yarns, or rugs, and I would have visions of creating things with them.
“I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City in 1969 to learn more about these possibilities. Instead of staying in New York and launching myself into the fashion industry, I decided to travel and spent a year with friends, driving from Mexico to southern Peru, which was in itself an amazing lesson in some of the most beautiful textiles in the world.
“When I decided to pursue this, the question that I asked myself is what do I want to do in terms of an action. When I’m steaming and blocking a scarf, I enjoy doing it. It’s a simple action, I’ve got an iron, I’m on a big grid board, and I’m kind of manipulating the fibers, and I’m smelling the cashmere as it’s sort of inundated with steam and it smells fantastic and it’s a lovely physical experience to do something as simple as steam and block a scarf.”
As an actor, Allen did not put down her knitting needles and yarn. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Starman, and other movies were created accompanied by the sounds of her clicking needles.
“You know, movie sets are notoriously boring. You’re there as an actor 12 hours a day and maybe you’re actually needed—even if you have a leading role—three or four hours of that day. That leaves you with nine or 10 hours of just sitting around waiting for the set to be ready, or the lighting, or the props. You desperately need something to do.”
It’s all about the scarves
“When I opened my shop in Great Barrington in 2005 (Karen Allen Fiber Arts), I knew I wanted scarves to be at the center of our collections. Striped scarves. Patterned scarves. Improvised and one-of-a-kind pieces.”
Why scarves? “I studied the art of the scarf for decades. It is usually the first thing a person learns to knit because of its simplicity. I have made it a lifelong experiment. As a hand knitter, there was always the challenge of a scarf having a right side and a wrong side. I was looking for something else: a way to bring color and pattern into knitting. I wanted to find a way of knitting that allowed me to use very lightweight yarns and to create a double-sided scarf: one where both sides looked beautiful.
Karen did her research before embarking into retail: “Generally, in the cashmere marketplace, hats and scarves are done in one color and they’re pretty boring… you don’t see a lot of exciting things. I thought this could be my little niche, to work in a very colorful way where there are not a lot of other people doing it.”
For Karen, it’s important that both the fun and the typical aspects of a workday are appealing. She feels it’s critical to enjoy the mundane, as well as the sublime, in one’s chosen profession. She loves creating the finished knitwear but is notas fond of the “business spreadsheet” side of things, especially when a pandemic interrupts the supply chain.
Karen has settled herself into a landscape that she loves, creating products that reflect her own joy of colors and textures. As she says, “I really feel one of the most important fundamental things is to try to find where your passion lies, what you love doing, because I think it’s the secret of life.”
I find how things are made to be interesting, so I asked Karen to provide details on how she gets from yarn to finished scarf.
“In 2002 I returned to FIT to learn how to use Japanese knitting machines. I worked with a wonderful teacher, Marian Grealish. I still work on the knitting machine I learned on—with some adjustments. The machines I use are antiques; they stopped being produced in the 1980s, but I have managed to find sources for ones still in excellent condition, even learning how to do many of the repairs they need to keep them running.
“The Japanese machines opened up a whole new world. I often say that after 20 years of working with these remarkable machines on an almost daily basis, I have only scratched the surface of what they can do.
“After a year of playing with them in my first studio, I discovered a mode in which they create a fabric that is double-sided, and I discovered that by breaking all the ‘rules’of their use, I could do things I had never seen done with fabric before I also discovered cashmere.
“As most already know, it’s a gorgeous, luxurious, whisper-soft yet durable, and warm and comforting fiber. Unlike wool, which comes from sheep, it comes from goats: a Tibetan Plateau Goat, or ‘cashmere goat,’ specifically. Unlike sheep wool, which is sheared, the cashmere fibers are hand-combed from the goats.
“I was introduced to a cashmere mill in Scotland and several in Italy when I was setting up my knitwear line. Fortunately, they were willing to sell to me in small quantities. The yarns are sold in kilo cones, costing between $200 and $250 per kilo. The yarn is dyed twice a year (for spring/summer and fall/winter) in different color palettes of about 120 colors each season.
“I knit with very fine, thin yarns (about the thickness of sewing thread) so that I can put two strands of different colors into one feed (each machine has between four and 12 feeds), and then I have the ability to make things where the colors swirl together in a spontaneous way.
“The quality of what is sometime called ‘cashmere’ has suffered in the last decade. China, which for several centuries sold off its highest-quality raw cashmere to England, Scotland, Italy, and Japan for spinning, has begun to process its own cashmere, most often with the lower qualities, or what one might call ‘waste cashmere,’ or ‘short ends,’ which is generally the kind of cashmere that is used for cashmere blends.
“The price of cashmere from China was right, but it turned out the garments were itchy, they pilled (those awful little fiber bumps in areas of wear) and did not hold up over time. Good-quality cashmere should last a lifetime, that is if moths (to whom cashmere is the chocolate cake of the fiber world) are not allowed to get at them. (As an aside, there are wonderful Ziploc bags of sweater size that are made to protect these precious sweaters and scarves, and it’s wise to use them.)
Here’s a photo of Karen at work with one of her knitting machines. Behind her you can see samples of her completed work.
A good scarf never goes out of style…
Yesterday was chilly and I pulled out one of my oldest scarves—from Sonia Rykiel—bought it in Paris more than 20 years ago. The colors are amazingly contemporary: black, tobacco brown, and pink. A good scarf never goes out of style and before I left the house, I searched online to see if Rykiel had anything to say about scarves. Here’s what I found:
“A scarf has to be the most beautiful thing ever invented to wear! It’s a winding,a continuity, an infinity! I love things that are endless. I hate them to stop. It’s like order and disorder: I rather love disorder and things that move. It’s a state where one gets more things done!”
Perhaps that is why I bought an infinity scarf—handmade in Massachusetts—at the Paradise Crafts Fair, which I attended recently in Northampton. I am looking forward to wearing it around my neck when the temperature drops and the winter chill blows in.