Stocking Capable Don’t needle Machias lawyer Frank Cassidy – to the beneficiaries of his marathon knitting projects, he’s a legend

It’s no big deal that Machias lawyer Frank Cassidy knits. All seven of his sisters knit. So does his mother. And somewhere in the family tree there is, or was, a brother-in-law, the mathematician, who crochets.

“My sisters find it interesting but not unusual that I knit,” Cassidy said.

Cassidy’s knitting has been immortalized in poetry – written by his mother-in-law. As one of the poem’s 10 stanzas goes:

“Thus he drove over to Shirley’s yarn store,

And throughout the fall went back to buy more;

His specialty mittens Frank started of knitting;

He knitted them standing, he knitted them sitting.”

“I learned to knit [as a child] from my mother,” he said. “I’d start out with 10 stitches and end up with 20.”

When he moved to Maine in 1981, to the town of Franklin on one of the waves of the back-to-land movement, Cassidy rediscovered knitting for a very simple reason: It was cold. He needed warm socks and mittens. He also needed cash at times, so he sold his knitted items at local farmers markets.

“I knit double mittens,” he said. No, he’s not talking about slip one stitch, knit one stitch to create a thick layer of knit fabric, the sort of thing you do when making the heel of a sock. He means a mitten within a mitten.

He said he found the pattern many years ago in Ellsworth at a place called Paradox Yarns, no longer in business. He grew so good at knitting double mittens he memorized the pattern.

It was with a pair of those now legendary mittens that he courted, and won, his wife, Katherine.

Which brings us to Cassidy’s current knitting opus: Christmas stockings. Twenty-four of them to be exact. One for each member of his wife’s family. Each one personalized with name and date of birth, and a motif inspired in some way by each family member. Peter’s motif is Father Christmas; Lois, a poinsettia; Gilbert, a moose; Judy, cardinals; Annie, a pineapple; Scott, a pelican; Caroline, an angel; Caitlin, a gold bell and red snowflake; John, a train; Bobbie, a blue crab; Joy, a fir tree and star; Calvin, a lion and a zebra; Brian, the French word “noel”; and a second John, an angler and a fish.

Five years ago, Cassidy knit 24 pairs of double mittens for these same family members, propelling the mittens and himself as knitter into the realm of legend – within the large circle of his wife’s family, at the very least.

Most of Cassidy’s wife’s family live in the Washington, D.C., area. His side of the family lives in New York.

Cassidy began the Christmas stocking knitting odyssey back in January. His original plan was to have all 24 stockings knitted by Thanksgiving, but he managed to complete only 13. “The others,” he said, “will have to wait until next Christmas.”

He had never knit patterns in color before, so it was not surprising that the task of knitting 24 personalized Christmas stockings ended up being more of a tangle than he bargained for. In the process, he had a few difficulties to solve. First of all, he couldn’t find charted patterns of the motifs he wanted to knit into the stockings. “I learned as I went,” he said. Eventually, he figured out that he could adapt counted cross-stitch charts to his purpose, and, lacking that, he charted his own designs. He also figured out that the fewer colors he used in his designs, the easier they were to knit.

Cassidy said he likes the challenge of figuring out the logistics of knitting the stockings – one might even say, he enjoys the challenge of grappling with the engineering aspects of knitting the stockings.

There is a method to his knitting marathon – first, he knits all of the tops of the stockings with the names and dates of birth, then he knits the motifs and finally turns the heel and finishes the foot. He works according to family group, so if there are three people in a group he works on those three stockings at the same time, moving from one sock to the other, each on different sets of four needles.

But because of the complexity of following the charts, he said, “I can’t knit here and there. I have to sit down and concentrate.” Although, when he gets beyond the color work and is working on the heel and foot, he can knit at meetings.

“I have not yet brought my knitting to the courthouse,” Cassidy said, laughing – even though there are times in the lawyering trade when it’s a “hurry and wait situation.”

Cassidy knits the socks in the round on double point needles using acrylic yarns to avoid the problem of dye lots. He lines each stocking with fabric, stitching them himself on the family sewing machine. He considers himself an artisan, not an artist. “I like seeing the pictures [from the charts] come alive, seeing it develop,” he said.

He also knits socks to wear in his role as a 20th Maine Civil War re-enactor. When he is participating in an encampment, he said, he sometimes darns the socks he has knit.

“Knitting is a calming process, a way to relax,” he said. “It’s a continuous thread, but it has beginnings and endings.”