He also helped found the Logan Circle Knit & Crochet Group, an all-male organization that meets twice a month for knitting and socializing. He later learned American Sign Language and worked in information technology for Gallaudet University.Īs knitting became more important to him, he became a consultant to a number of knitting organizations and wrote for various knitting publications. He grew up in McLean and graduated in 1978 from Langley High School, where he learned German, won German-language oratory contests and as a teenager traveled to Germany on his own.Īfter receiving his undergraduate degree from George Washington University in 1985, he became a legal secretary in the Washington office of the international law firm Nixon Peabody. Witt Guise Pratt was born in Memphis and was named for his grandfather, Witt Guise, a baseball player who pitched for the Cincinnati Reds. "When I was little and knitted, I was a sissy well now I'm a 6-foot-8-inch sissy with a sharp instrument." Pratt whether residents of a sophisticated urban center like Washington even take note of a knitter's gender. A Washington Post reporter once asked Mr. "Anything casual knitters couldn't do is what fascinated him."Īlthough knitting in centuries past was primarily a masculine enterprise, the stereotypical knitter these days is female. "The more complicated, the more intrigued he was," said his mother, Bobbye Pratt of Arlington. He became particularly adept at an innovative knitting technique popularized by Elizabeth Zimmerman called the Moebius cast-on. Gradually his work became more sophisticated, more creative. At first awkwardly and then gracefully wielding needles, he learned casting on, the knit stitch, the purl stitch, binding off and other knitting basics at the Woolgatherer on 21st Street NW. "At one point during the evening, she asked if I was interested in learning to knit." "Her loom and the yarn were far more interesting than the dinner guests," he recalled. He told the Washington Times in 1997 that he was attending an Adams Morgan dinner party and noticed that the hostess had a loom and a bag of yarns. He had been playing around with knitting, origami and other forms of weaving since he was a boy, but he remembered when he got serious about it. "I consider myself extremely fortunate to have found this for myself." "Like so many things, if we take the time to notice, when you've got a ball of yarn, which to many of us represents nothing short of infinite possibility, the world just opens up before you," he said. For him, taking a skein of yarn and transforming it into something beautiful and useful was "creation in motion," he told Dan Vera, publisher of the journal White Crane. Trained as a costume and clothing designer at George Washington University, he held jobs over the years at a Washington law firm and Gallaudet University, but knitting was the focal point of his life.
Pratt lived in Winchester, Va., and Arlington County but knitted wherever he happened to be - in the gardens around Washington National Cathedral in parks, coffeehouses and museums at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown on the Metro. Witt Pratt, 48, a masterful knitter whose sweaters, shawls, purses, scarves and other utilitarian items were essentially works of art, died May 20 of probable sleep apnea at what his mother called "his favorite place on earth," a mountain cabin near Front Royal, Va.
Virginia Textile Artist Had a Knack for Knittingīy Joe Holley Washington Post Staff Writer
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