Hartzler's knitting formula has been a proven winner
Marcus Hartzler knitted clothes for his family to enter in the Wayne County Fair Arts and Home Economics Department including a cardigan for himself and sweaters for daughter Claire, left, wife Karma and daughter Eva. Displayed in front of them are more of Hartzler's projects.
Marcus Hartzler sees every knitting project as a math problem, so before he knits, he calculates.
It’s proven to be a successful formula for the Wooster man who has been a Best of Show winner in the Wayne County Fair Arts and Home Economics Department three of the four years he’s exhibited. Last year he swept both hand knitting categories with Best of Show honors. Had it not been for a second-place ribbon on one of his 2022 entries, it would have been the pinnacle of his fair competition, said Hartzler, who has grown accustomed to the first-place ribbons.
He is preparing five submissions for this year’s fair, which will open Sept. 9. They include clothing items for his wife Karma and daughters Eva and Claire, as well as for himself.
A software engineer and mathematician, Hartzler began knitting when he was a sophomore at Mount Vernon Nazarene University. A high school friend taught him the craft, and he caught on quickly.
“I love math. I love problem-solving,” Hartzler said.
Once he learned the knitting basics, he began searching online for ways to advance and challenge himself.
“You can just follow a pattern as it's written,” he said, "but typically, I’ll take a pattern and figure out what I like and don’t like.”
Then he starts his redesign.
“It’s all math and algebra at that point,” Hartzler said. “You’re essentially getting the dimensions of a single stitch so that you can say, ‘I want it to be this wide with this many stitches, or I need this many rows.' If I want an angle, I need to decrease the rate of this many stitches per row.”
For one of this year’s fair entries, he took a pullover men’s sweater pattern and converted it to a cardigan with the Cleveland Cavaliers C logo.
Hartzler does most of his knitting between early fall and late spring. He is busiest in the months leading up to Christmas when he knits one gift item each for his wife and daughters.
The girls are particularly fond of the knitted stuffed animal. An octopus, a favorite of Eva’s, presented some challenges with its eight tentacles and drew attention from the pattern’s creator after he posted it on Ralvery, a community site for knitters and crocheters.
“A representative from the yarn company reached out to me and asked if I could post the octopus on Instagram,” Hartzler said. When the pattern’s creator contacted him to discuss the pattern, he mentioned the tentacles were the most tedious part.
His daughters are beginning to have a greater appreciation for their knitted garments. For a time, daughter Eva wasn’t keen on wearing the sweaters, but now her favorite outfit is a dress with one of the sweaters knitted by her dad.
Most of the time, Hartzler can knit without looking.
“I can feel if I drop a stitch or pick up an extra one,” he said.
He also knows how to fix mistakes. His wife told him a sweater he made for her was about an inch and a half too short, so Hartzler added the stitches in the middle of the sweater without a trace of what he’d done.
“I like to get things right,” Hartzler said. “I’m more concerned with being happy with the final result than just getting things done. If a knitting project proves challenging, I’ll put it in time-out and work on a different one.”
That was the case for a light-weight blanket he recently knitted. He said the blanket’s 150,000 stitches proved to be mind-numbing, so he turned his attention to some clothes or stuffed animals.
His calculations and designs are stored in a knitting notebook so he has a record of his projects.
He designed a knitted baseball and wrote the pattern for it. The inside of the ball is a ball of yarn.
“It’s a lot like (computer) programming or solving a math equation,” Hartzler said. “As long as you know what the rules are and what’s possible, you should be able to solve it using the tools available. For me, knitting is just another problem to solve.”