The Yarn Whisperer (8 page)

When the going got rough, which it did quite a lot during college, I locked my door, curled up on my bed, pulled out the sweater and knit a few rows. If anybody knocked, I quickly shoved the sweater under the covers so they couldn't see it. Let
them think it was booze or a bong or whatever typical college students were hiding.

They say that the best way to entice a person out of the closet is to show them someone like them who is living a healthy, happy, open life without fear or shame. That's what happened to me.

One day my friend Emily Jane, two years my junior and three doors down from me in the dorm, showed up with a sock in her hand. A knitted sock, on four DPNs, whose heel she was in the process of turning.

She was carrying it out in the open where everyone could see. There was no self-consciousness or even self-awareness about it. She was just turning a heel.

Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “I knit, too!” Our mutual friend Hilair chimed in, “I'm working on an embroidered pillowcase right now.”

“What are you guys talking about?” asked Jenny, my oldest and dearest friend at Mills, who lived a few doors up in the opposite direction.

“Crafty stuff,” Hilair smiled.

“Emily Jane is making a sock,” I said, watching Jen's face closely for signs of shock or disapproval.

“Cool!” she said. “I can't knit but I do crochet. I've been making an afghan for my Nana.”

Wait, what?

And so, quite suddenly and without warning, we were all out in the open, discovering—much too late—that we each shared a quiet passion for making or adorning fabric by hand.

You know what they say, out one day, marching in a parade the next. Naturally, we needed to proselytize. But how?

We all worked as receptionists for our dorm. Most of us didn't have bigger plans on Saturday nights, so we'd usually go down to the lobby and keep whoever was working company. We decided to use this time for the Saturday Night Crafters, dragging our projects out of hiding, plunking ourselves on the mustard-colored couches in the dorm living room, and proudly stitching away. I was quite the sight with my bad perm and baggy sweatpants.

“Don't mind us,” we'd volunteer to passersby, “We're just over here
crafting
. We'll be churning butter by the fire later if you'd like to stick around.” We wanted people to react more than they ever actually did.

At the time, it felt liberating. We weren't mocking our passion. We wanted to grab those legacy stereotypes and thwack them with a big sign that read, “No more.” After all those Take Back the Night marches, we were taking back the craft.

All too soon we graduated and the Saturday Night Crafters disbanded forever. Emily Jane still knits, and I hope Hilair still embroiders. My Jenny died tragically in a car accident in 2004, so I'll never know if she finished that afghan for her Nana or not.

I still haven't finished that blue sweater. It sits in the same plastic bag as it did in college. Time has marched on, fashions have changed, my skills have improved. I like keeping those blue stitches in suspended animation as a sort of tribute to the past, and to my friend Jenny whose own stitches were bound off far too soon.

KITCHENERING

YOU'VE HEARD ABOUT
the knitter's handshake?
Two hands go in for the grab-and-shake, but at the last minute, they veer to the closest sleeve or band and grab it instead, while we ask, “Did you knit this?” Our eyes immediately scan the fabric for seams and joins, cast-on edges and edgings. We can't help it, we're wired to look for imperfections. A proper seam garners respect and admiration, even envy. Hastily worked, jagged, or lumpy lines are like scars—we know it's impolite to ask how they got there, but we can't stop staring.

My history with seams hasn't been particularly good. All my jeans used to be hemmed with tape, staples, or awkward steel safety pins that were always popping open and digging into my ankles. I avoided seams in knitting for years, instead churning out miles of garter-stitch scrolls disguised as
scarves. Inevitably, I grew bored and wanted to make something substantial. I started my first sweater in 1988; its pieces are all done and still waiting for me to assemble them. The first sweater I actually
finished
was a fuzzy brushed mohair affair that had so many other problems, the sloppy seams just fit right in.

Not until I fell in love with socks did I realize how serious my seam problem was. I learned to knit socks the old-fashioned way, working a top-down, flap-and-gusset pattern on four double-pointed needles. I was so excited about having turned my first heel that I temporarily forgot where I was headed. Once you reach the toe, no matter how you slice it—and we've come up with a lot of ways—you end up with stitches that need to be brought together. Because the space between foot and shoe is quite cramped and in a constant state of agitation, you can't just staple the two sides together and hope nobody notices. You need something smooth and strong, and only one stitch does the trick. It's called Kitchener.

A little background: During World War I, Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener served as Britain's Secretary of State for War. He assembled the largest volunteer army the British Empire had ever seen, his stern, mustachioed face appearing on countless posters above the words, “Wants You.” He teamed up with the Red Cross to rally knitters in England, Canada, and the United States. They cranked out countless handknits for the men fighting in the trenches. Legend has it Kitchener designed a sock with a new kind of seamless toe that promised to be comfortable on soldiers' feet. That seamless toe technique is what we call Kitchener stitch today.

A lot of people liked Lord Kitchener. He'd done remarkable things while serving in the Sudan. But during the Second Boer War, he used brutal scorched-earth tactics and sent 154,000 Boer and African civilians into concentration camps, which earned him many enemies. Kitchener died in 1916 when, while traveling to Russia for peace talks, his ship was sunk by a German U-boat. His life provided fodder for six books and movies, and his death prompted conspiracy theories that still linger on. A lifelong bachelor, Kitchener was also a collector of fine china and often surrounded himself with handsome, unmarried young soldiers referred to as “Kitchener's band of boys.” Which is to say that Kitchener the person was as complex as Kitchener the stitch.

For years, Kitchener the stitch eluded me. It has multiple steps that involve threading yarn through each stitch twice, just so, before letting it drop off the needle forever. The instructions are usually written in a mechanical way that tells you what to do without explaining
why.
If anything distracts you along the way, if you reverse the order of your threading by mistake, if the phone rings or your bus reaches its stop, you have no framework for realizing what's wrong and fixing it. All too easily, you'll end up with a toe that looks like a half-eaten ear of corn, which is what my first few toes looked like.

I took those early failures as a sign that Kitchener was beyond my grasp. The next few years were spent trying to navigate seams by other means, like the illiterate person who learns to say, “I forgot my glasses, could you read that for me?” when presented with a menu. Since staples and tape were out of the
question, I figured out how to flip my socks inside out, line up the stitches onto two needles, and marry them off, pair by pair, in what some people call a three-needle bind-off. I call it cheating. Sure, it looked reasonable from the outside. But inside the sock, my toes were unhappy about having to share their tight space with a rude, bulky seam of stitches. Every time I sidestepped Kitchener, I felt like a flop.

You can always fudge what others don't need to see. We shove stuff into closets and under the bed before company arrives, and good manners dictate that they don't go snooping. But once something leaves your hands and goes home with someone else, all the rules change. This person has free reign to scrutinize. I gave a particularly beautiful pair of cheater-toe socks to my sister-in-law, who immediately behaved as if I'd embedded a hacksaw into both toes. To this day, no amount of explaining (and confessing) will do—she's convinced that all handknitted socks are instruments of pain. Which has conveniently gotten me out of knitting her socks for Christmas, but it also makes me feel like I've let knitting down.

As soon as I began knitting for other people, especially the likes of my sister-in-law, I realized I could no longer coast on my sloppy compromises. My pride was on the line, the entire reputation of knitting was on the line, and my friends and family deserved better. I had to work on this.

Thus began my slow journey from Kitchener dreader to true believer. While it didn't happen overnight, it was propelled by one particular collision of project and circumstances.

In my mid-twenties I was pretty sure I'd never have a child
of my own, so I was determined to become a memorable auntie for everyone else's children. I just needed my friends to start breeding. Finally, one sunny February morning, my friend Jeanne announced that she was having a baby. Showtime. This was it. I would go full-out Martha Stewart and, naturally, there would be knitting involved.

At the time, Debbie Bliss was just about our sole source for the adorable, charming, and whimsical. Among her creations was a knitted all-in-one outfit that made the wearer look like a teddy bear. It buttoned up the front, with sleeves that had attached mitts and legs with integrated booties. The hood even had two little ears. Perfect. I procured bear-worthy brown wool yarn and got the project under way. I don't think I even swatched, I just cast on and started going.

As is often the case, life intrudes. The yarn turned out to be splitty, the gauge finer than I expected, my progress tediously slow. Work got busy. Then my grandfather suddenly got sick and passed away, pulling me into that weird limbo place where my mind was mostly in the past. Things like work and relationships and knitting cute onesies for fresh new babies had no appeal whatsoever.

Fortunately, Jeanne's baby knew nothing of my life and continued to grow. Soon a beautiful little cherub named Nadiya was born. Gradually my own appetite for life returned, and I resumed work on the little brown outfit.

Debbie Bliss tends to write her patterns row-by-row, while my mind thrives in the narrative big-picture realm. This project had many odd-shaped pieces and few schematics to show
me (a) what they were supposed to look like and (b) how they were all going to fit together. The only way to know was to finish knitting and hope that, in all my distraction of late, I didn't lose count or miss a crucial row, like Bugs Bunny and that notorious left turn he should've taken at Albuquerque.

The baby was crawling by the time I finally finished. Proud and relieved, I wanted to feel like I'd darned the ends of everything that had passed through my life since I began the project, that I'd converted my own sadness and sense of loss into a beautiful object that a new generation could cherish.

But something was not right. No, it was more than not right, it was wrong. Undeniably, irrefutably so. When I held up the little brown suit to admire, both feet were pointing in the wrong direction. As in backward. If you had dressed the baby using those feet as your guide, it would've seamed up the back with a hood that smothered the face. I'd knitted a cruel straitjacket with bear ears.

As I pondered what Freud would make of my mistake, I considered my options. Unraveling was not one of them, nor was tossing the whole thing into the trash. There was only one choice: I'd have to operate. No shortcuts, no glue, and no sloppy three-needle bind-offs; this baby deserved to have feet done right.

Immediately that inner voice began its “you can't do it” mantra. But for some reason, I didn't listen. I grabbed a good pair of sharp-tipped embroidery scissors and aimed them at a stitch on the ankle.

Snip.

This normally innocuous sound suddenly became loud,
like the open-mouthed crunch of a tortilla chip in a church. There was no going back. I carefully extracted the strand from its row until two shivering, opposing rounds of stockinette stitches stood before me. I turned the foot around so that it was in the proper position. Using my grandmother's darning needle for good luck and the surrounding stitches as my guide, I began slowly and carefully weaving the yarn back through the opposing loops, re-creating the arch, dip, swoop, and dive that forms each stitch.

Toss a person into a pool, and he'll either sink or swim. Chances are, if he manages to swim, he's going to be so busy staying afloat he won't have time or awareness to yell, “Hey! I'm swimming!” Likewise, I didn't yell, “Hey, I'm Kitchenering!” to the world. I just quieted my mind and did what the needle wanted to do. It worked. By the time I finished stitching up the second ankle, I felt positively invincible. Like I'd been forced to take apart an entire Volkswagen Bug and put it together again, and the car actually started. I still hadn't taught myself the science behind the why of what I was doing, but that was beside the point.