Knitlandia

by Clara Parkes

  After a brief stop in the St. Giles’ Cathedral, I went back outside to ogle yet more shops advertising cashmere, gorgeous tweeds, and bottle after bottle of whisky. I realized I was in the classier Edinburgh version of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

  Back down to Princes Street I went, this time to marvel at the size of the mystery section at Waterstones and try on an antique ruby ring worth more than my car. My touristing had carried me through most of the day, but it was far from over. I returned to my hotel to check into my room, download more maps and bus schedules, and then I headed off again.

  I was staying on the same street as Edinburgh’s best Vietnamese restaurant, also known as Edinburgh’s only Vietnamese restaurant. I stepped in for my requisite jetlag-fighting bowl of pho. Several minutes of blissed slurping later, I left and caught a bus for the city’s Old Town. Navigating streets that were already starting to look familiar, I found my way to a pub whose name I’d written down. Inside, knitters awaited.

  A Playful Day podcaster Kate Long had traveled up from London and organized the gathering with some twenty or so teachers, designers, vendors, and knitters attending the show. I looked around and spotted knitters in a room to my right, already sprawled around two enormous tables covered with half-empty glasses. Needles were flying.

  A smiling man stood up, his bespectacled face familiar to me from photographs. This was Tom van Deijnen, better known to the knitting world as Tom of Holland. Not only is he a master of visible mending, but he also has a superb collection of obscure and intriguing old knitting books. We shook hands and yelled introductions. Women scooted down the bench to make room for me. I sat down, Kate put a gin and tonic in my hand, and I didn’t move for the rest of the evening.

  Across from me sat the young Finnish designer Veera Välimäki, knitting away on a black sweater. (“She has young eyes,” whispered the woman next to me.) To my right, Curious Handmade podcaster Helen Stewart told me of her move to the United Kingdom from Australia. Gradually, the pitch of the room grew louder and louder until I couldn’t even hear myself. Perhaps another gin and tonic wasn’t the wisest idea. I made my exit and hailed a cab for home, making it back to my room just before the clock struck ten. A minute later, I was asleep, forty hours after I’d last seen a bed.

  Who ever came up with that myth about beating jetlag by staying up all day? I would like to tell that person that he is cruel and wrong. I awoke feeling worse than the night before. But getting upright and sipping a cup of tea—courtesy of the kettles, mugs, and tea bags so prevalent in UK hotel rooms—worked wonders. Soon I was dressed and out the door for a proper pot of tea and Scottish breakfast complete with plump sausages and thick white toast slathered in marmalade. Belly full and several hours behind schedule but now feeling human, I boarded my bus for the show.

  The Edinburgh Corn Exchange was built in 1909 in the Chesser suburb of Edinburgh. Originally designed as a space for farmers and merchants to trade cereal grain, the vast halls of the Corn Exchange had been converted into an event hall that would, for the next two days, host the Edinburgh Yarn Festival.

  The show was only in its second year, the first one taking place at a much smaller venue near town and lasting just a single day. That trial run had been a wild success, but still, the move to the Corn Exchange had been a gamble. Would people travel this far out of the city center just for yarn? And would they pay the increased admission price to do so?

  The organizers were two passionate and impressively organized knitters named Jo and Mica (pronounced Meeca). They managed to bring in nineteen top teachers and program two full days of morning and afternoon workshops. They expanded the marketplace to more than 100 vendors—each handpicked. They booked another hall just for gathering, and they made sure everyone would have constant access to tea, coffee, and cakes. Classes sold out, word spread, and by the time I got to the Corn Exchange on Saturday morning, the place was humming.

  “Hello, loves,” men in suits greeted us at the door. “Tickets? Straight away you go then. . . .” Nearly all the workshops I’d wanted had been booked for weeks in advance, so I was here strictly for the marketplace.

  When I taught at Knit Nation, attendance in my rather geeky yarn and wool classes was sparse. “It’s not you,” Alice Yu assured me. “They’re just not there yet. But it’s important that you be here and teach your classes.” In the few years that had passed, the future Alice foretold was definitely here. The market was packed with more British knitting yarns than I’d ever seen in one place; people were leaving with armfuls.

  Visually, one knitting marketplace can be very much like another. There are only so many ways you can display skeins of yarn. But the character of the vendors and the variety of goods, that is what changes—as well as the spirit of the shoppers.

  This marketplace was packed. But I felt no elbows, and saw no greedy grabbing of skeins, no hoarder hustle to beat me to the next booth. All I felt was a calm, focused politeness. I remembered a conversation I’d had with my flight attendant Rick on the way over.

  “It’s kind of a favorite sociological experiment for me,” he’d said. “I can have row after row of passengers who are polite, who make eye contact and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ and then I’ll reach someone who doesn’t even look at me, who barks orders.” He leaned in and whispered, “I’ll let you guess which one was the American.” I smiled politely, realizing he was technically insulting us both, too.

  I made a quick pass of two of my favorite natural dyers, feeling virtuous in my restraint, before walking by a coffee stand and running headfirst into Eden Cottage yarns. I let out a moan, and the woman next to me laughed.

  In case you aren’t familiar with it, there is an international code of yarn marketplace etiquette. The moan, gasp, or uncontrolled giggle is knitterspeak for “I am overwhelmed by what I see and may become unable to restrain myself.” When you hear it, you understand that you will not judge but instead will offer support and encouragement—and nothing will be remembered in the morning. I was relieved when the women around me gave the international nod and smile of agreement.

  Having fallen off my yarn wagon within just a few minutes of entering the show, the rest came all too quickly. More skeins tumbled into my bag, which turned into another bag, and another.

  In the midst of all the color, my eyes found solace in the one booth whose contents were all white. I was impressed by the quality of the fibers and ingenuity of their spinning, including their choice of the trademarked New Merino fiber from Australia, which pledges to be mulesing free. Mulesing is a procedure in which skin is removed, usually without anesthesia, from the tail end of a sheep. The infestation it prevents—flystrike—is even more gruesome and painful. But here we had yarn from farms that had pledged not to do it, experimenting with more humane ways to protect their animals.

  Standing next to his yarn was John, a second-generation wool merchant who grew up accompanying his father on wool- and mohair-buying expeditions, even to the once-vast warehouses in San Angelo, Texas. Today, he takes great pride in knowing exactly where to go for the best of any particular kind of fiber, as well as which mills are best equipped to spin each blend properly. He bemoaned the fact that people didn’t really seem to care about these details anymore, and it was all I could do to convince him otherwise.

  I was in another booth when I overheard the owner tell a customer about the skein she was holding. It was Shetland from the Wadley flock in County Durham, he explained. He’d sent it to Paul at the Halifax Spinning Mill in Yorkshire. I decided to test him on another skein, this one fingering-weight Romney. “Ah!” he said with a smile. “That was a last-minute addition.” He went on to tell me how he’d gone to the mill to collect yarn for the show, and Paul told him about 200 fleeces he’d just bought from a local farmer and spun on a whim. Here was a sincere and unpretentious local yarn at its best. It was hard for me to believe that just a few short years before farmers were burning fleeces for lack of customers.

 
; The American-in-Amsterdam designer and knitting personality Stephen West was sharing a booth with Ysolda, and they’d kindly offered to host a signing for me. Stephen gave me a hug and asked what new and exciting things I’d seen. I was embarrassed to admit I’d only managed one aisle so far.

  I met sisters who’d traveled all the way from Greece to the show. I met Irene the knitter, and her non-knitting daughter who makes up for not knitting by finding her mother the best brooches and shawl pins. I met Michelle and saw a picture of her miniature dachshund Bertie Biggles. Among the many Canadians, Australians, and US expats I met, a common theme prevailed: Knitting has helped them slip into what they uniformly described as a difficult-to-penetrate British culture.

  Up next was a coffee date with Tom of Holland, with whom I’d only been able to exchange a handful of words at the pub the previous night. A Dutchman now living in Brighton, England, Tom impressed me with his passion for the unsung art of mending and making do.

  Perched on stools at a sunny window table, heart-topped espresso drinks between us, we talked. Tom’s mind was full of the obscure. He had friends in museums and libraries and universities, and he’d even attended a MEND*RS Symposium—something I didn’t know existed until then.

  He’d trained as a radiotherapy radiographer (I made him repeat that twice) before getting recruited by a software company to train others on their system. From there, he moved to software testing and was now a team leader. He negotiated a four-day work week so that he would be able to spend three days each week on more fibery pursuits.

  We carried our conversation into the supermarket across the street, where we pulled together a picnic supper to enjoy before the evening program began. Ogling the Hobnobs and custards and puddings, we both professed a fondness for grocery shopping in foreign countries. He told me about the store in France that had two long aisles of wine and one small shelf marked “Other Countries.” I added a box of his partner’s favorite tea to my basket, and a packet of Garibaldi’s biscuits, along with a small cake he insisted I try.

  It was dark when we returned for the evening program. It had been dubbed the “Ca-BAA-Ret,” with entertainment by sound artist, knitwear designer, and author Felicity Ford, plus door prizes and a pub quiz moderated by Felicity and Ysolda. The price of admission also got you one drink ticket, and by the time we arrived people were well into their cups.

  At 7:00 PM Felicity—who goes by Felix—strapped a candy apple–red accordion to her chest and launched into a sweetly sung, entertainingly rewritten, knitting-filled version of the show tune “Cabaret.”

  As the evening wore on and the alcohol took hold, the laughter grew louder and freer. The pub quiz was more challenging than any quiz I’d taken. Working in teams by table, we were given snippets of yarn and asked to match them with possible choices of brand and yarn names—and even the vendors of those yarns were hard-pressed to get it right. We had pages of questions, and then there was a brief break while each group was tasked with making a sheep from the bag of fiber, pipecleaners, and plastic toy eyes on our tables. As the visiting sheep expert, I’d been asked to judge that piece of the quiz, so I got up and wandered the room. Things fell apart when we were asked to list UK locales that had a sheep breed and a cheese named after them. After judging was complete (my table didn’t win, though we put up a valiant effort), people kept running up to the podium with their iPhones to prove the existence of one small flock—their uncle’s or cousin’s—where cheese also happened to be made.

  I shared a cab with several teachers headed for a hotel downtown, leaping out at my hotel along the way and bidding them goodnight. I checked my phone once more before falling asleep, noticing that Shetland knitting legend Hazel Tindall had just added me on Twitter. A surreal ending to a perfect day.

  The next morning was much the same, the bleary beginning, the tea-based revival, the hearty Scottish breakfast. It was Mother’s Day in the United Kingdom, and families kept streaming into the restaurant, mothers holding flowers and balloons with “I love you” printed in big cheerful lettering.

  Once back at the festival, I made more feeble attempts to conquer the marketplace, and again, I failed. More local yarn fell into my bag, more breed-specific wools. I had a long talk with the manager of a historic wool mill I’d tracked and admired from afar for years. “You’ll have to come visit,” she’d said. Now I knew I would.

  The afternoon found me back in the lounge where the previous night’s party had taken place. At the end of the room, a team of T-shirted volunteers was working up a sweat winding skeins of yarn for people and collecting donations for the Teapot Trust, a UK charity that provides art therapy for children with chronic illnesses. (Another team was operating the coat check out front, taking suggested donations per coat.)

  But I didn’t need any skeins wound. I was too busy gazing at the cakes. Dense carrot and dark, moist chocolate, heaping plates of scones all lined up along the bar. As I waited my turn in line, a woman lifted a fluted cake stand onto the counter. On it, I recognized the telltale chestnut-brown, lumpy form of fruitcake. Not the rum-sodden dreck that has given fruitcake a universally bad reputation, but literally a cake filled with dried fruit, raisins mostly, tasting of that exquisite smoky tang of caramelization. I thought back to the events I’ve attended in the United States, the convention-center fare, the soggy sandwiches and plastic-bagged Crisco cakes that had come from a cardboard box. What a contrast.

  Knitters were sprawled and chatting, fingers stitching away independently of eyes, in an area marked the “podcast lounge,” where six popular British podcasters hosted events throughout the weekend. In the rest of the room, people chatted at tables in groups of two or three. The spirit was quiet and calm, with an industrious sense of focus from the ever-swirling swifts and ball winders in the corner.

  Sated with cake, I made one final sprint through the marketplace before the 5:00 witching hour struck. Already, most of the vendors had begun dismantling and packing. I made a stop in Tom’s classroom, where he was tidying up tables of swatches and snippets and darning mushrooms in colorful shapes and different materials.

  “This is my favorite one,” he said as he handed me a plain wooden mushroom that was flat on one side. I stared at it.

  “Other side,” he said. I turned it.

  “No, other side.” I flipped it upside down. He came over and adjusted my grip.

  “Do you see it?” There, in faint pen marks, some previous owner—probably a child being forced to learn darning in school—had drawn the perfect angry grimace.

  I walked out with him and we said our goodbyes, standing on opposite sides of the street while he waited for his cab to the airport, I for my bus back to town. We took turns pantomiming outrage and impatience to one another until my bus came. Already, I missed him.

  What was different about this event? I asked myself. Was it just its newness, or was there something else? A warmth and inclusiveness to the show that I hadn’t experienced back home? Devoid of any corporate overtones or interpersonal melodrama? Or was it just not being among the American cast of characters I knew so well? Maybe, was it simply the glow and romance of travel once again making a liar of me?

  Many of the large American shows have taken to encouraging people to buy packages of classes, offering greater discounts the more you take. I’m sure this helps them fill the classes and pay the bills, but it often leads to an empty marketplace during class hours—which hurts vendors. Here, it turned out that most people registered for just one workshop, leaving them loads of time to peruse the marketplace and mingle in the lounge. Vendors were happy, students relaxed and connected.

  All weekend, organizer Jo wore a button that said “It’ll Be Fine,” co-organizer Mica had a necklace with enormous gold letters spelling out “WOOL.” While there was never a moment when they didn’t seem in total control, this was not their event, which is to say it was not, even for a moment, about them. They weren’t promoting a book or magazine or yarn store or company, they
were simply intent on producing an outstanding event. Which they did, in spades.

  I was invited to brunch the next morning with Ysolda, Stephen West, and his co-American-in-Amsterdam conspirator Nancy Marchant, the queen of brioche stitch. They were going to Peter’s Yard on the university campus, Ysolda said. They’d be lazily knitting and eating cardamom buns. Would I come?

  After another bus ride, there was Ysolda and her bike. Nancy had already ordered her coffee. Soon Stephen joined us, resplendent in mint-green spandex leggings with electric pink and blue stripes. For hours we sat, talking, sipping, and knitting. If not for the different currency and accents, and for the fact that it was Scotland outside, we could have been anywhere. But more than that, we could have been anywhere and we were all completely at home. Nancy helped Ysolda untangle a yarn she’d frogged the night before—“The thing is,” Ysolda joked, “I’m really bad with yarn.”—while Stephen plugged away at a sweeping sheet of thick, Technicolor brioche fabric.

  That morning reinforced something I’ve long held true, that knitting has a profound connective power. The culture and people and rituals around it, the values, they all contribute to an immediate and profound trust in one another. It’s home. You belong and are accepted, which rings true no matter where you are.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon racing through Edinburgh much like I’d raced through the marketplace when I knew it was about to close. I chased cashmere and tweed, scones and clotted cream, books, museums, even greenhouses in the Royal Botanic Garden.

  Along the way, I picked up an Old Scots word for dreariness: dreich. The man who taught it to me sold gorgeous cashmere scarves made in Scotland and had just finished reciting a Robert Burns poem to me. Dreich, he explained, “means . . . nothingness.” He pointed outside and said, “It means that,” referring to the gray spitty skies that hadn’t once shown the sun while I’d been there. Dreich. A perfect word both in sound and meaning.