All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON: Using the smaller needles, I cast on 331 stitches with the yarn held double, placing markers every 50 stitches six times and use the calculator and check a whole bunch of times, drop the extra yarn and cut it so that I can’t forget that the next row is the yarn alone, and feel really, really good about the idea that I have actually managed not to knit like an idiot for, maybe, fifteen whole minutes in a row. I celebrate by declaring it beer o’clock, work for a while, and then go to the corner store and photocopy the charts so that I can mark them up within an inch of their lives and maybe prevent further knit trauma, and leave for Knit Night.

  WEDNESDAY EVENING: I knit the first row of the chart and complain a little bit to the Knit Night ladies that this row is really hard because the chart starts right away, right after the cast on, and that makes double decreases sort of rough and is a little unusual. I persevere, however, and do not complain (much) until I get to the end of the row and have the wrong number of stitches left over. I curse violently, and recount the stitches to make sure that I have the right number. I do. That means I made a mistake with the chart, and I carefully scrutinize that chart, which is clearly marked “Right Side” for about ten minutes before the sick realization comes over me that if there is a “right side” there is likely a “left side” and I slowly, as in a horror movie, rifle my papers until I discover the thing. The world jiggles a little as I realize that I am going to have to rip the stitches back out. The Knit Night crowd asks me what’s wrong and I say I don’t want to talk about it… but then I do. At length.

  I start trying to tink back the stitches to avoid another rip, which I fear might take the will to knit right with it. After dropping several stitches back into the cast-on edge, generally screwing up and knitting like I am stunned as a bat, I cram the whole thing into my bag, fish out sock yarn, and knit some nice, quiet 2 x 2 rib, just to remember I’m okay at this.

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT (BACK AT HOME): I rip the whole thing out, perhaps aggressively, and with some language unbecoming to a knitter of my age and station. I toss the now mangled yarn and try again. I cast on 331 stitches (quadruple checking) with the yarn held double. I drop the extra yarn and start the “right side” of the chart. I curse and swear about having to start the chart right after the cast on without even a row of knit to make things nice and when I am halfway across, it occurs to me that this might be a good time to double-check Nancy’s instructions, and that’s when I see it: “knit two rows” before you start the chart. Clear as day. Right there. Totally right there. Missed it because I was working from the photocopies and didn’t look at the book. Rookie mistake. Bonehead mistake. Totally lame mistake. I rip it out, maybe weep a few hot tears of fury, try really hard to remember if I even like knitting, and start over.

  This time, all goes well. I cast on 331, yarn double. I knit two rows, yarn single. I start the “right side” of the chart, mark the center stitch, and knit the “left side” of the chart. I even get the right side on the right and the left side on the left. All goes well until I get to the end of the row and have stitches left over, but do have 331 stitches, which would be grand except there were decreases and it should be less. But I have no idea where it went wrong and I don’t know if I even care and for a terrible moment there in the middle of the night I may have thought about the fact that I have Nancy Bush’s phone number and maybe I might just hold her personally accountable for my pain, even though it isn’t her fault at all and that’s not why she gave me her number, and that if I have to rip this out again, which I totally do, because the four rows (4) that I have knit are arse, I am going to hurt someone (and seriously, how hard can this be?). Then I toss it in a basket, watch a rerun of Law & Order, drink two glasses of wine, think about chewing the yarn into little bits, and go the hell to bed.

  I am now knitting a garter stitch scarf in an attempt to protect my sanity and the lives of those around me.

  Fear me.

  ODE TO SLOW

  am a free-range knitter. I knit everywhere I go and almost all the time, and this lands me and my yarn in public pretty often, doing our thing. If you knit around regular people, you’ll notice sooner or later that they want to talk about it. (The same is true, by the way, if they see your stash. Unless you’d like to take a stab at explaining that you don’t belong on an episode of Hoarders, maybe keep your stash out of view as much as you can.) It turns out that despite my best efforts, knitting and knitters out in the open are still infrequent occurrences in most of the Western world, and it’s interesting to watch people try to make sense of this event. Some people try to ignore it but fail, stealing odd glances over their books on the bus, watching intently while pretending they’re not, but other, bolder people will begin a conversation about it. (Let us forget, just for now, about the third group, who want to talk about your knitting but not with you. They’ll sit feet away from you and have a conversation about you and your knitting as though you were deaf. “Hey, Martha, look at that lady there. See that? She’s knitting, I think. That’s peculiar, isn’t it? She seems sort of odd…”)

  The people who would like to discuss it with you, they aren’t always sure how to start, and so they invariably ask first, just to be sure, “Are you knitting?” (Every once in a while on a cranky day when I’d rather not discuss my behavior with a stranger or be an ambassador for knitting, I am tempted to say, “Nope. Not knitting” while continuing to do so. I feel sure it would put a stop to the whole business, though it’s untested.) Generally, I answer that yes, I am indeed knitting, and when they ask what, I tell them it’s a sock (my out-of-home knitting of choice) and then they all watch for a bit. This reaction is pretty universal. I used to think that they were just interested, but it turns out that the staring and silence is really a symptom of someone who’s suddenly rather busy adjusting their world view to a place where socks can be made, not just bought. Once they’ve made this shift, they ask one of two questions. If they contain knitter-potential, usually they ask if it’s hard to do. (This is because they’re already thinking about doing it themselves.) If the knit-force is not with them, usually the next question is, “How long does it take to make a pair of socks?” It’s not an unreasonable question, since even moving at a good clip it’s pretty obvious that socks aren’t churned out in less than an hour. Knitting, even fast knitting, is still slow, and so I tell them the truth. A pair of socks takes me fourteen to twenty hours of knitting, depending. At this point, most normal people recoil in horror, tell me how unreasonable that is, and silently renew their inner commitment to getting socks the normal way, from the store.

  I am not unsympathetic to them. If you really think about it, knitting is absolutely a ridiculous way to get clothes. Before you all get out the pitchforks, let’s be honest. A pair of socks from the store cost almost nothing, comparatively. They are cheap in terms of both time and money. Sure, homemade socks are infinitely better, but most folks haven’t experienced the supreme wonder that is a pair of perfectly fitting socks; They’ve been dodging along happily with their discount store socks forever, and no harm has come to them, and because there’s nothing wrong with the logic of our detractors, it can be hard to convince them that knitting makes sense. Most of us could get good, serviceable clothes that you can wear in public without shame for next to nothing, again comparatively speaking. Every store has swathes of socks for a few dollars, and whole racks of sweaters that you can pick from, and for less than thirty bucks and an hour of your time, you can be standing in a sweater that fits and doesn’t need the ends woven in. In the face of that, how do we defend what we’re doing? The yarn for a sweater alone would be more than $30 a lot of the time—hell, I’ve knit thirty-dollar socks and forty-dollar mittens. They can have socks for next to no money and in no time, but ours are pricey on all accounts, and they can’t find a way to relate it to other things that maybe they themselves do—or have seen done—and understand.

  Think of the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel— the pope’s personal
chapel. Do you have any idea how long Michelangelo stood with his neck twisted up on a freaking scaffold to come up with that? Four years. Four years to have a ceiling painted. It’s got more than 300 figures and it’s widely regarded as one of the most remarkable works of art within the entire realm of human expression. It isn’t just a painted ceiling of 5,000 square feet; it’s 5,000 square feet of frescoes—paintings done on wet plaster one little bit at a time—largely by one guy. Just consider that. Did anyone say to Michelangelo, “Hey, Dude, aren’t you getting a crick in your neck from painting that ceiling for so long? Isn’t this sort of ridiculous, slow, and expensive?” Did anyone take him aside and say, “Mike, baby, wouldn’t it make more sense to just paint the ceiling white with a big old roller and put the paintings on the walls like everybody else?” Nope. They didn’t, and even in retrospect nobody thinks it was a crazy undertaking. In fact the Vatican spent twelve years and many millions of dollars restoring the whole shebang a while ago. Obviously, even though it was technically a stupid way to paint a ceiling (if we’re following the sock rule), it’s got a value that makes sense to us, enough sense to value and invest in it. We get that, and we get other aspects of it too.

  Take food. Almost everyone understands that there’s a value in taking the time and money to prepare a beautiful dinner for a family or guests. Almost nobody thinks that you’re being ridiculous if you spend a whole day in the kitchen making something gorgeous, almost nobody is going to ask you why you’re bothering, and almost nobody will suggest that you’re entirely off your rocker for not picking up boxed macaroni and cheese and winging it at the lot of your guests. (I keep saying “almost” because I want to leave room for the possibility that one terrible day I’m going to be reduced to serving just that, likely as a result of knitting too much.) Almost nobody is going to suggest that the weird powdered cheese is a better option than, well, just about anything you could give to your guests… and maybe that’s where we start helping them understand how knitting your clothes really is something that makes sense.

  That powdered cheese and stale macaroni might be what gets you through a particularly scrappy Tuesday when you’re really only coming up with dinner because you’re too pretty for prison, and that’s where they send parents who don’t provide children with food, but you still understand the value of that slow, special meal you could be making. We all understand that it’s cheaper and easier to grab takeaway on the way home and fling it at the ravening hordes, but nobody uses that as a reason why you’re not serving up McDonald’s at Thanksgiving. Special things, like homemade bread and soup, or a cake you made yourself, are slower. They take a long time, and they cost extra money, energy, and effort, but it’s well understood that your time and money are really that secret ingredient that your mum used to say that she was adding—the one she called love. The value of what you put into making something is transferred to that thing, and it becomes valuable just by containing it. Why knit socks? Why not serve sandwiches at weddings?

  All of this means something—something good—about investing and going slowly, and putting your time and money into your efforts to show you care, and that is something that should reassure the slower knitters among us. The longer it takes you to make something, the more valuable it is.

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  nce upon a time there was a very nice knitter who lived in a tiny two-story house with a lot of yarn, a chronically late husband, and some untidy teenagers. This may sound a lot like the beginning of a fairy tale, but this knitter was keenly aware that she was not a princess because a princess would have had way less laundry and way more of a castle, which is really not what you call a house with only two closets, but I digress.

  Despite the wee house and the very minor failings of her family (and sadly, herself) the knitter still thought that mostly she was living something absolutely close enough to a fairy tale, because even though the place seemed to be seriously short of dusting elves or pastel birds that hung up the laundry for her, things were really pretty good. Nobody in the house was ever hungry; though the house was tiny, it was warm and safe; and the knitter did have all the yarn she could ever need for her whole life… although she doesn’t really like to talk about that, because it makes her family ask questions about why it is that she keeps buying yarn, so for the purposes of moving the story along, let’s gloss over that little detail.

  One fine day when the sun was shining and the knitter was doing what she did best, which would be sitting around working on a sweater while planning to play dumb when the family discovered they were out of bread, as well as contemplating what other women did with their hair that made it look so much better than hers, she began to run into trouble. As our intrepid knitter began the armhole shaping with a predictable bit of casting off to begin the hole, she turned the page to the next instruction, and there it began. The next instruction was something like “cast on a few and then increase a whole whack,” and really, any way our knitter tried to slice it, that’s not how armholes go. For there to be a hole, there needs to be fewer stitches, we’re all pretty sure of that, but knitting can be odd as fish, and every knitter has met a pattern that makes no sense but still makes a sweater, so this knitter, despite being really pretty experienced and clever at this business, tried hard to make the instructions work.

  Some time later, the air thick with expletives and generally unladylike language, the knitter was casually gnawing on the edge of her counter to relieve a little stress while she tried to figure out what could be wrong. Not only didn’t the instructions work, they didn’t even occur over the right number of stitches, and try as she might, the knitter couldn’t comply with them—but she was still committed to trying. She wasn’t giving up, partly because she doesn’t like to think of herself as a quitter or someone who can have her spirit broken by an inanimate object like yarn, and partly because of the nature of knitting errors themselves. Knitting errors are sneaky. They lurk in corners waiting for a knitter to let down her guard, and then they insinuate themselves into the work. It’s not like a mistake in tennis where the ball sails past you and you’re instantly aware that you’re wrong about where the ball is in space and time. It’s more like a mistake in baking, where a cake might simply fail to rise while it’s in the oven. The mistake isn’t clear, glaring, and immediate. It’s sneaky and underhanded and reveals itself slowly while you stand around hoping against hope that it still might come together.

  Knitting mistakes being what they are, and this knitter, being intimately acquainted with that truth, had done what almost all experienced knitters do when they find a mistake. She had carefully examined the most recently row knit; she had determined that it didn’t have the right number of stitches to make the next row work; she had decided that it was therefore wrong; and then (having been shafted by something like this before, in a way that was absolutely memorable) she had gone to her trusty box of all-knowing (a laptop connected to the Internet) and had asked that box if there were any corrections to the pattern. There were not, and so, heaving a sigh of enormous regret, the knitter ripped back a row of her work, and checked there for the offending error that was the source of the armhole’s bizarre nature.

  Sadly, so sadly, that row didn’t have the right number of stitches either, and so the knitter went back another row, cursing violently, and another, cursing violently and creatively, and so on, ripping back row after row, checking the pattern a million times, and recounting a million times, and trying really, really hard to understand how she could begin with the right number, follow the instructions for increasing and decreasing the right way, and still end up with the wrong number, and then the phone rang.

  Now in most fairy tales, this would be the moment where the fairy godmother showed up. In a flurry of wings and sparkles, a kindly fairy godknitter would descend upon our poor knitter and not only wave a magic wand and sort this sweater out, but have the leftover sock yarn sorted in a way that made it seem usable and reasonable, instead of a weirdly obsessive co
llection that nobody in their right mind would be keeping. (Having given it a great deal of thought, I’m also convinced that she would be wearing a handknit gown with a beaded entrelac bodice. It’s the only possible thing that could give her the credibility she needed to be taken seriously as a reliable rescuer of knitters.) We’ve already determined, however, that this is not a real fairy tale, and that this wasn’t a real princess (you could tell by the frazzled expression and ruined demeanor—princesses never have ruined demeanors) and so the person on the other end wasn’t a fairy godmother but a knitting friend of our hapless knitter, which was mostly the next best thing. This friend was used to knitting ruining demeanors and being the source of foul language, and was immediately sucked into solving the problem. She asked all the relevant questions: Were the right number cast on? (They were.) Had the knitter stopped knitting her size and accidentally taken up with another? (She had not.) Had she checked for errata to the pattern? Consulted the Internet? Considered that the yarn was faulty? (When all else fails, blame the unlikely.)

  When they had exhausted the obvious, our knitter threw a massive fit, slammed the teakettle around for a bit, and had a bit of a cry, and then her friend had a clever thought. “Hold on,” she said. “Let me get my copy of that pattern; we’ll walk through it together.” So it came to pass that the knitters began to scour the pattern, line by line, looking for where the whole thing had come off the rails. “See that?” asked our knitter. “Right there at the bottom of that page. Cast off twelve stitches. That makes sense. I did that. Sixty four is what I had, then I cast off twelve which should give me fifty-two, which I have…” (They paused there to get a calculator. That may seem like simple math, but a failure of simple math could have been the root of all evil here, and it would have been ridiculous not to double check that it hadn’t changed.) “Now look here!” exclaimed our knitter. “It ends there, you turn the page, and everything becomes madness. Suddenly there are supposed to be seventy stitches, and that’s not right, unless I was supposed to cast on twelve instead of cast off twelve… but that still doesn’t come out right… and then look here!” She paused to stab the offending sentence hard with her finger, mostly because it was hard not to be angry when there were the ruins of a sweater on the table with its yarn pulled out like innards at a goring. “Here you’re to cast some on and then begin increasing again. I don’t see how that’s going to make an armhole unless I’m trying to put wings on it!” She was enraged to gasping by now and shoved both the book and the yarn violently away from her. “That’s it!” she screeched, sort of aware that she was starting to sound like a harpie, but depending on her friend to understand. “I don’t get it. I hate this book. I hate this sweater, the yarn is stupid too, and I can’t believe that anyone even allowed something like this to be published. You’d think they’d be more careful. This page is fine and then you turn it and it’s like the bloody editor nipped off and got blasted. This is my time they’re playing with, and for an instruction to be so reprehensibly wrong is just… well, it’s reprehensible. Maybe it’s a joke or even on purpose. The lot of them are sitting around the yarn company right now, laughing until they can hardly breathe, just thinking about me losing my mind. I bet that’s it. I should write a letter. I should…”