All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Here, having patiently been waiting for an opening, and seeing that one was not forthcoming, the knitter’s friend gently interjected, “Steph?” (It is a complete coincidence that the knitter has the same name I do.) “Steph? I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. I see that page seven is fine… then I turn the page and page eight makes sense, too…”

  It was at this moment that all the good sense and ability to double check and problem solve was restored to our fair knitter, and, with a sinking feeling, she looked at her page numbers. Page seven… flip… there it was. Page ten. For one horrible moment she wondered if her book was faulty and it was still someone else’s fault, and she took a deep breath, surveying the carnage of the sweater and the afternoon in front of her, and then she rubbed the pages a little between her fingers… and the two pages that had been stuck together fell apart without so much as a whisper of a sound.

  The silence was eerie, and the knitter could tell that her friend was sore afraid. “Never mind,” said she, and ever so gently hung up the phone, and went to lie in the road.

  THE FAT SWEATER

  f there was some weird game show where contestants had to match people to their wardrobes, I think that I would be a really easy one, as long as we stuck to my store-bought clothes. I am a sensible woman who doesn’t own lipstick, nail polish, or high heels, and I pride myself on my practical and reasonable approach to my wardrobe. I like plain, simple clothes for a whole bunch of reasons. I like plain clothes because I’m sort of shy and I don’t like to stand out and because I am physically modest and don’t care for anything flashy or low cut. Also, I think I missed the day at school when they explained how to put together an outfit. So, in a desperate attempt to make sure that I don’t put together the wrong things, I’ve decided to err on the side of caution. Plain black pants go with any plain top, plain shirts go with jeans every time, and plain tops and plain pants can always go together, especially if they are the same color. This does make me look like I’m wearing a uniform a lot of the time, but I figure that it’s better for people to say, “Hey, Steph? Did you know that when you wear a brown top and brown pants you sort of look like a dishwasher repair guy?” than, “Hey, Steph? There’s no easy way to say this. You know that seizure that Marie had? It turns out that the doctors think it was caused by the way your shirt and pants clashed.” I have fashionable teenaged daughters, and I can’t count the number of times that I’ve gone to them with an outfit that I think is pretty good, only to have them tell me that it’s too much or not enough or that I’m dressed like a dishwasher repairman or that they are starting to see the flashing lights that they think indicate that the combination of my skirt, blouse, and jacket are giving them a wee bit of brain damage. I can always tell that I’ve misstepped when I ask them if I look okay and they say, “It depends. Are you leaving the house?”

  I never managed to learn all the fashion rules that other people seemed to know, and my own mother is still trying to get me to care about them even now, telling me things like women as short as I am shouldn’t wear long skirts because it only makes them look shorter, or that I would look taller if I didn’t “chop myself in half” by wearing different colors on my top and bottom. This has only ever confused the hell out of me, because she also says I look too plain when I wear the same color on the top and bottom. I think I’m still five foot one no matter what I wear, and there’s likely no disguising that.

  Finally, I love plain clothes because, as a knitter, I’m looking for things that are a plain canvas for my knitwear. A fancy lace shawl is more impressive over a plain black shirt than it is over a patterned blouse that’s going to steal some of the show. What’s in my closet might be a train wreck, but it’s no accident. Here is what I believe about the store-bought things that I own.

  I believe that I do not have many clothes.

  I believe that I only keep clothes that I wear often and that fit me.

  I believe that I don’t have many clothes that don’t make sense, or that I will never have occasion to wear.

  I believe that the things that I have are mostly plain, functional, comfortable, useful garments that reflect my personality.

  If you knew that about me, and if you saw me on that game show with my store-bought clothes on a wardrobe rack behind me, you would be able to match us up. You’d win. This is, however, only true as long as you look at the things I have bought from a store. My knitting wardrobe—the things I’ve made over the years and years I’ve been knitting—looks like nine knitters (or one with multiple personality disorder) all live here. All of these knitters have a different personal style and are a different height and dress size, and it would be pretty much impossible to nail down their favorite color. Is it blue? Green? The mountain of handknits upstairs tells no tales. It’s the opposite of the store-bought clothes. As orderly, boring, and plain as that wardrobe is, that’s how much of the knitting wardrobe is eclectic, colorful, and, frankly, downright strange, especially considering my lifestyle. There are Fair Isle sweaters, brightly patterned in colors that look good together, but not together with me. There are enormous pullovers, tiny tanks—it is eclectic, insane, ill-fitting, and adventuresome, but a knitter would understand. A knitter would take one look at that collection of handknits, and rather than think that I was attempting to assemble my own personal Goodwill shop, I think they’d recognize a pattern. A lot of it is there because I wanted to try the knitting. A lot of the stuff is different sizes not because my weight fluctuates by sixty pounds eight times a year, but because gauge is a fickle mistress and sometimes I finish things that aren’t working because, darn it, the knitting is good.

  There is one sweater in particular that I call The Fat Sweater. It is brightly colored, roughly the size of a barge, and, were I to put it on, I would drown in it. There is so much yarn in that sweater that if I happened to be caught in the rain while I was wearing it, I would be driven to my knees by the weight. The Fat Sweater meets none of the personal wardrobe rules I think I live by. It does not fit; it doesn’t make sense; and it is as far from plain, functional, and comfortable as is wearing a sequined tube top to a parent teacher meeting. I do, however, wear it sometimes. It is fine knitting, brilliantly done, and as a freestanding object, I’m as proud of it as I would be if it were a painting. To my knitterly way of thinking, why wouldn’t I wear it? (The answer, of course, is because it doesn’t fit, doesn’t flatter, is sixteen years old, knit in all the colors of the early ’80s, and it makes me look like I steal handknits from the closet of a knitter of preternatural size.)

  Alongside The Fat Sweater is an extremely elegant wrap knit of a novelty yarn. It is the exact opposite of everything I have ever bought. It is, in fact, everything that this tree-hugging, ultra-hippy, vegetarian knitter abhors, and yet I love it with a passion that knows no bounds. It is 100 percent unnatural fibers, it sparkles, it was a serious pain in the arse to knit, and it was expensive. It is the anti-Steph. Despite all of this, I have knit it, I have kept it, and I love it. I knit it because I have a mental image of me in the wrap. I’m wearing it with a clingy little black dress, and a pair of tiny little strappy heels. I look inexplicably tall. My hair is doing a fabulous Sarah Jessica Parker thing, and I am at a cocktail party, delicately holding a martini in one hand and a black beaded handbag in the other. I’m discussing politics without getting angry, and I make several good points, and my lipstick is exactly the right color, and at this party in my mind, all the other women want to be me as I glide along, making conversation that’s as sparkly as my wrap, and all of that is possible only because I knit it.

  The reality is that when I put this wrap on, I am wearing it to the grocery store over my jeans with a pair of Birkenstocks. I don’t own a little black dress, nor strappy little heels, and the last party I went to had fourteen nine-year-olds and a cake in the shape of a Barbie. I beat my hair back with four kinds of product to suppress its will to ever spring forth into “country singer hair,” and I need at least thirty minutes’ notice t
o come up with any lipstick, never mind one the right color. When other women see me, they don’t wish to be me. They generally thank their lucky stars that they have escaped my fashion destiny and incredible ability to overlook the fact that my cardigan is misbuttoned.

  Still, despite all that, I have that wrap draped over a hanger in my closet, right next to The Fat Sweater. This means something, doesn’t it? It could mean that I’m a lunatic who is so out of touch with reality that I’ve got a sparkly wrap for no reason, but I choose to believe that it means that I’m one step closer to being able to say, “One moment, I’ll be right with you,” when Pierce Brosnan comes to the door to take me to a James Bond-esque cocktail party, with The Fat Sweater tossed in the backseat in case we need a tent.

  The truth is that knitters have two wardrobes: the one that is their clothes, and the one that is the product of dreams, skill, hope, or possibly a 50 percent off yarn sale. We make no sense in the outside world, but in our world, we are brilliant. If you see a knitter in a fat sweater, or a garment that is otherwise ill fitting, sparkly, or with gratuitous cables, lace, or color, don’t be too hard on them. We aren’t wearing it because of how it makes us look. We’re wearing it because we made it, and because we’re not regular people, we’re knitters, and that means that we believe that the beauty of what we have made will be miraculously transferred to us. Somehow.

  PRODUCTIVE

  ecently I was having a beer with my friend Peter, who is one of those rare human beings who enjoys beating knowledge into children: He’s an elementary school teacher, and we were talking about problem solving and children. (Not necessarily that children are problems that need solving, but teaching children to solve problems.) He says that most people problem solve reproductively, which is to say that they think about the way they have done things before, and do it that way again. With a little practice, my teacher friend claims that all of us can be taught to think productively instead, which means that we come up with as many solutions as we can, and consider them all before we charge off with our tried and true answer. He drew a diagram for me, filling in a chunk of graph paper with a few Xs and many Os, and then asked. “How many Os?”

  Thinking reproductively, I followed a rule I’ve known my whole life. If you would like to know how many of something there are, you should count them. It’s a system that has served me well, so ticking across the rows, I began to count up the Os. My friend stopped me, and pointed out that there were far, far more Os than Xs. “Wouldn’t it be faster,” he proposed, “to count the squares in the height and width, multiply those two numbers to get a total, then count the few Xs and subtract them from the total, rather than spend all the time counting the many, many Os?” I stared at the diagram as Peter went on. “Children need to learn this—to think beyond the first answer, to stop and ask, ‘Is this the fastest way to do something, or the smartest?’ That’s productive thinking. The job of a teacher is to give kids a hundred skills so that they’re free to apply their own creativity, and that’s what happens when we teach them to think productively.” I nodded sagely, trying hard to acknowledge what he was saying while simultaneously trying not to look like someone who hadn’t just failed a thinking test over a beer. “This,” Peter said (likely while trying to forget that his friend had just failed a thinking test over a beer), “is the difference between genius and regular folk.” He paused for effect. “Genius looks for the other ways to think about things, the other ways to solve a problem, the other ways to look at the problem entirely. It’s not necessarily about having a high IQ. It’s about knowing the right way to think about things, and then thinking a lot.” He took a sip of his drink and stared off into the night for a minute. “If we could teach all kids to think like this… Give them a bunch of skills, then show them how to use them…” Peter broke off and stared again, no doubt imagining his acceptance speech when he won an award for being the best teacher in the world for changing it all. Me, I’m a mother of the kids he’s talking about turning into geniuses. Essentially he was talking about creating an army of child brainiacs, and there’s no mother on Earth who can’t look into that future and imagine what it would be like if all the kids were smarter than all the parents. We’ve barely got the upper hand as it is—hell, there are days when I’m arguing with my daughters and I regret having taken prenatal vitamins.

  On the way home on the bus, I thought about what he had said. If people had lots of skills, and could be taught to think this way, would they be geniuses too? Is it too late for grown-ups? Are we doomed to be intellectually dwarfed by our children? While I don’t think I’m a genius, I like to think I’m pretty clever. I knit, I write books, I dress myself—even Peter must think I’ve got enough sense to understand what he’s saying, or he wouldn’t have given me the opportunity to fail his test. I even think of myself as a productive, creative thinker. I like to think that knitting trains you for it. The easiest, clearest way to solve a problem in knitting is to rip back your work and do it again. If you make a mistake, that’s what we all think to do first. Well, truthfully, usually we think something foul right before that, but then we think of ripping back. It’s the knitting equivalent of counting if you want to know how many of something there is. It’s obvious, it works every time, and it will absolutely solve your problem. If you make a knitting mistake, and you rip back and re-knit, that problem will cease to exist. The error is gone. (This assumes, of course, that you don’t immediately knit the same mistake in again, but that’s another sort of learning that we can talk about another day.) That’s the simple, reproductive answer, but as knitters, we’re pretty likely to reject it… aren’t we?

  When I see a mistake in my work, even though I know it might involve ripping back, my first thought is about how to get out of ripping. Ripping my work out is a painful, destructive process. It’s unknitting, watching my time unravel right in front of me. Though I know it’s the best answer sometimes, I always look for the wiggle room. I’ve said to other people lots of times that we all shouldn’t mind ripping and redoing work—I mean, it’s more knitting, and we like knitting. The truth is, the minute I see the mistake, the bargaining begins. Can I live with the mistake? Is it that bad? Will other people notice? Since I channel all of the perfectionist tendencies I have into knitting so that I can be married and loved, I always assume that if I notice, then someone else will too… or more truthfully, I’ll notice, and that means I’ll never love or wear this piece of knitting because who could possibly go out in public with a mistake on their knitting that makes them look like a moron? (Despite the fact that I never, ever notice the mistakes on others’ knitting, I remain convinced somehow that those same people will point and laugh if they see a mistake on mine.)

  Once I confirm that the mistake does indeed need fixing and something must be done, I still look to avoid ripping. Can I fix it on the next pass? Pick up a missed yarn over? Change a knit to a purl? If I can’t fix it on the next pass, I’m still not done with the avoidance techniques. I start thinking harder. Can I drop a few stitches down a bunch of rows, fix the mistake, and ladder them back up again? I’ve done some highly inventive and unreasonable stuff in that department. If a mistake is way back at the beginning, often deconstructing a chunk of the sweater makes a lot more sense than ripping all the finished work. (Sometimes this is only the best solution emotionally, though, not saving me any time, just avoiding the pain of watching it all come undone.) I’ve sewn over cables to make them appear that they go in the right direction; I’ve worked duplicate stitch over mistakes in colorwork, erasing all evidence that I momentarily followed a chart as well as a stoned bat with a first-grade education.

  It is, I reason, really productive thinking. I’m glad to realize this, really, because I was sort of demoralized by the idea that Peter thought this concept should be taught to children and then I didn’t do it. If the definition of productive thinking is that you look at all the possible solutions and settle on the best one, then that’s exactly what I do with knitting. That
’s good news, because it means that when Peter’s army of super-smart children swarm the Earth, seeking the upper hand, knitters will stand a chance against them.