All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  LOSING GROUND

  while ago, I made a timing error related to a knitting deadline that was pretty catastrophic. For reasons I won’t go into here, but mostly having to do with me being a complete procrastinating idiot, I found myself needing to knit eight socks in eight days. Eight adult-sized, sock-weight socks. I was pretty worried about this as a goal. Every Christmas I try just about the same thing, and it’s never really worked, but in keeping with my usual ability to delude myself, I decided that this was going to be difficult but possible. It turned out that it was indeed both.

  The biggest barrier to this escapade appeared to be that I couldn’t cancel my life. (This is the same thing that goes wrong every Christmas. I always plan on an eighteen-hour knitting day and then get all stunned when people are still expecting me to appear in public or bathe.) I still had to do my job. I still had to cook, care for my family, and fight a daily battle against the laundry. But I did make all the changes I could. First, I managed to convince myself that I was above the human need for sleep, then I rented about seventeen DVDs, and then—without exception and whenever possible—if my hands were free for even a moment, I knit socks. If I was walking, I was knitting. If I was on the phone, I was knitting. If I sat thinking at the computer, I picked up the sock, even if it only meant that I got three stitches done. I knit at red lights. I knit while lecturing the children and frying eggs. I knit continuously. I didn’t really have a choice. The deadline I was on for these socks wasn’t like the Christmas deadline, where you’d rather have finished socks but you could totally wrap them up on the needles in a pinch—this deadline was firm. It was absolute. There had to be socks if it killed me, and there were. It worked. I admit that toward the end I was a little shattered and given to outbursts of tears or rants about the perils of interrupting me, and it is true that my husband still shudders involuntarily when he thinks of it, but with my wool as my witness, there were eight socks in eight days.

  While this whole thing was going down, there was just about nobody who thought I was normal. I mean that. Everybody I knew thought I had taken entire leave of my senses. I knit myself stupid for eight days and I think that some of my friends considered an intervention. They definitely regarded me with a critical eye, and there were repeated questions about whether or not it was necessary or normal. I tried pointing out to all of them that it was like being on any sort of deadline for work. It was like having a report due, rolling out new software, or going into labor. I tried to relate it to something they could understand. Despite this, nothing brought my nonknitting friends around to a supportive position. It’s hard, partly because if you don’t knit at all than any knitting seems like a lot of knitting, but it may also have been that I was trying to explain the rational nature of my behavior while wearing a dirty bathrobe and explaining that I’d decided to start limiting fluids because the bathroom breaks were wasting precious knitting minutes. The big surprise, though, were my knitting friends, because as much as they saw it as necessary, they clearly still thought the idea of knitting a sock a day was a big slice of crazy pie. Toward the end, when I was alternately knitting, twitching, crying, and insisting it was not a problem, I pointed out to another knitter that it couldn’t be that nuts because it was working. I was knitting a sock a day. He pointed out that really the reason everyone thought it was lunatic was because it was lunatic, that it was truly only possible (and barely, at that) because I was, and I quote, “A good knitter.”

  That compliment felt great, especially in that moment, and I took it to the bank. I left it there, propping up my knitterly self-esteem, until a while later when I was reading a wonderful book called A History of Hand Knitting, by Richard Rutt. In the section about the introduction of the stocking frame in the 1600s, one of the first machines of the Industrial Revolution, he wrote that for the first time there was a way to get stockings (a huge commodity at the time, just as socks are now) that weren’t hand knit, and he was comparing the performance of that machine to that of a hand knitter. He wrote “… it is a mistake to think that the early knitting frame quickly speeded up the bulk production of stockings. A framework knitter working hard might produce ten pairs a week, while a good hand knitter could make six.”* There it was. A good hand knitter could make twelve stockings a week. That sentence was significant to me, because right up until I read that, I believed I was a good hand knitter. Apparently the definition has changed.

  My first thought was that maybe the definition of a stocking—not knitters—has changed. It didn’t seem likely that in a scant four hundred years we’d changed what we were capable of that much. Maybe it was the scope of the work that I didn’t understand, not how they got it done. I think of a stocking as a really big sock, a sock so big that it probably was as much knitting as at least the two modern socks I make, but maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe “stocking” was being used here to mean “really short, small sock” or maybe they were knitting chunky yarn at a big gauge, so the stockings didn’t take so long. Nope. After further research, it turns out that it’s as bad as I had hoped it wouldn’t be, if not worse. In Folk Socks, Nancy Bush writes about an example of the sort of stockings that you’d expect in Scotland in the 1600s. An old grave yielded up a pair of stockings where the legs were about twenty-three inches long, and the feet were eleven inches. That height (mid thigh on me, but I’m short) seems to be near the norm, though some common stockings seemed to stop just below the knee. (Conversely, some of the fancier ones went higher, and it’s important when you’re thinking about that to remember that socks only get bigger around as they get higher on the leg.) They were knit at seven and one-half stitches to the inch. Seven or eight stitches to the inch is about what I knit my socks at, and while that gauge seems reasonable, it’s also only one of the possibilities. The first stocking frame knit at eight stitches to the inch, and I think they would have created that to make the sort of stockings people were most used to seeing, but there are lots of other stockings from that time that were anywhere up to twenty-four stitches to the inch, which makes me just want to weep.

  Six pairs of stockings in a week? Twelve stockings? I couldn’t let it go. Admittedly, Mr. Rutt is speaking of professional knitters working at it for a living, but seriously, if I lifted all burdens from you for eight hours a day or more and let you work at stocking knitting for a living, would you be producing twelve stockings a week? That’s at least the equivalent of you or I hauling off and trying for about twenty socks during a workweek. Assuming a twelve-hour day and a seven-day week, I’d still be gibbering in the corner.

  What happened? How did a good hand knitter go from being this stocking machine to being, well, me? What occurred that changed the abilities of all of us so quickly? I know hardly any knitters who could pull off what almost all knitters did four hundred years ago, and that’s not really that long ago, not in a human perspective. Worse than that, my life is a walk in the park compared to theirs. I buy most of my clothes; they made them. I turn on the stove, but they had to chop wood, build a fire, and tend it to accomplish the same thing. I have central heat, a washing machine, and electric lights, and they accomplished everything without any of that, and they did it all while keeping an eye on their eight kids, wishing someone would invent reliable birth control, and worrying about what carried the plague.

  I can tell you one thing that’s changed: skill and the cultural context that it’s in. Back when all this stocking knitting was going down, English children as young as four were being taught to knit. By the time that they were seven or eight they were expected to be making stockings in a way that contributed to the family’s income, and by the time they were in their teens, they were proper full-fledged hand knitters with ten or twelve years’ experience. That’s something we mostly don’t have here. I hate to be blunt, but a lot of knitters in North America came to the craft late, when their brains were old and it was harder to learn something. Older people learn more slowly and often don’t have the same degree of dexterity. (If you don’t believ
e me on that, you should think about how many twelve-year-olds can learn to skateboard in fifteen minutes, and how many forty-year-olds are going to be hospitalized within the same number of minutes.) It’s all the same. Languages, skateboarding, how to program a PVR or DVR, or how to text—the kids are faster, and if you learn when you’re little and there’s room in your brain, then when you’re thirty you’re a wicked fast knitter. You’ve been practicing for twenty-five years. That’s got to help. We probably lost a lot of our speed when we stopped teaching it to little kids and came up with child labor laws that made it illegal to force them to practice in a profitable way. Life was hard, it was difficult to make ends meet, and knitting stockings was something that you could do whenever your hands weren’t busy, just to try and bring in a little extra cash. During the several hundred years that comprised the stocking boom, everyone knit, and, by everyone, I mean even your father. All were beavering away at knitting, and they couldn’t conceive of the luxury of our lifestyles, or the idea that you could have hours of idleness in the evening during which you just watched something or leisurely read a book. Free time was something for rich people. Those who weren’t rich had one person read out loud while everyone else knit or spun, just to keep the efficiency high.

  By contrast, knitting barely has a cultural context for us. It’s hard to comprehend how knitting was regarded four hundred years ago in the British Isles. The expectation was that this skill, which we think of as very specific and difficult, was manageable by just about everyone. Our culture has other expectations that are just about the same. Take driving. Driving a car is a really complicated activity. You have to use your hands and your feet, signal your intentions, read the intentions of others, interpret signs, follow all the rules, and do all of it at exactly the right speed. Still, even though it’s that hard, we expect that pretty much everyone will be able to do it with a reasonable degree of dexterity. We’ve built a culture on it. We expect that, even though one of the consequences for screwing up this common cultural skill is death (which is certainly not true of knitting), you’ll be able to do it when you’re pretty young and stupid.

  On the flip side, we’ve come to think of everything to do with knitting as pretty highly skilled and specific, and even knitters are tripped out by it sometimes. Ever hear a knitter say, “I’m not ready to cable,” or “I’m going to do scarves for a while before I do socks. They look too hard.” Sure you have. A couple of hundred years ago, that attitude would have been laughable. They would have laughed at a knitter like that just as hard as you would have giggled if you heard that someone who was out there driving around felt like they weren’t ready to signal or do the speed limit, so they were just going to drive the highway at a crawl, hoping that people got the feeling that they were going to change lanes sometime before they did. Our expectation is that if you’re grown, you’ll be able to handle all the complexities of driving, because it’s part of making your life work, and they felt the same way about knitting.

  Finally, there was what a stocking represented. It was an income, or it was something to keep you warm, and there was no other way to get them. Either you knit them or you bought them, and even once the stocking frame was invented, it was about another two hundred years before machine-made stockings were cheap enough that their production was meaningful to common people. Sure, we’ve lost ability, we’ve lost cultural context, and we’ve lost the sort of difficult lives where if you didn’t work continuously you couldn’t manage, but aside from all of that, we’ve lost one other important thing.

  Incentive. Back then, there was an incentive to be a competent knitter. It paid off. Being fast and skilled mattered. Now, if you’re not competent or fast you don’t really have a lot of problems, other than a big stash that you’ll never burn through. If you don’t get the hang of socks, there are other places to get them, and you can just be a sweater knitter. You don’t have to be a good knitter to be a happy knitter, and that wasn’t true in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were fast and they were good because it mattered. I’ve compared that a lot to the week that I spent knitting like a fiend, trying to do eight socks in eight days, and if it ever happens to me again, and people look at me like I’m crazy, I’m going to say two things. I’m going to ask them if they signal when they drive, and then I’m going to tell them that, far from being a knitting-obsessed maniac headed for some sort of vague incident concerning the men with the huggy coats and a sedative blow dart, historically speaking, I might be a slacker.

  * Richard Rutt, A History of Hand Knitting (Loveland, Colo.: Interweave Press, 1987) 85.

  LANDMINES

  close the door, saying good-bye to the postie who’s just delivered me a package, and it strikes me that he must wonder about me. This family gets a fair number of packages, and sometimes I see this guy three times a week, and it just occurred to me now (I’m pretty quick that way) that even though he comes in the early afternoon, about nine times out of ten I’m sort of unkempt, clutching a half-knit sock and clad in leisure wear when he arrives. (By calling it “leisure wear,” I’m trying to make it sound okay that I’m actually wearing old yoga pants and a coffee-stained T-shirt that says “talk nerdy to me” on the front.) He’s never asked me what I do, why I’m always here, or how come I so seldom look like I am prepared to go out in public—and now that I think about it, I wish he would. Compared to what he must be imagining about how I spend my days, I’d rather he knew that I am a writer, a knitter, and that somehow, or at least in my life, that combo means that I don’t get dressed as often as other people.

  I am not now, nor have I ever been, the sort of person who can just leave the house, although I hear tell that most people can. I even watch my friends and family do it, and I see people walking down the street in the morning, all of them getting up, getting dressed, brushing their hair, picking up their bags, and leaving their houses for work, and, while I salute those people, I can’t identify with them. I work from home, and I have a tiny office off of my kitchen, and while I occasionally think about what a leg up on the world you would have if you had the sort of job that made you get dressed every day, I don’t want one, and truthfully, when I did have one, it didn’t help a lot. Mornings would often find me looking for one of my shoes, discovering my blouse was buttoned funny, and spilling coffee on my last pair of clean pants. (Eventually I learned to have my first cup of coffee naked. It worked pretty well.)

  My trouble with leaving for work wasn’t just about work. I have the same trouble going anywhere. Even trying to leave for a grocery shop I can’t find my list, my keys are gone, and even though I’ve taken great pains to prevent it from happening again, I have nothing to wear that makes me look like a grown-up who can be trusted. (It has been suggested to me that this may be related to my belief that putting on my one bra is really only for special occasions, but I still find it difficult to believe that controlling your breasts is the secret to being taken seriously.) If this is the sort of person you are, with uncontrolled breasts and naturally messy hair, then it turns out that you may be happier working from home, as I am, where the expectations for my appearance, timing, and foundation garments are a little bit lower. It has been awesome for me, because other than the fact that my postie likely thinks I’m chronically depressed, home moves at the speed and with the priorities I can cope with. I work when I like, eat when I like, talk when I like, and do laundry when I like, and frankly, a commute of ten steps without even having to brush your hair is hard to top.

  Working from home has its down side, like that the only structure in it comes from me. You need a fair bit of self discipline about getting yourself to work if you’re the only one who’s going to notice if you get there. Everyone else has to get dressed and organized every day or their bosses will notice, while a lack of reasonable sensibility on my part could mean that if I’m not careful, I can end up hanging out at my desk in my underwear thinking about how great it would be if I could pay the cat to do housework. (Think that over. She
’s just lying there.)

  I accept who I am—it’s hard not to once you’re in your forties—but I still sometimes wish that I was that other sort of woman: the kind where you can come over anytime and she’s got clothes on, or the kind who can put her hands on her purse without a search-and-rescue mission that takes twenty minutes and a minimum of three family members. To stay in the habit and to keep myself from becoming entirely feral and unacceptable to society, I try to go to a regular Knit Night one evening a week. It’s on Wednesdays, and I’m pretty attached to it. Despite my natural tendencies to hang out at home, there’s not a lot that can happen to make me miss a Knit Night. I don’t go if I’m sick, since, even if I feel almost well enough to go, only a sadist gives a fellow mother a cold—especially if her kids are little. I don’t go if I’m working (though I really try not to be working those nights), and I don‘t go if it’s a parenting conflict, like parent–teacher night or a school concert, or something else where your kids will end up in therapy explaining how they were completely unsupported because their mother cared more about yarn than she cared about them. (I understand that my kids will probably need therapy someday anyway, simply because I’m their mother. I just want for it not to be about the knitting.) My point is that I really do try to get out to Knit Night, and some weeks when I’m swamped and my goal to be sort of normal fails, it might be the only time I leave the house for social reasons. That means that without Knit Night, I’m essentially having all my interactions with other non-family humans when they sell me produce or cheese, which worries me. I feel like the only thing that keeps me from falling into an abyss where the neighborhood kids talk about me like I’m some vague legend and call me “The wool lady” is making sure I get out there once a week.

  In order to rally against my basic nature, I conceive a huge plan—a grand effort where I plan ahead, try not to let things get in my way, and hope it all culminates in walking out the door at 6:00 P.M. on Wednesday evening looking like someone with clean, matching clothes, brushed hair, and subway tokens. In short, I try to leave looking like someone I’m not. (You can imagine the strain.) All day long I think about what I need to take with me, and I make a little pile on the piano. A skein of yarn I promised Andrea, a bit of fiber for Denny, a book I’m lending Rachel, the book I’m returning to Jen… my keys (That’s a hard one. I’m bucking a genetic trait for key loss) and, of course, my knitting. I put together one of the few outfits I own that doesn’t make me look homeless, and I try not to lose touch with my goal. I get my word count written for the day, I get my e-mail caught up, I even make dinner for the family—which I think is very generous, considering that I won’t be there to eat it. I start early in the day, I maintain the focus of a sniper, and I watch out for the landmines that can trip me up and ruin the fragile shot I have at making it out of here. It’s like planning an escape from a disorganized, low-security prison.