A Life in Stitches

by Rachael Herron

  I was reminded of this recently, when I was signing books at the Oakland Fiber and Textile Festival. It was a gorgeous day in the Bay Area, the first really warm day of the summer. People frolicked in summer sundresses and shorts, slathering on the first layers of summer sunscreen. Children laughed and ran in the grass while knitters congregated under large umbrellas, admiring each other’s work.

  I sat at a small table with the occasional lanolin-scented breeze wafting by. I got to meet readers, see friends, and sign books, all the while knitting socks in green Miss Babs yarn with blue heels and toes.

  But even though it was awesome, it was still scary to sit out in the open with the book of my heart at my elbow, people riffling through it and choosing to either buy it or walk on. So instead of staring at people perusing my book and making them squirm, I knitted. They were able to look at the front cover, flip it over and read the back, look at the quotes, and think about the price, while I hid behind my yarn, available for answering questions, avoiding the hard sell.

  What they didn’t know was that every time I frowned and looked down, fiddling with something on the needle, I was faking it.

  I don’t have to look at my knitting when working socks (unless I’m turning the heel), which makes them a great portable project for social activities. When you can carry on a whole, uninterrupted conversation while maintaining eye contact, no one minds if you knit. In fact, the non-knitters are kind of impressed.

  But it doesn’t feel impressive. To me, it feels necessary for survival, in exactly the way cigarettes used to.

  So when two knitting sisters suddenly started arguing next to my table, one saying she’d heard of my book, the other saying, no, she hadn’t, she was thinking of another book, I squinted at my yarn and then gasped as if I’d dropped a stitch while the sisters bickered. They argued the relative merit of knitting fiction as a whole while I kept my head down and my eyes on my work. To them, I looked engrossed, while in reality, I was just doing the knit stitch, over and over, around and around. I could have easily done this if I’d been dropped down a pitch black well. I was so grateful to have my sock—I was hiding in plain sight, just like I used to with cigarettes. Everyone ignores the girl smoking while leaning against the concrete wall, no one makes eye contact. I loved that knitting brought me back that anonymity. The sisters didn’t notice me (or buy the book, for that matter).

  I hadn’t thought ahead, though. After an hour, I finished my sock. Worse, it was the second one, so I couldn’t just cast on again with the same yarn. I thought of doing something I’ve done in the past, which is to knit on with no regard for what the actual length was meant to be, planning to rip out the excess when safely behind closed doors, but I knew I had three more hours to sit at my book table, and I couldn’t bear the thought of later having to rip out five inches of useless sock.

  And I couldn’t even consider my only other option: not knitting. Oh, no. Impossible. To sit and talk to strangers about my writing? Without knitting? No way. I looked jealously at the skater kid who cruised past on the sidewalk, cigarette clamped between his lips. I wanted to knock him off the board, or to bum one like I used to, like I hadn’t done in years and years.

  I had a flutter or two of panic in my chest, and my stomach flipped.

  Then I looked around: I was surrounded by table after table of yarn vendors.

  Duh.

  The panic went away, and I felt the cool assuredness that comes right before a yarn purchase. I crossed to the nearest booth and grabbed the closet sock-weight yarn. I didn’t care what color it was, or what fiber composition it was made of, I just cared that I could cast on. Immediately.

  I lucked out. The yarn was gorgeous: Amy Klimt’s hand-dyed merino/cashmere/tencel in self-striping red, pink, and white. Each color change was clear and crisp, and I couldn’t wait to get each stripe made. In the next three hours, I met dozens of new people, sold lots of books, and knitted almost to the heel of my delicious new candy-cane sock.

  The beast was soothed. I would survive. Even better, I’d have something to show for it.

  And I was reminded again that our craft, with its particular alchemy, changes time and effort into something beautiful and useful, whereas smoking just changed clean lungs into dirty, damaged ones. At its core, smoking didn’t transform me into a better anything, and when I used to tell myself it did—that it made me cooler, more confident, more likable—I was lying to myself. But knitting transforms not only yarn into clothing, but knitters into calm, confident people who have a community of their own. And we still have something to hide behind when necessary.

  PICK UP AND KNIT

  Knitters often joke about the Sweater Curse, but most take the superstition seriously—they tend to knock wood after laughing. It’s a well-known idea: If a knitter makes a sweater for a boyfriend, the relationship is doomed. In a variation of the myth, the relationship might even end while the sweater is still on the needles. In any form, knitting a boyfriend (not a husband—they’re exempt) a sweater guarantees a breakup, and the knitter is said to have fallen prey to the Sweater Curse.

  No one knows who first told the story—is it an old wives’ tale? Did some guy somewhere just freak out when receiving such a strong evidence of love? Why doesn’t the break-up rule apply to other acts of love, like mending clothes, or picking the loved one up at the airport, or getting the significant other’s name in tattoo form? (The latter example should end in a breakup, probably, but doesn’t always.) No matter where the legend came from, it lives on in the collective consciousness of knitters everywhere, and many knitters think of it as something to be considered before buying that gorgeous dark blue yarn that would go so well with his dreamy eyes.

  I never worried about the myth. For a long time, I dated only men, and I’d never considered knitting any of them a sweater. Perhaps it was what they wore that discouraged my craft: Roger wore polar fleece or tank tops, Luis wore tattered sweaters from JCPenney, and Mick never wore more than a T-shirt, no matter the weather. None of them were great at laundry, and I didn’t trust them not to ruin a hand-knit sweater. So I never gave the Curse any thought.

  Then, for a while, I dated both men and women. Those were heady, busy days of falling in love every six or seven months, and, honestly, I was too preoccupied to knit much of anything, even for myself.

  Then I met Jenn. My first long-term girlfriend, she was the first significant other I thought might be worthy of my knitting time. I briefly considered the Sweater Curse, but since it was often called the Boyfriend’s Sweater Curse, I decided it wouldn’t apply to this situation.

  When I brought the idea up, we were sitting on the back porch of a hotel room in Mendocino. It was an idyllic scene: big wooden chairs on the dark wood balcony, green cliff below us dropping away down to the crashing blue waters of the Pacific. Gulls wheeled above us.

  “What if I knitted you a sweater?” I said.

  Jenn was absorbed in her book and didn’t look up. “I think you should.”

  Somehow, it didn’t seem like quite enough.

  “You fly, I’ll buy,” she said.

  Well. That was enough.

  We found a yarn store in Fort Bragg, and Jenn choose a pretty heathered purple merino. I picked out a simple raglan pattern and cast on that afternoon, sitting again on the dark wooden chairs. Jenn retreated inside when the fog rolled in, but I stayed out there, knitting in the heavy, wet mist, listening to the foghorn.

  The sweater turned out perfectly. It was a good fit, and the light purple was a great color with her dark brown hair. Jenn loved it.

  Then we broke up.

  The separation was mutual. It wasn’t working for either of us, and it was better for us to part. But I wondered about the curse—was it the sweater’s fault? Did that last stitch clinch it? Was it because the hem rolled up that our connection was severed?

  Although tempting, I didn’t blame the sweater as much as I blamed my desire to be alone and autonomous. And besides, we were women. It
didn’t apply, right? But at the same time, just as I throw salt over my left shoulder even though I don’t really think spilled salt is bad luck, I resolved I wouldn’t knit another girlfriend a sweater.

  That was fine. It meant I got to keep all my knitting.

  After a short time-out, I licked my wounds and got back into the dating pool, sans needles. I joined a couple of Internet dating sites, and I loved pouring myself a glass of wine on Friday nights and cruising the listings. It was astonishing how quickly I could fall in love with an online profile—a few witty back and forth e-mails and I had the whole relationship planned.

  Then we’d meet. I’d be disappointed when a person who said she was a thrill-seeker turned out to be an exterminator, or the one who valued creative expression was actually a Deadhead. I exchanged a volley of e-mail with a doctor at the local children’s hospital, and, by our correspondence, I knew we were perfect together. I imagined our Christmas cards, a dog posed at our feet wearing a Santa hat. We went on one date and knew by the end of the night that there was absolutely no chemistry. At all. She could have stepped on my toe and I probably wouldn’t have felt it. Then I dated a writer who was sexy and smart, and we did have chemistry, but when it came to dinner dialogue, the repartee we found so easy online fell flat.

  One woman caught my eye even though by then I was getting tired of the Internet routine. Her profile showed her crouched in front of a velvet Elvis painting, her smile wickedly pleased with something just to the right of the camera’s lens. I read her profile five times. She was quirky, down to earth, funny. Some of the lines in her profile were so perfect they made me ache.

  But I didn’t contact her. Instead, I started a knitting circle at the local gay bar that was just blocks from my house. I advertised it on Craigslist, and I walked to the first afternoon session surprisingly nervous. What if no one came and I ended up knitting alone? What if, and this was worse, only one person came, and I had to make polite chitchat for the next two hours with someone who liked to crochet tiny pineapples?

  I was thrilled when fifteen women showed up. This was back when knitting in public was something people didn’t see very often. When perhaps eight or ten people were already gathered around the tables, staring at our work in the dimness of the bar, another woman joined us. She said, “You’re the knitters. Obviously.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  She threw a bag of knitting onto the table. “Can someone please help me finish this hat? I can’t figure out the decreases, and I’m going to rip it into pieces if I don’t figure it out soon.”

  It was her, the woman from the Elvis painting. My heart raced. This was a sign, it had to be. And sure enough, at the end of the knit-out, Toni followed me outside, grinning that wicked smile.

  “Do you like baseball?” she asked.

  “Nope,” I said. “But I’ll go anyway.”

  After a few very promising dates, as my heart dipped its toes into the waters of infatuation, I wanted to make something for her. Certainly not anything like a sweater, but I thought a striped scarf might be nice. Just a little token of the depth of emotion I knew we were both beginning to feel.

  I finished it and tucked it into my bag, ready to give it to her. We were staying in her family’s house in Montara Beach, and we walked down to the water. Night had already descended, and the paths through the ice plant at the sandy edge were lit up by moonlight. Where the dry sand turned to wet, Toni turned to face me. “I can’t do this.” Then she started to cry. I was tough and got all the way back to my car before the tears started. I used the stupid scarf to dry my face and wrapped it around my neck for the drive back home, making it mine again. It was soaked by the time I got back to Oakland.

  I stopped responding to ads, took down my profile, and stopped Internet dating. All my crushes, fanned into virtual flame, died quickly in person. It wasn’t worth it. I was officially done with dating, and certainly done with knitting for anyone that wasn’t related to me by blood. I stopped going to the knitting group I’d started at the gay bar and went back to knitting alone, on my couch. I’d be a little old cat lady, and I was happy about it.

  I swear I didn’t mean to see Lala’s online profile. It was, mostly, accidental. But she lived in Oakland, played the banjo, and she knitted. A bluegrass-playing knitter in my town? How was that possible? I wrote her a short message: “Do I know you? Because if I don’t, I should. I’m not dating, nor am I interested in dating, but if you’d like to get a beer sometime, that would be fun.”

  We met at a bar. She was an hour and a half late, but she had a good excuse, and I had my knitting, so I didn’t mind. It wasn’t a date, after all. We talked for hours. I admitted that I was a runner—she was horrified—and she admitted that she was widowed, her young wife, Aura, having died of melanoma a few years prior. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that had been like. We met two more times—I wasn’t sure if they were dates or if we even had chemistry, but I tried not to think about it. On our fourth date, she picked up the banjo and played it, her hands deft and sure. I kissed her, the banjo still between us.

  True love hit me like a bus. I knew within three months that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

  She wasn’t getting a sweater, though. Not on my watch. I knew that much. I knitted her fingerless gloves, decorated with a banjo on one hand, and La on the other. She worked in a chilly office and loved the warmth of the red alpaca I used.

  Six months into the best relationship I’d ever had, my resolve starting to crumble, I was dying to buy some yarn and knit love into stitches that would wrap all the way around her. But I wouldn’t do it. I’d gotten lucky with the gloves so far—we hadn’t had so much as an argument since I’d given them to her.

  She wanted a sweater though. “Please? The curse doesn’t count if there’s no boyfriend involved.” She was a knitter—she knew what I was worried about.

  “Nope.” I sat on the couch in her apartment.

  “Just a small one. I’m not that big.”

  “No way. I’m not risking losing you,” I cuddled Harriet, the dog she’d brought into my life.

  “What would it take for you to make me one?”

  I laughed. “A ring, probably.” I was kidding. I never planned on getting married—it wasn’t on any check-off list I’d ever made for my life.

  “So let’s get domestically partnered.”

  I looked at her. She sounded serious.

  I made myself a sweater instead. I used tan and pink cheap wool from Michael’s—I wanted it in a hurry—and made a raglan striped pullover. The only thing special about it was that I had added a band of pink hearts in one of the tan stripes around the left wrist. I thought of it as my practice-engagement sweater, a secret ring that only she and I knew about, one that we could barely talk about—every time the topic of marriage came up, we both stammered and stuttered and got too nervous to speak clearly. Lala had already been married, I thought. Why would she want to do it again and risk that kind of loss? She was worried about the potential for repeat heartbreak too.

  But one night as we stood in my kitchen, indulging in cocktails and love-struck tears, we just knew. We told no one for months, hiding the actual engagement rings that we bought, and I bought yarn for her first sweater. Seven years and three weddings (two legal, in two different countries) later, she has enough sweaters to carry her through the coldest winter our Northern California climate can throw at her. The first one I gave her made her eyes widen in delight—she knew what it meant. I was finally stepping over that dangerous line, ignoring it. And it was worth the risk. Now she has a green cabled sweater and a rugged gray one. She has one made from an old Mary Maxim pattern, with two country dancers on the back. I will state for the record: Intarsia equals love, period. But I think my favorite one I’ve made her is the one with the Space Invader on the lower right front—it’s just right, so her.

  So it seems that true love really does conquer all. It conquers petty arguments over vacuuming, financ
ial troubles requiring meals made of lentils, and dismal choices regarding driving routes. The Sweater Curse, boyfriend or not, is no match for a love that sees past the stitches, even the occasional dropped one, into the heart.

  WHIPSTITCH

  The first Alice Starmore–designed sweater I ever saw was called Golden Gate Bridge from her book Pacific Coast Highway. My friend Anne was wearing it and I had a difficult time focusing on the food on the table in front of me, or on Anne, who was visiting from out of town. Instead, I focused on the sweater’s graceful, swooping cables, unable to take my eyes off the iron girders evoked by the pattern. Anne’s sweater was the same rust red as the bridge, and I could almost smell the fog and hear the seagulls.

  It was a piece of art—a warm, gorgeous representation of an architectural icon. It was incredible. I wanted it.

  I’ve rarely experienced that level of covetousness in my life. If Anne had not been a friend, there’s a possibility I would have entered a life of crime that morning, out in the parking lot. “Tourist robbed of sweater, left in waffle-shop parking lot, shivering.”

  But I refrained from robbery. I merely swallowed my jealousy with the last of my pancake and, as I was unable to foot the three-hundred-dollar eBay charge for the out-of-print Pacific Coast Highway pattern book, I headed instead to my nearest knitting store and found Starmore’s more recent The Celtic Collection.