A Life in Stitches

by Rachael Herron

  People had cared enough to do this for me. For me.

  Inside the box was also a red fabric bag filled with handwritten notes from the knitters, personal notes of love and loss, kindness and grace. Emily’s read, “Mine is the one made of custom green-and-purple silk/wool yarn. It’s the one in the middle. It’s not a fancy stitch pattern like some of the others, but every stitch was knit with your peace of heart in mind.”

  When I asked Krista Moore, the driving force behind the blanket, why she’d been moved to put it together for me, she said that her own mother was “a beacon in my life, and I could tell you felt the same way about your own mother. When you shared your sad news with us I fell to pieces. I could feel your heartbreak because it was too close to home. I had to do something, I had to hug you and kiss you on the cheek and tell you, We are sisters, you and I. I know your pain and I grieve with you. If I could have gone weeks without sleep and knit you that whole blanket I would have, but I knew that there were so many more who felt the same way as I did. I knew that if I sent up the Bat-Signal the response would be overwhelming. And it was.”

  She gave those who responded her address and a deadline. The only rule was that the square had to be eight by eight inches. When they arrived at her house, she started seaming them all together with a simple crocheted edge. Her life was suddenly complicated when her young, healthy brother suffered a stroke, and she said, “The best help I could offer my family was to babysit my brother’s infant, so while Cale slept, I laid out your squares and began to join them. Your blanket became my therapy too. I prayed for you, your sisters, your dad, my brother, his children. The prayers flew out of me. I knew there was more love in that blanket than I had ever felt before when I packed it up and sent it on its way.”

  By the time I received it, her brother was healing and, astonishingly, with the blanket wrapped around me, I found that I was starting to also.

  I swear I didn’t go out and look for someone I could direct my karmic abundance toward, but within six months, I found a reason to give a blanket forward. In the course of four short months, a Canadian knitter named Zoom had seriously injured her back, lost her job of eighteen years, and was diagnosed with breast cancer.

  I’d virtually “met” Zoom through my online friend Grace. No, scratch that last adjective. Grace is a real friend, one that I made because I wrote a blog she liked, and because her comments have always meant a lot to me. I haven’t met her in person, but we’ve e-mailed frequently and talked on the phone, and when her cat, Ramona, died, I cried almost as hard as if Ramona had been my own. At some point in our friendship, Grace told me I should be reading Zoom. She was right—I loved Zoom’s humor, fearlessness, and, not least of all, her orange cat, Duncan, who was the size of a beer truck.

  Grace, being very Grace, shot me a quick Facebook note on May 7, 2009, saying that Zoom could use some love. I clicked over to Zoom’s blog, where I learned about her cancer diagnosis. Two weeks later, I sent Grace (who lives near Zoom) a message asking if she’d help me make a blanket for her. She loved the idea as I knew she would, and I spent hours trolling Zoom’s blog, pulling up likely looking comments, sending their authors queries, and getting the plan in place.

  And then we knitted. I loved sitting on my couch in Oakland, California, thinking about the knitters all over the world, knitting at the same time, putting prayers and good wishes into each careful stitch. Grace collected the Canadian squares; I received the Stateside ones. All told, we collected squares from four countries: the United States, Canada, the Sudan, and Australia. It got so that I couldn’t wait for the mail to come—I’d run out and have the packages half open by the time I got inside. “Ooh!” I’d cry. “Look at this one! It has a whole garden on it. Oh! It’s Zoom’s community garden! There are her carrots!” After the deadline, Grace posted the Canadian squares to me, and when I received them, unpacking the box felt as joyous as unwrapping birthday presents.

  Krista had sewn together all the squares on my Love Blanket by herself. I sat in my house surrounded by dozens of squares, thinking about that much crochet…I didn’t even try to do the math to figure out how many years it would take me. I knew I wasn’t woman enough to handle it by myself. I called in the troops.

  Friends and family gathered one Saturday afternoon in an updated version of a quilting bee. Just as communities of women used to gather over a quilting frame to quilt, we gathered with a singular purpose first at our computers and later to sew each loving square into one blanket. I felt connected to generations before me as I realized that my Love Blanket was the result of another bee in another place, and I knew I was extraordinarily lucky.

  Our table groaned under the weight of the goodies. Annie brought cookies and three kinds of delicious-smelling handmade soap that her mother-in-law made. Rachel M, who had contributed to my blanket, brought cookies and spare crochet hooks. Courtney brought her amazing laugh. Janine, the woman who taught me to spin, came. Even my sisters were there, ready to help. None of them were readers of Zoom’s blog, so while we sat on the floor and crocheted the squares together, I told stories of her life, and if I’d stopped to think, These are just stories I read online, you don’t really know this woman, I would have stuttered to a stop.

  I believe I do know Zoom, in the way that she lets me know her: online. So many times I’ve met readers of my blog who say things like, “I feel like I know you. I know that’s weird, I’m sorry,” before they back away, blushing. But it’s not weird. It’s true. My readers do know me, and I know an astonishing number of them too. Of course I don’t put everything on the blog—I couldn’t. The chronicling of every step doesn’t lend to glamour. But the way in which I share my life online is exactly the same as the way I share my life in person: I tell select stories of my choosing, just as we all do. Filters are different in different situations: I let down my guard the most around family, of course. They know what I’m like on a bad day. But everyone else—friends, coworkers, acquaintances—know only what I choose to display. Just like on the blog. Interestingly, I often tell stories online that I don’t tell anywhere else. It’s an intimate space, and I know my readers are listening and remembering, creating a deep well of collective memory and incredible kindness.

  I mailed the blanket to Grace and she delivered the blanket in person to Zoom. The next morning, I got an e-mail from Zoom that read, “I woke up in the middle of the night and just lay there thinking about it for a long time. About how such a freakishly bad year has been so deeply good in so many ways. About how terrified and alone I felt in the beginning, and how safe and nurtured I feel now, and how much of that I owe to the knitters and bloggers of the world. I thought about the process that went into this blanket, and the community and the symbolism, and about how friends I’ve never even met could care so much about me that they would somehow get together and transcend geography to make me something so wonderful and heartwarming and nurturing and full of love…If there’s a fire, it’ll be the thing I save.”

  I feel the same way about my Love Blanket. After people and pets (and okay, the laptop), I’d save it first. It lives on my writing chair in my office. I didn’t want the blanket to go on the bed—the dogs would sleep on it, and it would get dirty from everyday use. Instead, I stow it in plain sight while still keeping it safe, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in my office on cold mornings when I’ve dragged the blanket over my shoulders, wrapping it around myself, piling the extra in my lap. Or how often I’ve sat in the soft chair editing with the wool draped over me. Cats struggle to sit on my lap, but I don’t let them share with me often. This is the most special blanket in my house, the most perfect weapon in my war on grief. Even beating out the first copy of my first book, my Love Blanket is truly my most prized possession. It edges everything out for the sheer love in every single square inch. I can feel the prayers in it. Only a small percentage of my online friends contributed to the actual blanket itself, but the stitches carry the weight of all the others. I hope that
Zoom feels the same way with her blanket. They’re literal representations of love, grace, and kindness. You can roll your eyes at me, but I think my blanket might be made of magic.

  And it’s so warm too.

  CHAIN STITCH

  It’s hard to remember how we built our yarn stashes before the Internet came along. I don’t mean just that we all started buying yarn online when it became possible to do so (although we did—I remember that fateful day I typed “yarn” into brand-new eBay’s search field and then freaked out), I just mean that the world, as a whole, got so much bigger, didn’t it?

  Pre-Internet—and I don’t admit this easily—I shopped for yarn at chain craft stores. Michael’s, JoAnn’s, Beverly’s: I hit all the stores with a person’s first name. I looked for wool or wool-like products, but boy, were they hard to find back then. I knew in the back of my mind that “real” yarn stores existed, but I didn’t know then what that meant. Even though I lived in the Bay Area, I’d never gone to one. I thought they would just charge me too much and—this is so galling to admit—I was happy with my wool/acrylic combos.

  Then the Internet happened. (I say that as if I woke up one morning and the whole World Wide Web was just there, which isn’t true at all. I remember watching it grow over time, but, looking back, it feels like it just popped up one night.) And on the Internet, thanks to the knitting blogs I started reading, I discovered that people sought out and bought specific kinds of yarn.

  It was a revelation that people out there were knitting with yarn that I didn’t even know about, that I immediately wanted to have. Of course, that wouldn’t do. So I started buying yarn online, and boy, was it so easy! Just a few clicks, enter a few numbers, and bam! My very own postal carrier would bring lovely, light boxes full of color right to my door. It was miraculous.

  I disappeared right down the rabbit hole for a while. For years, in fact. I shopped for yarn all over the world except in my own backyard, where it just didn’t occur to me to look (I’m crafty, but not always that swift). And along with being able to order yarn online, I was suddenly able to research yarn before I traveled, and I discovered a passion: yarn travel.

  I was able to finally locate yarn stores before I hit the road. Instead of hoping I’d run into yarn, I’d go directly to the yarn shop that I’d already researched. And I’d wager that all knitters, even on the strictest of yarn diets, invoke the Souvenir Yarn Clause when we travel. Souvenir yarn—especially if it’s just sock yarn—doesn’t count. We can buy as much as we want of it, because obviously, it’s just a tiny bit of yarn. It hardly costs anything when compared to the trip itself, and sock yarn will always fit into your carry-on for the ride home.

  With the Souvenir Yarn Clause held firmly in mind, I went to the New York Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, New York, and the orange lace-weight cashmere I found there justified the whole trip. In Lake Tahoe, I found Cormo batts. In Atlanta I discovered Miss Babs hand-painted yarns, and I also found the best key lime pie I’ve ever had, so that was kind of a double win. I bought blue merino in Bruges after spending two hours walking across the city. I purchased possum wool in New Zealand and learned that cats think this is the most interesting yarn of all. I’ve gotten hand-dyed lace-weight in British Columbia and good sturdy cream wool just outside London. Venice, of course, has provided so much yarn throughout the years that I’m actually a little embarrassed to think about it.

  And the best part? In most of those towns I met other knitters, friends that I’d already made online and finally got to hug in person. There weren’t as many of us blogging back then, and you could go around the entire knit-blog circle in an hour or two of Web surfing. I’d never before knit with anyone, had never dreamed of something as exotic as knitting out together in public. Lord, at-home knitting was something you didn’t cop to. You did it in private. This getting together to knit was a whole new world.

  And now I had friends in faraway cities who got me. They knew how I felt when I sat on my favorite bamboo needles (hint: not good), and they understood why I couldn’t resist collecting yarn on my travels the way other people collect snow globes or shot glasses. When I’d come to town on a trip, we’d sit around tables knitting, and no matter what city in the world I was in, the conversation always went the same way: from yarn to needles to patterns and, finally, to knit-blog gossip, the most delicious kind of all.

  Those were the good old days, though. These economic lean times hit our home just like it did many others. Bills needed to be paid more than trips needed to be taken. I tried to take it in stride, but I was still depressed about it. Yarn traveling was something I loved doing, and I wouldn’t be able to do it much anymore. I tried not to think about it much and stopped buying yarn, knitting out of my stash (thank goodness I’d stocked up).

  Finally, I opened my eyes and looked around. It should have been obvious, of course, but somehow, seeing what was practically in my backyard, hiding in plain sight, was astonishing. My immediate neighborhood, I found, was chock-full of the yarn and knitters that I’d been traveling so far to find.

  My local yarn shop is Article Pract (a spoonerism of “practical art”). There, I’ll find the owner, Christina Stork, who is way cooler than I’ll ever be. She wears awesome clothes I could never get away with and has naturally red hair and a smile that reaches from one ear to the other. Her boyfriend coaches roller derby, and she knits while she screams encouragement from ringside. Tattooed and pierced indie artists staff the counter, and I’m always kind of thrilled when someone knows me there, as if I’m walking in to the Cheers of yarn (except they’re calling Rachael! instead of Norm!). It gives me a little boost I can’t quite get from buying Malabrigo online (oh, the softness of that stuff! It makes up for the vinegar smell left over from its dyeing process). It doesn’t hurt that Christina’s store is in the district that is currently the hippest in Oakland, and it’s surrounded by restaurants that all seem to have been started by ex-employees of Chez Panisse. In the same vein, Christina is the Alice Waters of yarn, putting everyone in contact with everyone else, our yarn-locavore, making sure we are able to stay local.

  But Christina is more than a yarn vendor to me. She’s more than just stash-acquisition. Now that she’s moved to live practically within shouting distance of my house, I’ve been over to see her ducks, to sit in her kitchen and eat salad drizzled with raspberry vinaigrette and warm, locally made bread. We don’t even knit much when we’re together; we’re usually too busy catching up, our hands flapping in time with our words, not noticing we haven’t knitted until the end of our visit, when one brings out something to show the other. From Christina I learned that homemade soup, made at the end of a long workday, served to friends, is as nourishing to the soul as it is to the body. She taught me that there’s never time in the week to see friends—no one has any free hours anymore—but you do it anyway, and you don’t regret staying up a little bit past your bedtime in order to catch up with someone you love. You can’t learn that on the Internet.

  Another thing you can’t do on the Internet is sit around knitting on a random Saturday afternoon while appreciating vegan food. Yes, I eat meat, and I won’t try to convince you to do otherwise. But my knitting friends Kira and Rachel Dulaney are generous and hospitable, and they’re known for hosting crafting parties that feature everything from Indian bhindi masala to homemade sushi, always vegan, always delicious (a combination I hadn’t thought possible before I knew them).

  Having known them for a long time now, I can look at my relationship with them to define how my relationship with yarn has changed throughout the years. Rachel lived with my little sister Bethany in the dorms at San Francisco State. We hung out but we didn’t talk knitting, because I didn’t talk knitting with anyone. I just did it at home, privately.

  Then the Internet opened knitting up—I believe that the reason knitting became trendy was because knitting information became so readily disseminated and available online. People started to talk about it. One afternoon, Kira, who
m I’d known for a year or two by then, was wearing a pair of fingerless gloves.

  “Those are pretty,” I said, admiring the cables on the back.

  “I made them,” Kira said.

  When I pulled myself out of the vegan sushi platter that I’d fallen into, we talked yarn nonstop for the next hour while Rachel sat patiently listening. Since then, Kira’s moved from being a talented knitter to managing a yarn store to owning her own design business, KiraK Designs. She’s been featured in national knitting magazines and is well known in the industry now. But I still think of her as our adorable know-it-all who drops everything to deliver groceries if someone needs them. Both she and Rachel give their time and energy to anyone who needs anything, driving friends to doctors’ appointments, dropping off spare cable needles when needed. They both came to my mother’s funeral and, afterward, sang songs from the musical Chess at the top of their lungs in the kitchen with us. If I were ever put in jail and my family refused to take my calls, they’d be the ones I’d phone next. (God forbid. Really. If I end up behind bars, I will blame this essay entirely.)

  Don’t get me wrong, traveling the world to buy yarn, meeting knit-friends along the way, is fantastic. If you can afford the money and time, you should try it. You can take a knitting cruise to Alaska, or a knit-themed tour of Northern Italy, and you can spend many, many hours happily researching all of it before you go. It’s wonderful to buy fiber in a language you don’t speak with currency you barely understand. The language of yarn is always the same, and a Swedish knitter can show an Aussie how to cast on without using words.