The Yarn Whisperer

by Clara Parkes

  Some patterns shake things up, veering from symmetry with a lopsided cable. Swapping many stitches over just a few produces the knitted equivalent of a tall person and a short person sharing the same umbrella. While the tall guy can never stand up straight, the short person still gets wet.

  We usually nest our cables within a bed of purl stitches. This helps them “pop” visually, but it serves a deeper structural purpose, too. When you do anything out of order, it can be a source of stress. Say you have a line of people waiting to get into a movie theater, and three guys in back suddenly cut right in front of you. Folks are going to complain, right?

  The same thing happens when you pull stitches out of line and jam them ahead of the ones that were patiently waiting to be knit. Knitting is an innately linear activity. Stitches love to stand in line and wait their turn. Cables disrupt this natural order. They put physical stress on the neighboring stitches, pulling some painfully tight while making others pucker awkwardly. The surrounding fabric will do whatever it can to bring the tension back to normal, and bands of purl stitches act as bumpers to absorb that jarring change in tension. We usually space our tense cable twists between smooth straightaways to let the stitches loosen their grip on the wheel and relax a little before the next bend comes.

  An ambitious product marketer may insist that “true” knitters turn their cables with a cable needle, just as the guy at Williams-Sonoma will suggest that a food processor is the only real tool for chopping vegetables. A traditional cable needle is a rather stout, curved or straight object with pointed ends and a slightly thinner center. This shape allows for easy maneuvering of stitches without risk of them sliding out.

  It’s a pretty and helpful tool, but so is a bent paper clip, a toothpick, a coffee stirrer, a spare pen or pencil—even a bobby pin works in a pinch. You just need something to keep the first half of your hopscotching stitches safe and sound while you work on the other ones—especially if you happen to be working with a slinky silk or bamboo yarn. But some yarns, those with a lively halo of robust, high-crimp fibers, don’t need a cable needle at all. The fiber ends instinctively reach out and grab the fibers around them. Those stitches will just sit there patiently waiting for you to pluck them back up and slide them onto your needle. If you’re at the International Space Station for a six-month stint without your cable needle and suddenly have the urge to turn a few, rest assured, you can.

  Our knitted roadways also rely on something called a “traveling stitch” to funnel traffic from lane to lane. Unlike overlapping cables, traveling stitches have no overpasses or tunnels. Their motion is derived entirely from the side-to-side movement of a stockinette road that’s bordered on either side by reverse-stockinette bumps.

  Traveling stitches declare eminent domain on all that they encounter, just like my Great-Aunt Kay did every time she got behind the wheel. Need to veer right? No problem, simply take whatever’s there and merge it into your stockinette road. Want to pick up your great-nephew at the library? Drive your stitch onto the sidewalk and right up to the front steps. Merge successful, mission accomplished. As an added bonus, the honking of the other cars will let him know you’re coming.

  We merge through decreases, whether by knitting together the main road and its purl neighbor or slipping the main road, purling the neighbor, and then slipping the main road right over it. To make up for the stitch they took over when merging, they’ll leave a new stitch in their wake. Traveling stitches are the driver who assumes the yield sign applies to everyone else, the nightmare freeway that is constantly merging busy lanes with no advanced notice, the great-aunt who weaves blithely from lane to curb and back again, never heeding the blaring horns of those around her. The traveling-stitch highway is a perpetual collision of lanes and cars, with the biggest one—that blundering tractor-trailer of a knit stitch—always winning.

  We have many guides to choose from in the world of stitch travel, but Barbara Walker is our Rand McNally. Armchair travelers leaf through her pages and dream of the open road, mapping out stitch by stitch, turn by turn. Intrepid knitters do it when mapping out their very own journeys. And designers—the GPSs of the knitting world—do it when formulating that pattern for a hat, sweater, or scarf.

  I have a friend who lives at the end of a narrow one-lane road in rural Virginia. She frequently has eighteen-wheelers show up in her front yard, their GPS having insisted that the road did something it hasn’t done in nearly thirty years. One guy in Texas named his GPS Christine—for the evil Plymouth in Stephen King’s horror story—after it instructed him to turn directly into oncoming traffic.

  Putting blind faith in anything is rarely a good idea, whether it’s a GPS or a knitting pattern. It’s far better to develop your own instinct, learn for yourself what works and what doesn’t—and learn why. Here I’m reminded of the cars my grandparents used to let my brothers and me drive when we’d visit them in Maine. First we had a VW 1500 Squareback, which my grandparents had imported from Germany in 1962. The bottom had rusted out (you could see the road through a crack on the floor) and the heat was always on. The windshield wipers moved at the speed of the engine, forcing us to keep it revved up high in the rain—until one fateful evening when the driver’s side wiper gave up, bounced off the hood, and landed somewhere along the side of the road.

  As challenging as the car was to drive, the Maine roads were even more so. At one spot on the winding two-lane road near my grandparents’ summer house, the road curved just before a small bridge. The sign said 45 mph, but we’d never gotten close. The tires would squeal at 35 mph; our hands would cling to the dashboard for support. Somehow this idea of not being able to reach the speed limit amused us to no end.

  The next year, my grandfather replaced the 1500 with a VW Rabbit he’d got cheap after an engine fire. The gas gauge didn’t work, someone had scraped FUCK YOU into the paint on the roof, which had then rusted in place, and the speedometer jumped from 25 to 60 with the spastic regularity of an EKG reading. We didn’t ask how it passed inspection, we were just thrilled to have a car with a radio and seat belts. Our prospects for The Curve had improved.

  But by July the starter was on the fritz, forcing us to pushstart the car. There were four of us and only two doors, making each ride an adventure. With my oldest brother, Jeff, steering from the open driver’s door, we started to push. “OK, Clara, get in!” he’d yell, and I’d climb into the back. “Eric, go!” In went my brother, taking the spot beside me. “Janet!” His then-girlfriend hopped in the passenger seat and slammed her door shut, all three of us briefly in a moving car with nobody behind the wheel. Then Jeff slid into the driver’s seat, slammed his door shut, and popped the car into gear. We held our breath, and when the engine finally lurched and sputtered to life, we all shared the smug satisfaction of having done something rather clever, like when you replace the flap in a toilet tank or turn a heel for the first time.

  Later that summer the car—which by then we’d dubbed “the Shit”—lost its muffler. We began leaving the keys in the ignition whenever we parked it, but nobody took the hint. Not that they could, since it wouldn’t start.

  We never did make the curve at 45, not in that car or any one since. The road wants you to drive at a certain speed, and thankfully no amount of foolishness will change that. Maybe my grandparents put us in that car on purpose, knowing that its ridiculous limitations would keep our impatient recklessness in check—just as I’d never start a new knitter with laceweight yarn and slick needles. They need to do laps with a bulkier yarn first.

  Then, and only then, can they develop an instinct for stitches—take curves, try new roads, give an occasional pushstart, even let them get lost so we can help them find their way. Time behind the needles is the very best teacher.

  Stitches are a responsibility, they are our babies. Their fate rests entirely in our hands. Each stitch needs to be considered carefully, its origin and final destination taken into account. We are the architects of their future, and they’re trusti
ng us to do right by them.

  At the end of the day, we want all our stitches home safe and sound. We want to prevent anyone from taking a curve they cannot handle, or blithely driving off a cliff, confident there was going to be a bridge. And we really don’t want the streets of our fabric to be haunted by that lost and lonely stitch who, after a long day at work, can’t find his way home.

  OUTED

  I SPENT MY college years at a small women’s liberal arts college in Oakland, California. I hadn’t chosen Mills so that I could be at the forefront of the women’s movement. I wasn’t particularly interested in feminist studies, and I certainly didn’t have an aspiration to live in a gender-divided society. No, I’d chosen Mills because my mother’s best friend had graduated from there and, oh, because it had a pretty campus.

  Picture an oasis of early twentieth-century California architecture: tiled rooftops, arched entryways, heavy casement windows opening to a forest of tall, fragrant eucalyptus trees, all magically hidden from the traffic and exhaust and stray gunfire of Oakland. It was a beautiful place to be, quiet and small, and safe enough for me to let down my guard and explore who I really was.

  Halfway through my senior year, I finally had the courage to come out. As a knitter.

  Please believe me when I say this was not a popular stance. The previous year, the college board of trustees had announced it would make Mills coed—prompting the students to strike, occupy the administrative offices, and effectively shut down the college for two weeks. Eventually, trustee Warren Hellman held a press conference and unfurled a banner: “Mills, for women, again.” This replaced the earlier banner, which read, “Warren Go-to-Hell-man,” which he kept until he died.

  We were there to break free from the patriarchy, to experience the possibility of a world in which traditional gender roles played no part. We were unleashing our inner CEOs, Tony Award–winning playwrights, confident scientists seeking a cure for AIDS. We marched on campus, we held vigils, we studied angry books by powerful women. We learned to speak up, to question. While we weren’t openly discouraged from following the path of our foremothers, the message was there.

  In the midst of this amazing environment, I held on to a deep dark secret. Rolled up in a clear plastic bag under my bed was a sweater. Robin’s-egg blue, with dolman sleeves, made from an exquisitely crunchy, lanolin-rich yarn from Sweden. The secret was that this sweater was only half finished, and I was the one knitting it.

  When the going got rough, which it did quite a lot during college, I locked my door, curled up on my bed, pulled out the sweater and knit a few rows. If anybody knocked, I quickly shoved the sweater under the covers so they couldn’t see it. Let them think it was booze or a bong or whatever typical college students were hiding.

  They say that the best way to entice a person out of the closet is to show them someone like them who is living a healthy, happy, open life without fear or shame. That’s what happened to me.

  One day my friend Emily Jane, two years my junior and three doors down from me in the dorm, showed up with a sock in her hand. A knitted sock, on four DPNs, whose heel she was in the process of turning.

  She was carrying it out in the open where everyone could see. There was no self-consciousness or even self-awareness about it. She was just turning a heel.

  Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “I knit, too!” Our mutual friend Hilair chimed in, “I’m working on an embroidered pillowcase right now.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” asked Jenny, my oldest and dearest friend at Mills, who lived a few doors up in the opposite direction.

  “Crafty stuff,” Hilair smiled.

  “Emily Jane is making a sock,” I said, watching Jen’s face closely for signs of shock or disapproval.

  “Cool!” she said. “I can’t knit but I do crochet. I’ve been making an afghan for my Nana.”

  Wait, what?

  And so, quite suddenly and without warning, we were all out in the open, discovering—much too late—that we each shared a quiet passion for making or adorning fabric by hand.

  You know what they say, out one day, marching in a parade the next. Naturally, we needed to proselytize. But how?

  We all worked as receptionists for our dorm. Most of us didn’t have bigger plans on Saturday nights, so we’d usually go down to the lobby and keep whoever was working company. We decided to use this time for the Saturday Night Crafters, dragging our projects out of hiding, plunking ourselves on the mustard-colored couches in the dorm living room, and proudly stitching away. I was quite the sight with my bad perm and baggy sweatpants.

  “Don’t mind us,” we’d volunteer to passersby, “We’re just over here crafting. We’ll be churning butter by the fire later if you’d like to stick around.” We wanted people to react more than they ever actually did.

  At the time, it felt liberating. We weren’t mocking our passion. We wanted to grab those legacy stereotypes and thwack them with a big sign that read, “No more.” After all those Take Back the Night marches, we were taking back the craft.

  All too soon we graduated and the Saturday Night Crafters disbanded forever. Emily Jane still knits, and I hope Hilair still embroiders. My Jenny died tragically in a car accident in 2004, so I’ll never know if she finished that afghan for her Nana or not.

  I still haven’t finished that blue sweater. It sits in the same plastic bag as it did in college. Time has marched on, fashions have changed, my skills have improved. I like keeping those blue stitches in suspended animation as a sort of tribute to the past, and to my friend Jenny whose own stitches were bound off far too soon.

  KITCHENERING

  YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT the knitter’s handshake? Two hands go in for the grab-and-shake, but at the last minute, they veer to the closest sleeve or band and grab it instead, while we ask, “Did you knit this?” Our eyes immediately scan the fabric for seams and joins, cast-on edges and edgings. We can’t help it, we’re wired to look for imperfections. A proper seam garners respect and admiration, even envy. Hastily worked, jagged, or lumpy lines are like scars—we know it’s impolite to ask how they got there, but we can’t stop staring.

  My history with seams hasn’t been particularly good. All my jeans used to be hemmed with tape, staples, or awkward steel safety pins that were always popping open and digging into my ankles. I avoided seams in knitting for years, instead churning out miles of garter-stitch scrolls disguised as scarves. Inevitably, I grew bored and wanted to make something substantial. I started my first sweater in 1988; its pieces are all done and still waiting for me to assemble them. The first sweater I actually finished was a fuzzy brushed mohair affair that had so many other problems, the sloppy seams just fit right in.

  Not until I fell in love with socks did I realize how serious my seam problem was. I learned to knit socks the old-fashioned way, working a top-down, flap-and-gusset pattern on four double-pointed needles. I was so excited about having turned my first heel that I temporarily forgot where I was headed. Once you reach the toe, no matter how you slice it—and we’ve come up with a lot of ways—you end up with stitches that need to be brought together. Because the space between foot and shoe is quite cramped and in a constant state of agitation, you can’t just staple the two sides together and hope nobody notices. You need something smooth and strong, and only one stitch does the trick. It’s called Kitchener.

  A little background: During World War I, Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener served as Britain’s Secretary of State for War. He assembled the largest volunteer army the British Empire had ever seen, his stern, mustachioed face appearing on countless posters above the words, “Wants You.” He teamed up with the Red Cross to rally knitters in England, Canada, and the United States. They cranked out countless handknits for the men fighting in the trenches. Legend has it Kitchener designed a sock with a new kind of seamless toe that promised to be comfortable on soldiers’ feet. That seamless toe technique is what we call Kitchener stitch today.

  A lo
t of people liked Lord Kitchener. He’d done remarkable things while serving in the Sudan. But during the Second Boer War, he used brutal scorched-earth tactics and sent 154,000 Boer and African civilians into concentration camps, which earned him many enemies. Kitchener died in 1916 when, while traveling to Russia for peace talks, his ship was sunk by a German U-boat. His life provided fodder for six books and movies, and his death prompted conspiracy theories that still linger on. A lifelong bachelor, Kitchener was also a collector of fine china and often surrounded himself with handsome, unmarried young soldiers referred to as “Kitchener’s band of boys.” Which is to say that Kitchener the person was as complex as Kitchener the stitch.

  For years, Kitchener the stitch eluded me. It has multiple steps that involve threading yarn through each stitch twice, just so, before letting it drop off the needle forever. The instructions are usually written in a mechanical way that tells you what to do without explaining why. If anything distracts you along the way, if you reverse the order of your threading by mistake, if the phone rings or your bus reaches its stop, you have no framework for realizing what’s wrong and fixing it. All too easily, you’ll end up with a toe that looks like a half-eaten ear of corn, which is what my first few toes looked like.

  I took those early failures as a sign that Kitchener was beyond my grasp. The next few years were spent trying to navigate seams by other means, like the illiterate person who learns to say, “I forgot my glasses, could you read that for me?” when presented with a menu. Since staples and tape were out of the question, I figured out how to flip my socks inside out, line up the stitches onto two needles, and marry them off, pair by pair, in what some people call a three-needle bind-off. I call it cheating. Sure, it looked reasonable from the outside. But inside the sock, my toes were unhappy about having to share their tight space with a rude, bulky seam of stitches. Every time I sidestepped Kitchener, I felt like a flop.