The Yarn Whisperer

by Clara Parkes

  A week before I left France, I went to a used bookstore to sell some of my books. While the clerk was looking through my collection, I browsed the shelves. A familiar voice came across the aisle. “Mais non, ce n’est pas possible,” it began. “C’est la petite Américaine … Cla-haa?”

  I glanced up to see Jacques—my Gauloises-puffing Jacques from that first summer. He had just moved to Nantes for a teaching position at the university. We quickly caught up. Sophie lived in the south with a boyfriend. They had a baby. He and Marianne had long ago split up. He was with a new woman. I’d like her, he said. I’d have to come and have dinner with them before I left. They didn’t have a phone yet, so I gave him my number and we parted. After a quick trip to Rome to visit family, I returned to find that my roommates—all of whom were also leaving—had disconnected our phone line. I left France for the last time without ever seeing Jacques again.

  It’s been twenty years since that visit and since I stopped trying to lose myself within someone else’s fabric. I like to think my life fits my fiber far better now. I’ve relaxed into an open stitch pattern that highlights the mohair instead of trying to squash it. But I still long to go back to France. Whenever I’m on deadline, I’ll have at least three different browser windows open, each featuring a charming rental cottage or apartment somewhere in France. The worse the deadline, the bigger the house and the longer-term the rental.

  Part of me fears that the Clara I’ve become will still be sideswiped, if given the chance, by her long-dormant French counterpart. I worry that my beautiful life may suddenly seem once-again insufficient in the face of that alluring, smooth, tightly twisted worsted world. Or maybe France has changed, too? Maybe its fabric has relaxed to accommodate more variety. Perhaps now it would accommodate my fuzzy halo, and the two Claras could finally become one.

  CHANNELING JUNE CLEAVER

  THEY SAY THAT beauty is only skin deep, that it’s what’s inside that really counts. All this is fine, well, and good, but what about pie? You could have the most exquisite filling known to mankind, but if your dough is a flop, nobody’s going to want a slice.

  For years, piecrusts have eluded me. One New Year’s Eve, I wrote a bucket list of things I’d like to accomplish before I leave this earth. Somewhere between “write a book” and “take off a year and travel to India,” I added “master piecrust.”

  When I was growing up, nobody ever seemed excited about crust. They never hummed as they rolled it out; there was always a sense of obligation and dread as they waited for it to tear (it always did) or stick (it always did) or otherwise spontaneously combust somewhere between the rolling pin and pie plate.

  My health-conscious mother made her crusts out of whole wheat flour, experimenting with various oils and “heart smart” alternatives to butter and Crisco. The pies of my childhood were always a bit dry, crumbly, slightly bitter in taste. Their tops were made from a patchwork of torn pieces that had been glued back together. And they were always served with the unspoken message, “Eat this damned thing.”

  Living in Maine in a house overlooking acres of blueberry fields, blueberries figure prominently in my summer diet. I’ve mastered blueberry crumbles, blueberry pancakes, blueberry syrup … but every time someone visits—and many do—the first thing they ask for is pie.

  How I’ve longed to be one of those June Cleaver people who can happily whip up the perfect pie at a moment’s notice. What’s that you say? A busload of tourists is stranded at the town hall, and they need two dozen blueberry pies for sustenance? Not a problem, let me just don my apron. Can I knit them some mittens while I’m at it?

  But the ominous nature of pie dough has always taken the wind out of my sails. When you hear people groan about something enough times, it’s easy to groan about it yourself—even if you’ve yet to give it a fair shot. People do this with knitting all the time. “Thumb gussets are impossible,” they say. Only after we follow the instructions, step by step, do we realize how incredibly graceful, logical, and downright easy a thumb actually is.

  Funny enough, I managed to write a book—three, actually—before I felt ready to turn my attention to pie dough. After multiple failures, each adding a new layer to the compost pile, I stumbled upon the golden recipe: the 3-2-1 Pie Dough from Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio. This combination of ingredients (flour, fat, and liquid) and technique produces the dreamiest piecrust known to man.

  It goes against all common pie dough wisdom. While everybody blends some mix of butter and Crisco, this one calls for nothing but pure, unadulterated butter. And everybody warns, “Do not overwork!” Yet I roll, fold, slap, and tease this dough to within an inch of its life. The final product? Airy and crisp, rich and buttery, both ethereal and substantial. Even when disaster strikes—like the time my nephew placed a ten-pound doorstop on the center of a particularly perfect blueberry-lemon pie—it still comes out beautiful, in its own way.

  Not only did Michael Ruhlman help me get over my fear of piecrusts, he also gave me a chance to overcome my fear of introducing myself to famous people. Not that I succeeded, but I certainly did try. I was in Cleveland to film yarn-related segments for the PBS television show Knitting Daily TV. I’d arrived at the airport with my suitcase of swatches and TV-ready jewel-toned shirts, my freshly lacquered nails shining in the light. The weeks leading up to the trip had been a frenzy of swatching, researching, and fretting.

  I was waiting for the producer and crew to arrive when I noticed another man waiting in the area. Our pacings crossed, and I glanced at his face. Without a doubt, I’d just walked past Michael Ruhlman.

  I am not a person who walks up to famous people and introduces herself. First of all, I almost never see famous people—or if I have, I certainly didn’t recognize them. I’m always the clueless one in the group who turns around too late and says, “Huh?” after the person has passed. Second, I don’t think most famous people would much care who I was. Third, and perhaps most important, I think everybody deserves a little privacy. When fate put me in an elevator with knitting luminary Barbara Walker, I let her dictate the conversation. (She was charming, and I learned that her husband does the dishwashing in their house.)

  But this wasn’t just any random celebrity, it was the man who’d helped me check an item off my bucket list. He’d been in my kitchen, helping me delight and harden the arteries of countless friends and family members. He’d made me a pie person. That deserved thanks, don’t you think?

  After a few more minutes of pacing, my nervousness was annoying even to myself. How different was this than frogging lace or turning a cable without a cable needle? Don’t let fear stop you, I told myself. Walk through it. You’ll regret it if you don’t.

  So I did. My hands sweating, my heart in my chest, I walked up to him.

  “Mr. Ruhlman?” I’d read that you’re supposed to address celebrities by their last name out of respect. Unfortunately, my voice was so quiet that he didn’t hear me. But the eye contact and my moving mouth made him stop. He looked down at me, taller than a redwood he was. There was no annoyance in his gaze, only the slightly concerned look one would give to, say, an escapee of an asylum.

  My mouth opened and out came, “I just wanted to thank you for your pie dough recipe. It totally transformed my entire relationship to pie.” Only mush those words together and say them in a very high-pitched warble. While we shook hands, I babbled something about how honored I was to share an airport with him. By now my ears were buzzing, my face an electric shade of fuchsia. I bowed a few times more before turning around and walking away as quickly as I could, narrowly missing a concrete pillar. I was mortified, yet also exhilarated to have faced a fear and wobbled my way through it.

  I know some people can feel invincible after bungee jumping or diving out of an airplane (assuming they survive) or even after cutting a steek for the first time, and that’s exactly how I felt. At that moment nothing seemed scary, not pie dough, not introducing myself to a hero, not talking intelligently about yarn to a m
uch larger television audience. It all seemed quite human and achievable and, for some reason, utterly funny. When you strip us all down to our essence, removing the pedestals and the frippery, we’re all just people.

  “Where are you?” my phone buzzed. It was the show’s executive producer. “We’ve landed. Heading to baggage claim.”

  Back to reality, but all those nerves and butterflies were gone. I tackled the show and had a blast.

  When I got home, you can be sure I baked a celebratory pie—this one a glorious cherry creation with a woven lattice top. It wasn’t for visiting friends or family, or for that busload of stranded tourists down at the town hall. It was just for me—and it was, on both the outside and the inside, perfect.

  PABLO CASALS, GRANDPA, AND ME

  FROM THE AGE of ten, cellist Pablo Casals began every day with a walk. Then he’d return home and perform two J. S. Bach preludes and fugues on the piano. “It fills me with an awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being,” he said in Joys and Sorrows: Reflections by Pablo Casals as Told to Albert E. Kahn. “Every morning of my life I see nature first, then I see Bach.”

  My paternal grandfather cut this quote out of a magazine and taped it to the downstairs china closet, right above his black rotary phone, partially obscuring the view of my grandma’s blue Royal Worcester breakfast set. It was directly across from a tiny powder room with red, white, and blue wallpaper dating back to the bicentennial. I passed that piece of paper for years before ever reading it, but the words have stayed with me.

  My grandpa was a disciplined man. Accomplished in his field, methodical to a fault. He ate the same lunch every day for forty years: one can of kippered herrings and two rye crackers that cost him “exactly twenty-seven cents” from the Navy commissary. (My mother refuses to acknowledge inflation when she tells the story. It was, and shall forever be, twenty-seven cents.) He wore the same few suits and ties until they were threadbare. One pair of L.L.Bean shoes kept him suitably shod for most of his retired life, just over nineteen years.

  Bach was his hero, and he had little tolerance for anything else. My father once played him a Puccini aria, and he snorted, “What’s her problem?” He didn’t have much patience for my own music, either, although I did try to introduce him to The Sugarcubes, not realizing that the album cover I kept showing him featured line drawings of naked people. Oops.

  My grandpa idolized Casals, a man he’d heard perform in Europe and whom he felt could genuinely interpret the mathematical beauty of Bach. I used to think my grandpa also held on to Casals’s words because they validated his own need for order, for the comfort of routine.

  In his work as a solar physicist, my grandpa changed our understanding of the sun’s ultraviolet spectrum. He was a scientist, his mind a sort of cell-based supercomputer able to process vast amounts of data. Taking leaps and trusting the unknown, those were completely foreign to his nature. Everything new had to be studied, evaluated, its merits and pitfalls dissected, poked, and prodded to within an inch of its life. He didn’t get elected to the National Academy of Sciences for waving his hands in the air and saying, “Oh hell, let’s give it a go and see what happens.”

  As an impetuous teenager, this drove me nuts. Who cares which air conditioner we get? They’re all going to break in a few years anyway. But my grandpa knew that if he crunched the data, he’d be able to figure out which machine really was the best. Toward that end, Consumer Reports magazines were always on the dining-room table. Appliance salesmen who knew him rolled their eyes when they saw him coming.

  One summer was dedicated to the question of whether or not my grandparents should replace the refrigerator on the porch. It was an ancient machine with a round condenser on the top and a heavy door that clicked when it opened and closed. It never kept the ice cream quite cold enough. But was it the freezer’s fault? My grandpa had discovered that the local IGA sold ice creams for half price if they’d been melted and refrozen in transit. Every night we’d pull out a rectangular box of Sealtest ice cream, always in odd flavors like rum raisin or butter almond or Neapolitan, and ladle runny scoops into our dessert bowls. The refrigerator was never replaced.

  I always felt that my grandpa was trying to control everything. But now I wonder. Just as planning a meal can be more fun than actually eating it, maybe he was more enchanted with the investigation of things than with the outcome. If he’d been a knitter, he would have made one heck of a swatcher.

  The word swatch dates back to the 1600s, when it referred to a sample piece of cloth attached to a batch of fabric being sent to the dye house. Today, a swatch represents a small piece of knitted fabric we create as a sample. We swatch (the verb) as practice, as a musician practices her scales, to keep our fingers nimble and improve our technique. The more you do something—whether it’s a B-flat scale or purling three stitches together through their back loops—the easier it becomes.

  Swatching is also the knitter’s equivalent of sight reading. It’s that first read-through when we meet a new piece and figure out how it should be played. Our answer comes in the form of a number, called “gauge.” Gauge is to knitting what scale is to the map, an utterly necessary device if you plan on traveling any particular distance. Gauge is expressed in terms of the number of stitches required to fill a certain amount of fabric when knit on a specific size of needle. It is the beginning of a recipe to help you transpose what you see into what you make, a knitterly version of the tablespoon, the measuring cup, the oven thermometer. In a world that’s entirely handmade, gauge provides a welcome compass point to keep us from getting lost.

  The smaller your gauge number is, the bigger each stitch will be, the fewer you’ll need in order to complete your project, the less yarn you’ll need, and the faster you’ll reach your destination. The higher your number, the smaller each stitch is, the more stitches you’ll need, the more yarn, the more time. Those tiny stitches are the Sunday drivers of knitting. Slow progress, but what a pretty ride.

  Gauge also functions like a speed limit. We’re given a number and told to follow it in order to enjoy the yarn at its optimal capacity. Nimble yarns can take curves at a speed that’d wipe out a bulky yarn, like a tiny speedboat can out-maneuver an oil tanker. Every yarn has its ideal range; almost every yarn lists this range on its label.

  We have our cautious drivers, those who clutch the wheel with both hands and always obey the law. Their eyes dart back and forth between road and speedometer, foot jamming on the brakes or quickly accelerating to maintain the exact speed. It’s not much fun to be a passenger in their car.

  The footloose and fancy-free knitters, new ones especially, get so caught up in the glory of being behind the wheel, feeling the wind blowing in their stitches for the first time, that they often forget about speed completely. The lucky are protected by a wide, empty road, a large and forgiving vehicle, that guardian angel who manages to get their attention in time. Which is why many of us started with the scarf, a humble rectangle equipped with training wheels and extra airbags to keep us upright and safe until we have a few more miles behind us.

  Early knitters had few yarn labels to guide them, no posted gauge or printed pattern to follow. The needles were placed in their hands at such an early age that a sort of instinct developed. It told them how to kick-start their stitches, how fast to take certain curves, when to slow down, how to swap strands after a blowout. Without having to think about it, their hands knew how to tweak their fabric until it gave the results they wanted. From this, they were able to measure and calculate, with simple hatch marks on a piece of paper, until they had the blueprints for their sweater. They didn’t rely on anyone else’s signposts or numbers, and the results were stunning.

  Today, we depend on the instructions of others—we let iPads guide our pilots, we work from recipes and patterns written by someone else. In the knitting world of “someone else,” gauge becomes the crucial promise. It is the synchronizing of watches before an im
portant mission, the sacred pact between leader and follower. “If you drive on this road at this exact speed,” it seems to say, “you will reach Peoria at 11:37 a.m. like I did.” Peoria is a sweater that actually fits.

  You can tell a lot about people by how they view swatching. For the eager knitter, the gauge swatch is the mother who yells, “Come back and get your raincoat in case it rains!” when you’re already halfway across the front yard. You want to get started on that glorious new sweater now, and the pattern is saying you have to sit inside and waste time knitting a square? Swatching is the ounce of prevention, the nightly flossing, the benchmark colonoscopy at sixty. Not very sexy, but highly recommended.

  Some dutifully come back inside and knit their square. But others keep running and elope, casting on for that project without really getting to know the yarn first. Is it smooth or splitty? How much bounce does it have? Will it want coffee in the morning, or tea? “Who knows?” they say. “I’ll figure it out as I go along.” Far more knitters go on a few dates, ignore the signs, and marry the wrong yarn anyway, convinced they can change it. Sometimes they actually can, but usually not.

  Because of my work, I am a serial swatcher, unable to commit and settle down. Every week, I meet a new yarn. I often fall in love and decide this is the one. I make plans to settle down. I choose my china, I wallpaper the nursery. But the clock keeps ticking, and soon a new yarn knocks on the door. I swatch it out of professional curiosity, I file my report, and soon enough I’ve fallen in love again. It’s exhausting.

  But there’s a third reason to swatch. Not for practice, and not to get your gauge, but for the very reasons Pablo Casals touched upon in his quote: to transcend. There is a calm, meditative act in forming stitch upon stitch, divorced of any particular objective or deadline. In transcendental swatching, the journey takes precedence over the destination.