by Alanna Okun
“Where’s Aude?” people ask when I show up to parties without her. We tweet at each other all day long even though we should be doing our jobs, even though we could just as easily text, even though we know it’s irritating as hell. We still like to put on a bit of a show. We still feel so relieved to have found ourselves living solidly in our lives, and to have found someone who can see the other so clearly, that we have to say the words aloud and often to make it feel real.
* * *
One day, a few years into our grown-up lives, Aude asked me to re-teach her how to knit; she’d learned when she was younger, she said, but had fallen out of practice.
I’ve taught a lot of people how to make a lot of things: eight-and nine-year-olds at the performing arts day camp where I spent a decade of summers, coworkers during work hours and outside of them, friends sprawled on blankets at the park near my apartment. It’s how I cement old friendships and establish new ones. It’s a more diffuse identity than I had in school but I’ve come to like being known in this way—as the person in the office who can fix your button if it pops off, as the one you email if you want an embroidered song lyric as a last-minute wedding gift, as the triage nurse who can fix a dropped stitch or reassure you that no, you’re totally right, just keep doing what you’re doing. It means that I have a place and a purpose, and that I am, in some small way, needed.
Aude brought over deceptively beautiful brown alpaca yarn and a set of circular needles. I showed her how to cast on, and how to do the knit stitch, and how to reverse it in order to purl. There was some swearing, but not like during the embroidery, because in knitting there are fewer opportunities to draw blood. We drank a lot of wine. By the time she left, she had the beginnings of a cowl.
She gave that first cowl away, and the next one too. I went on to teach her youngest sister, who took to knitting in a way Aude never did. That’s fine—Aude has her drawing, which she does in small moments at bars or on lazy weekend afternoons. Whenever I see her pages and pages of work I feel this shock tinged with recognition, the same way you’re surprised when you walk past a surface you didn’t realize was mirrored and catch your own reflection. She draws small, everyday things: a woman waiting for the subway, a tipped-over trash can on a street corner. Each picture has its own quiet, intense energy; you can’t look at them just once.
One year she drew her legs every single day, sometimes in painstaking detail, sometimes in a few quick strokes. Every now and then a part of my leg or skirt made it into a drawing. I liked spotting them in her notebook. Oh, that’s right, I’d think. That’s where I am.
* * *
I finish embroidering the “Player” pants for her in that small boutique, mostly to keep her from shouting any more profanities but also because I love doing it, and I love her, and she wants them to exist. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.
After leaving, chances are we spend the day in our usual manner: wandering around the city, popping in and out of thrift stores, splitting beers and burgers, seeing our other friends and staying at parties for no longer than fifteen minutes each. Maybe we swing by one of our houses, for naps and showers and a moment of shared quiet before reentering the world. Maybe we go our separate ways and plan to meet up again later. My days with Aude run together, because there have been so many and because there will, with any luck, be so many more.
Sixish
I have plenty of ways to tell time. In the roughly four hundred square feet that my home comprises, I have an oven, a microwave, a computer, an iPad, and a phone, all of which prominently and insistently display digits whenever I look at them. (To varying degrees of accuracy—has a microwave clock ever, in the history of time, really been right?) I own two physical calendars at home and one at work, not to mention the Google calendar that syncs to all my iDevices and carves up my days into neat, hour-long chunks. But there are times when I crave something less neat, less harsh, less broadcast to me by an unfeeling satellite millions of miles away. I want a method of measuring that is warmer and that is mine. I want not six, but sixish.
This is, of course, a little ridiculous. Six is how you board a train before it departs and how you and your friend arrive at a restaurant when you both agree to. Six is how school works, and jobs, and any part of society that requires more than one person to do a task at a given moment. Six is for grown-ups, while sixish patently is not.
But being a grown-up can be such a drag. I’m not scared of time, exactly, but I do resent it. It frustrates me, it restrains me, and then it lurches past without a chance to catch up. It forces me to contend with it in unappetizing dollops: how long until I graduate, how long until I find a home or a job or a person, how long until I finally one day arrive at where and who I’ve always wanted—always waited—to be? I’m impatient. I’m ready to be done. I’m ready to have done, and time is always the sluggish, impassive obstacle between here and there.
And then time can be so slippery and so violent. It can present itself as a doorway that you trip through and suddenly everything is different: someone you love is gone forever, something has been said or done that can’t be swallowed back down. You turn around and scrabble frantically at the doorway but it’s sealed itself shut, and time—so nimble and effortless just the instant before—is back to its stony measuredness, marching you farther and farther away from the place you are screaming to get back to. Time can take the small amount of stability, the tiny measure of happiness, the hint of control you’ve managed to stockpile and twist them right before your eyes. Time does not have to care.
* * *
So I decided to make a clock. Maybe forty-eight hours elapsed between when I had the idea and when I hung the finished product above my front door. And if time is something that scares you or stresses you out, you should try making one too.
It’s not as hard as it sounds—clockworks are easy to find. You can get a set on Amazon or at Michaels or at Jo-Ann Fabric, hands included, for around $8. It’s a steal, if you think about it: this little hunk of gears and metal capable of taking the measure of every day you spend worrying, every hour you spend ignoring the things you are supposed to be doing, every minute that means the difference between perfect spaghetti carbonara and sad scrambled eggs dripping off some noodles, all yours for the price of a glass of wine.
Once you have the mechanism, you need to make your clock face. It could be a hunk of wood or a paper plate. It could be one of those modern clocks that has no face at all, just the hands in the middle and numbers stuck to the wall around it. The face should be strong enough to support the weight of the clockwork, and not so thick you can’t poke through the little doohickey1 that holds the hands. It has to be something you’ll want to look at every morning and every night, and that won’t seem tedious or twee if you move houses or if someone else joins you in yours. It has to be a clock that you will still like even when time has passed. It does not have to be round.
My clock, however, is round. I made it out of an embroidery hoop, with off-white fabric stretched tight between the two rings of wood. (If you think you’ve never seen one before, just picture a Jane Austen heroine sitting in a drawing room, impatiently awaiting a suitor and trying to keep her hands busy. Yeah, it’s that thing.) Whereas I’m technically pretty good at knitting, I make up embroidery as I go; my stitches are uneven and the backs of my hoops look like a convention of multicolored spiders was massacred without warning. I never really formally learned, mostly just played around with thread the same way I did with yarn, although I once attended a craft camp for grown-ups in Brooklyn and had my form corrected by an extremely wonderful teacher I’m still in touch with to this day.
And so I stitched the numbers around the edges of the clock, spelled out in lowercase—“one,” “nine,” “eleven”—in my own friendly, crooked handwriting. I attached the clockwork through the center (had to MacGyver a backing out of the cardboard Amazon box it was delivered in) and hung it above the door of my apartment. I like the softness of the thread alongsi
de the straight edges of the clock’s hands. I even like that the numbers aren’t evenly spaced, because I eyeballed their placement. Six is definitely not directly across from twelve, but it’s close enough. Sixish.
* * *
I’ve made maybe a hundred embroideries in the past seven or so years. I started off stitching expressions I liked—none of that “Home Is Where the Heart Is” stuff but odd little lines or sayings that stuck in my craw. The first was something I heard in an introductory art history lecture, a sentence attributed to Cézanne: “With an apple I will astonish Paris.” I didn’t totally know what it meant (I was busy crocheting my college boyfriend a sweater and playing a word game called TextTwist on my laptop), but I liked the way the words fit together, confident and surprising and exploding one after the other.
Not long after, I read this Carl Sagan quote, a favorite of nerds and coffee mugs: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” It only made sense to embroider each of them onto its own hoop, along with a third, simple picture of an apple. I absolutely misconstrued both quotes—I took my tableau to mean “I can do anything, including take over Paris and the universe while making A+ apple pies,” which is the epitome of liberal-arts freshman-hood—but that’s almost part of the point; with embroidery, you’re capturing something free-floating and sitting with it, placing it in a new, soft context. I’m not saying you should go around misinterpreting famous thinkers, but there is something to be said for making something yours. Either way, I’ve taken the three hoops with me everywhere I’ve lived since then.
Now I make embroideries for my apartment the way some people get tattoos. (Although one is more permanent, both involve needles and sometimes bloodshed.) I’ve made reminders for roommates:
Don’t forget:
Keys
Phone
Wallet
Recycling
And just for myself:
Do less:
Drinking
Worrying
Self-flagellating
Do more:
Knitting
Writing
Yoga
Being here now
When Marina died I stitched my favorite quote of hers, the last few lines from a poem she wrote at school: “Everything is so beautiful and so short.” There was no quote for Jamie, so when he died a year later I just moved hers right next to my bed. It didn’t make them feel any closer, but it helped to know that I wouldn’t forget.
And then not so long ago I tried an experiment. I was in an especially anxious period and noticed that my usual brain-yelling was coming through more clearly than usual, coalescing into repetitive anti-mantras: “Don’t feel that.” “You are not enough.” “Why you?” They took up so much room in my head and, what’s more, they were boring, swirling around again and again and again. I thought that maybe if I could pin them down, like an old-timey butterfly collector, these words would lose some of their power.
So I treated them the way I did any other song lyric or famous quotation. I wrote them out in pencil, on fabric stretched across a variety of hoops, and one by one I embroidered them. There were seven in all. Each took about an hour to complete, which was exactly enough time to get so thoroughly sick of whatever was written in front of me that it had to shrink, had to be stripped of its context. They seemed ridiculous, these things I said to myself; some of them even directly contradicted each other. How could “YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH” reasonably hang on a wall beside “YOU ARE MUCH TOO MUCH” and make any kind of sense?
I enjoyed dressing them up in swirly fonts and studding them with tiny stars and flowers. I liked taking this amorphous, menacing collection of voices that thrived in the darkest part of my brain and forcing them into the open. There, they shriveled.
It didn’t solve anything, of course—if I’d discovered that an hour of embroidery could fix the insidious ways we dismantle ourselves, this would be a very different type of book, and I would have a lot more money and a much nicer apartment—but it brought some of my fears down to eye level. Projects, even the kind that are not so emotionally loaded, always feel smaller when they’re done, when you’re not obsessing over individual components anymore. The same is true for spans of time: happy periods, mourning periods—all of them flatten when you can look back on them from arm’s length, when you can hold them in your hands and stick them to the wall, when you can look at them in the context of your life.
* * *
Before the clock, I’d never used embroidery to make something with an actual function. All of my pieces, even the ones on which I fought miniature battles, were meant to be decorative, hung over doorways or propped up on desks. The clock wasn’t like the anti-embroideries, where the very process of capturing those words was enough to sand down their edges, at least a little. A second is still a second; a minute is still a minute; a week still feels way too long and a year still feels much too short. Some fabric and thread were never going to change that.
If anything, it’s a reminder. (A very literal one: even if it’s imprecise it still lets me know when I am most definitely going to be late to work.) It ticks away in my quiet apartment but its pulses aren’t unkind. It’s a little goofy, a little lopsided, like if Don Quixote had painted flowers on the blades of the windmills instead of charging toward them.2 Just because you can’t defeat something doesn’t mean you can’t make a wry sort of peace with it. And it reminds me that even if I can’t ask the world to be less rigid, less unforgiving, I can ask that of myself. I can stop getting so angry when someone is twenty minutes late or takes two hours to text me back, can cease thinking of them as uncaring or careless when really the only true culprit is life, and also the New York City subway system. I can stop myself from panicking when I do the same in turn. I can learn to sit with the moments I have instead of hoarding them, worrying there won’t be enough for later. I can, if I choose, if everyone else agrees—and so far, they always do—make plans for sixish.
Things I Do Wrong, at Least as Far as Crafting Is Concerned
1. Hold the yarn.
There are all kinds of methods for how to wrap yarn around your fingers while you knit or crochet, so that it’s right there every time you need to make a stitch (that is, fairly frequently). There’s the English style and the Continental/European style, which both sound like they involve a salad fork and a hostile takeover. I do not do either of them. Instead, I sort of just let the yarn … hang. When I need it (again, roughly twenty times a minute) I pick it back up and toss it over my needle. This is, obviously, extremely inefficient, but each time I’ve tried to teach myself the “right” way I find it so slow that I get frustrated and revert to my incorrect yet familiar method. I can do it quickly and without looking, so I think this is about it for me. I wish I could remember exactly how my grandmother held her yarn—not so I can blame her for teaching me that way, but so I can know if this slapdash approach of mine at least has some history. Maybe I’d like it more if I knew it was something we shared.
2. Check gauge.
Ha-ha. Um. So, this is what you’re supposed to do every time you knit or crochet something new: make a small test patch with the yarn and the needles or hook the pattern calls for, so you can make sure you’re getting the right number of stitches per inch and adjust accordingly, before you plunge into the thing itself and it becomes much harder to go back and correct such an overarching mistake. Some dedicated crafters will even launder their sample so they can see how it’ll shrink or stretch. This doesn’t matter so much when it comes to items with forgiving dimensions (blankets, bags, scarves) but in the case of fitted pieces like tops, it’s crucial. And I hardly ever do it! At all! When I want to start a project, I just want to start, goddammit.
It’ll work itself out, I think, cavalierly casting on 240 tiny stitches that will all have to be undone if it turns out that I hold the yarn tighter than the pattern’s author did. And here’s the thing: it usually does work out. Or at least, I’ve conveniently bl
ocked out the dozens of times I’ve had to start over. But you should check gauge. Don’t be like me. I am bad.
3. Listen to directions.
“Ugh,” I say when confronted by an especially annoying pattern feature, like short-row shaping at the bust. (It’s hard.) “Do I have to? I’m not going to.” And then, weeks later, as the garment in question hangs down my front like an expensive silk-merino potato sack: “Damn, this pattern really should have included some short-row shaping at the bust.”
4. Laundry.
I am usually much too scared to wash any of my pieces even when the yarn is specifically designed for you to do so. This means that they all smell, at best, like a sheep sheltering from the rain, and at worst like a sheep sheltering from the rain inside a locker room.
5. Neatness.
My embroideries in particular look terrible from behind. They’re riddled with tangled threads, their edges haphazardly tamped down with whatever Elmer’s-ass glue I happen to have on hand. I try to at least trim all the unsightly bits when a piece is meant for someone else, but if it’s for me, forget it. I tell myself that there’s something subversive about a craft that looks even and measured from the front and chaotic from the back; that’s human nature, right? What we see on the surface has so little to do with the messy process it took to get there, and all my loose threads are a testament to that effort. They should be celebrated, not hidden! They’re the real craft, the real art! But really that is just me justifying my laziness after the fact.