The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater

by Alanna Okun

  The Internet was what notified me about an event called the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival, which takes place in Rhinebeck, half an hour from where I went to college, and another called Vogue Knitting Live!, which takes place thirty blocks from my former office in Manhattan. I’ve gone to Rhinebeck for the past eight years and Vogue Knitting for the past four, and they’re the highlight of their respective seasons. The former takes place in a Hudson Valley fairground, replete with hot apple cider and herding dogs, and the latter is in the towering Marriott Marquis in Times Square, but they’re both designed to bring crafters together. (I’ve heard them each referred to as a “knitter prom.”) They feature classes taught by experts in everything from weaving to wool dyeing to how to make swants.2 There are dozens of booths with yarn, tools, and homemade knickknacks for sale. And everywhere, people meeting for the first time, hugging like old friends and checking out one another’s name tags. “Oh, right, I know you from Ravelry!”

  Also, yarn. Did I mention you can buy yarn? With money? All of your money? That’s really what I’m after when I attend these events; sure, it’s great to check out what new techniques people are using, and to say hello to friends who I only get to see once or twice a year, and to feel like I’m finally among folks who appreciate what I’ve done with a single ball of Malabrigo, who admire the disappearing cable on the yoke of my sweater, who understand this small but constant part of who I am.

  But real talk, it’s all about the yarn. I don’t know a crafter alive who can resist the allure of booth after booth piled high with warm, squishy goodness. All those colors! All that potential! Sometimes I set a budget before I go to Rhinebeck or Vogue Knitting, but I always manage to give myself a loophole the instant I spot an especially alluring splurge.

  Just don’t buy lunch this week! I’ll tell myself. That’s easily $50 extra right there, which is basically the same as $150, which if you round up is $200!3 God, you’re so fiscally responsible.

  Another thing the Internet does is make it easy to drop dollars on yarn even when you are not at a convention or in a yarn store. I don’t shop online too often because my MO is more “orbit the shop or booth for forty minutes while intermittently rubbing the yarn in question against various parts of my body,” but every now and then a digital yarn spree hits the spot. I’ve gotten a few duds this way—a rainbow best described in person as “clown barf,” a supposed “soft green” that turned out to be so neon it was difficult to look at directly—but the same has been true for yarn I’ve bought in a store, even after all that deliberation. It’s just like buying clothes, or picking someone up at a bar: sometimes you get home, dump it on your bed, and are like, Ehh, the lighting in there must have been bad.

  And as the old adage goes, where the Internet taketh away (my money), it also giveth (me a little bit of money, sometimes). I rarely knit for money, unless it’s a commission by a very close friend, because the materials are so expensive and the process is so time-consuming that if I wanted anything close to a fair rate I’d have to charge around $300 for a sweater. And I am not good enough to make a $300 sweater/the pressure overall seems very stressful/I like my friends too much to charge them like that and so if I want someone to have a handmade sweater I just give them the goddamn sweater.

  But! These problems do not extend to embroidery. Embroidery takes relatively little time and only a few dollars’ worth of materials, and thus has become my twee side hustle. About two years ago a former coworker posted on Facebook, looking for someone to make a custom embroidery for his roommate. I’d never done a commission before but had been doing samplers for long enough that I figured I’d give it a shot. Besides, I was in a period where I felt totally sick of waiting for someone to tell me I was good enough to pursue something that sounded interesting; I’d spent a large chunk of my school and then work life figuring that there were people who were better qualified than I was for projects or promotions or leadership roles, but I was always happiest when I put the horse before the cart and just went for it anyway. Dudes seemed to do this all the time to great effect. I don’t advocate faking it until you make it on, like, the operating table, but when it comes to stitching an inside joke and a doodle on a six-inch piece of fabric, lean the ever-loving heck in.

  When I’d given my friend the piece (and confirmed that it had already been gifted to its rightful owner) I posted a picture of it on my various social media feeds. And requests came … not pouring in, but trickling in, like a garden hose left unattended. Most orders came from coworkers and friends: a Lord of the Rings quote for a boyfriend, a song lyric for a mother, an embroidered array of gluten-full goodies for a hapless Celiac. I did a rush order for a colleague who had forgotten his anniversary; I did a fairly lifelike portrait of the Food Network chef Bobby Flay. I’ve done a few for people I’ve never met, mostly friends of friends or people from Twitter, and shipped them to Nebraska and California and Chicago.

  Some people know exactly what they want—a color scheme, a specific image—but most only care about the words and leave me to make up the rest. I worried at first that doing commissions would feel rote, even a little stifling, but it’s turned out to be just the right amount of restriction to make me get creative. I didn’t know I could stitch a tiny, perfect doughnut or Bobby Flay’s face until someone asked me to. How do I illustrate this quote I’ve never heard before? How do I write out names and words that mean so much to someone else?

  That’s the best part of doing custom embroideries: getting access to that kind of intimacy. Being the conduit, however invisibly, for someone I care about to say something of value to someone they care about. Nobody’s ordering expensive, time-consuming craft projects to tell their enemies to fuck right off; these are all expressions of deep love, even if they’re silly. One of my earliest pieces was for a coworker whose friend had said something ridiculous yet quasi-brilliant while drunk: “Why is it you only ever run into people you already know?”

  My coworker hired me to commemorate this almost-koan forever (or at least as long as the fabric and thread last). But even something so jokey and seemingly throwaway takes on a certain weight when it’s been written down on something more permanent than paper or a screen: I hear you. I see you. The things you say and do matter to me, and will be remembered.

  If the order is a lyric, I like to listen to the song while I work; if it’s a quote, I’ll find the clip or the paragraph, put it in its original context even though my job is to make a new one. I’ve absolutely teared up while making them: “I fucking love you.” “You’re my person.” And I’ve gotten ideas for my own pieces, for myself and for the people in my life. “The best is yet to come,” I stitched for Aude after a birthday and a breakup, surrounded by a bunch of small stars I’d learned to make for a recent commission. I document them all on Instagram, and sometimes even Twitter, and ask that my customers send me photos of the pieces in their new homes. I like to have a record of all these little records.

  * * *

  And then there are the people you meet. Not long ago, I met a girl I knew from the Internet. She’d tweeted at me, we’d emailed back and forth, moved it to Facebook, and then finally arranged to have coffee. She’d read some of my writing about crafting and anxiety and that’s why she’d initially reached out; she was starting a company, she told me, that used knitting as a jumping-off point to talk about mental health. Obviously I was all in.

  You get a lot of the same comments when you write online: “Somebody got paid to write this?” “Go home [your name or the name of the publication], you’re drunk.” “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” (This last especially when you suggest that perhaps readers might enjoy taking the time to make something with their hands.) You learn to ignore them, to occasionally gain insight from them, and mostly to consider them an annoying but necessary part of the ecosystem in which you choose to reside.

  But every so often you get a message like this: “Thank you for putting this into words. I thought I was alone.” These w
eigh so much more than the tossed-off, dismissive comments that even just one every couple of weeks or months can be enough to sustain you.

  And even more rarely, one of those messages turns into an actual connection. When Danielle arrived at my office for our coffee date, she had a gift. It was a pink-and-purple cowl that she’d knitted in a loose, ropelike pattern. I kept it on the table beside me, patting it throughout our excellent and far-ranging conversation. It had been so long since someone had knitted for me. This makes sense—coals to Newcastle, right?—but I think maybe other crafters are the people we should most want to craft for. I appreciated every stitch of that cowl, every minute I knew she had spent turning the yarn into a gift for someone she only knew through a screen. I wasn’t—I never have been—alone.

  Tools of the Trade

  When someone expresses the desire to learn a craft, whether it’s knitting, crochet, or whatever else, the thing that always seems to scare them the most is the prospect of picking out supplies.

  “So you need, like … needles?” they ask. I tell them yes, or a hook, and they look relieved—they knew, at least, that much. The rest should be a piece of cake. And then I have to bring up the concept of needle size (thin for lace and socks, medium for sweaters, thick for cowls and hats, but none of that is really a hard and fast rule) and materials (wood, aluminum, plastic), not to mention varieties (straight, circular, double-pointed), and the person is once again stricken, even more lost than before. I have to explain that it’ll be fine, it’s just like picking out the right ingredients at the supermarket; yeah, cucumbers and zucchini might look the same to the untrained eye, but once you know the difference you’ll be cooking in no time. Sometimes the prospective student listens and is mollified by this, but mostly they stay simmering at a low-grade panic until I agree to accompany them to the store.

  I get it; crafting is supposed to be this simple, meditative activity, and then all of a sudden there are all these factors involved. If someone were to tell me to pinch-hit on their baseball team or babysit their child, I would have similar difficulty figuring out what to pack in my bag—a glove, right, or some diapers? But how big is the glove supposed to be, and at what age are kids through with diapers, and then what do they do after that? Honestly, the sheer amount of stuff required to complete even the simplest task can be staggering, to the point where it’s a miracle any of us ever try anything new at all.

  Luckily, there are really only a few categories necessary to maintain a fairly steady crafting habit. Let’s start with a bag, because that’s recognizable to civilians. Most crafters have a bag to carry around their works in progress (WIPs) and to organize their other supplies. Some have many—a pouch for each individual WIP—but those people are much more organized than I am and also probably file their tax returns on January 2. Most, I would imagine, operate more haphazardly: a tote filled with other totes they call upon as needed, or a perplexing array of plastic grocery bags pierced with three different sizes of needles.

  That is my craft-bag method—I grab one when I’m running out the door and can’t stuff another in my alreadyoverflowing backpack, or when a project is especially delicate and shouldn’t have to share living space with the rest of the things I lug around (usually a makeup case, my glasses, my sunglasses, my Game Boy, a book, a phone charger, assorted jewelry I threw on before leaving the house one day and then decided was too much and never had the wherewithal to remove from the inner pocket and so it’s all tangled in an inextricable brass blob, and half a Xanax I mostly just like knowing is there). When I was young I was known for my bag, as much as you can be known for anything in the halls of an elementary school. It was a black canvas tote, screen-printed with the multicolored logo of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where I had not and still have never been but where one of my closest friends now works. (The world is funny that way.) My sister, Moriah, used to have a matching hat until she left it on a plane, ending her tenure as an outrageously adorable little acorn head who looked like she’d wandered off the set of an art-school remake of The Sandlot.

  It wasn’t the appearance of the bag that made my classmates smirk and my teachers smile benevolently, but the contents. Inside it I kept a variety of books, as many as six or seven at a time, so that whenever I finished the one I was reading I’d have plenty of options for the next. How could I know what I’d want to read in an hour, two hours, a whole entire school day? What if the ending of the book I was currently inhaling had a surprise twist that made me crave normalcy; what if the bus ride home jogged a desire for a mystery rather than a fantasy? Even at age eight I hated the thought of being bound, of not having control over my (however immediate, however minuscule) future.

  Occasionally I would make room in my bag for my knitting. I liked to knit during circle time and whenever my teachers read aloud. I wasn’t supposed to be doing anything else with my hands, I reasoned, so why not let them do what they wanted while my mind relaxed? Some, like my marvelous fifth-grade teacher, went along with it, but not all of them; in third grade, an aide called me out in front of the entire class, telling me to put that away, I was supposed to be paying attention. My cheeks burned and I thought about running from the room, but I stayed where I was and stuffed the yarn deep into my bag.

  I did not know, as a child deathly afraid of getting in trouble, how to say that working on that half-done scarf helped me pay better attention. The stitches kept me from fidgeting, from biting my nails and twirling my hair and staring at the clock. They kept me from doodling in my notebooks and in the margins of library books. They certainly kept me from grabbing one of the slimmer paperbacks I carted around and tucking it into my textbook, which I liked to do whenever I finished skimming whatever section I was supposed to be concentrating on. My bag contained half a dozen tiny promises that I would never be bored, that I would always be understood, even if the drudgery and the teasing at school got to be too much.

  Nobody makes fun of my glasses anymore (to my face), and my bag now contains more than just novels, but it serves the same purpose. It’s a safeguard. It means that no matter how long the subway is stuck belowground, no matter how tedious or tense the work meeting, I can still find a way to channel my energy. I wonder about the people who don’t have a bag. Mostly they seem to be men: they get on and off the train with their hands shoved in their pockets, earbuds nestled in their skulls, nothing to weigh them down beyond the miniature supercomputers they cradle like baby doves (which, invariably, do not have phone cases). I don’t know if I envy or pity people like this, unladen but also unready. Unconcerned, maybe. Unburdened. The rare times I walk around with no bag—coming back from the Laundromat, maybe, or a run that turned into a stroll—I’ve felt suspiciously light. But it’s a lightness that comes with its own weight, its own worries, as pleasant and yet as slimy as when I had my braces removed and slid my tongue over my untethered teeth for the first time.

  * * *

  Once you have your bag, you have to get your scissors. Not so hard, right? Every kitchen and office supply closet has these. But there’s a mundane yet dangerous allure to scissors, especially when you are little. This makes sense: they are most likely introduced to you as belonging entirely to the realm of adults. Even if you are a good kid, scissors beckon. (See: me at age five, cutting my then baby sister’s hair and hiding it in our toy box.) They live in cups on the teacher’s desk and in your parents’ miscellaneous-stuff drawer and in the hands of hairstylists. They’re like knives, but less scary; swords, but more real. At first you’re allowed to use them only in specific, supervised situations, and you must never, ever run with them. They have the power to make things less, and so they can impart it, briefly, to you.

  Now I am an adult, for all intents and purposes, and own at least five or six pairs of scissors, scattered throughout my apartment. When it comes to crafting, they mostly come into play at crucial junctures: in the very beginning, as you cut your fabric or remove the bindings from your new yarn; at turning points, when
you switch a color or complete a section; and at the end, when they really prove their worth. Scissors are for neatening up, for putting in order, for that final sprucing skim before a piece is finally complete. There’s nothing more unsatisfying than finishing a long knitting or crochet project when you’re out for the day and don’t have a pair of scissors on hand to tidy up the loose yarn ends; it just looks diminished and undignified, like someone who’s come home from a long journey and hasn’t yet had time to shower.

  If you have to use scissors at some other point, it’s usually a matter of triage: fixing a snarl, working around a snag, rescuing a piece that’s been crumpled in the depths of a bag it should never have been shoved into. For some reason, this happens to me most frequently with socks. Maybe because they’re small enough that I take them with me everywhere, or maybe because they’re knitted on double-pointed needles, so there are many times more tips from which stitches can slip off. Regardless, I’ve watched in mute horror as I plunge my hand into my bag and remove what looks like a dust bunny made animate, jaws clamped around the memory of my clearly-not-that-beloved project.

  In those moments, scissors are my kindest, firmest friend. They watch as I try in vain to rewind the ball of yarn, to follow what could logically only be one strand but feels more like five back to the point where it connects with the knitting. They say nothing as I tug, sit silently as I swear, and finally, when I say uncle, step in and with one motion sever the problem from my life. I salvage what yarn I can and rewind it in a calmer if diminished version of itself. I reattach it to the project and vow to weave in the loose ends later. I keep going.