The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting
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5. Untying knots.
Once you’ve had to face down a tangled skein of lace-weight silk that was too expensive to even consider cutting, you can overcome even the most stubborn shoelaces or headphone cords.
Body Talk
Bodies are the worst. They make smells and noises when you least want them to. They’re too big in some parts and too small in others (sometimes, bafflingly, in the same exact parts) and they host a buffet of aches, pains, sores, and general creaks. They break down and they break out.
They betray. They invite unwanted people and comments and judgments; they stand for who you are in a way that can feel so grossly inaccurate. Why can’t I just be that brain in a vat? you wonder on certain hungover mornings, trying to squeeze into a pair of pants that fit just fine last week but now sit in such a way as to frame that tummy roll that never used to be there in college, or maybe you just didn’t used to care.
* * *
Bodies are the best. They help you get where you want to go, and then sometimes when you arrive you can use them to sing or dance or have sex. When you least expect them to, they take over from your stupid loud brain. You can do this, they say in a voice far deeper and calmer than your own. You are more than this moment right here. Some of them can literally create new people! They operate in a thousand ways you can never fully understand, carrying you and swaddling you even when they are frustrating. Sometimes they let you down far too early; sometimes they chug along until it’s time.
“I can’t imagine living to ninety,” my grandma said on her last Christmas. “How many days do you have to brush your damn teeth?”
* * *
Bodies just … are. They’re sites of pain and pleasure, meaning and misunderstanding, deeply personal, deeply public, with you and against you and totally unconcerned with you. What they all require, at least where I live, is clothes. As if it’s not hard enough just to have a body, now you have to buy things to put on it in order to take it out with you into the world. You have to listen as you’re told, again and again, that you aren’t quite right, that you aren’t quite real, just because you can’t always pour your glorious whole self into an arbitrary series of fabric tubes (made by someone living on the same planet in the same year as you but who most likely isn’t making close to a living wage, designed and peddled and delivered to you by a faceless corporation that has no interest in your humanity besides the Red Sox debit card sitting in your falling-apart wallet, a corporation that does, in fact, benefit from your continued sense of incompletion).
I actually do like clothes, and for the most part I have the sort of body I’ve been taught deserves to wear them: white, thin, cisgender, from a comfortable background and a comfortable life. I can’t begin to imagine the struggles of people who have to contend with a society that yells far worse epithets than “Huge schnoz!” or “It’s amazing how you manage to rock both acne and wrinkles at the same time, Benjamin fucking Button!” (That one is courtesy of my own brain.)
Largely, I like the way I look. I like my shoulders, straight from years of choir posture, and my smile, even though it crinkles my eyes down to nothing in photographs. I like that my boobs are sort of small and my butt is sort of big; I even like my nose and eyebrows (both at least a size too large), which inspired mean enough comments to make me cry when I was younger. I like wearing fancy jumpsuits and crop tops, and winged eyeliner, and lots of earrings. I like doing my makeup every morning, those ten or fifteen minutes of confronting my own face and smoothing it out. I like arming myself gently, softly, against the onslaught of being in the world.
But I do still hear the ways in which I fall short, because I am not a brain in a vat. I hear them from boys and from girls, and from ads on the subway and shows on HBO and most of all from myself. I hear them whispered by my dimpled thighs and hissed by the flaps under my upper arms. I hear them emanate from dressing-room mirrors, where I’ve brought in ten items and can’t find a single one that doesn’t make my lower half look, to me, cartoonishly outsize.
“You could wear a paper bag and still look great,” my mom has told me throughout my life. I appreciate this more than I could ever say but it can be hard to hear clearly once the cacophony gets too loud. And for as long as she’s been telling me that, it seems, she’s been putting down her own body, even though she is the kind of beautiful I can’t wait to be.
“I’ll buy this when I lose ten pounds,” she says, almost as often as she reassures me. I don’t see where these ten pounds lurk, but I know that she does.
* * *
What do you do when you figure out the world isn’t made for you? Remake it yourself so that it fits. Or, at least, so that a small corner of it does. I was overwhelmed when I first started considering knitting projects larger than scarves, more involved than hats; every pattern I read stressed the importance of measuring, of checking the yarn’s gauge but also knowing exactly how many inches you were at your various parts. I’d adopted a sort of don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy when it came to my physical self. I knew how much I weighed, vaguely, but didn’t like to look at scales. I once told a friend that I sometimes liked to forget that I had a body, except as a receptacle to put KitKats in.
But once I started knitting and crocheting for myself I had to look head-on, or else risk a garment that either wouldn’t make it past my shoulders or would turn out too large to stuff under my winter coat.
The first time I really measured myself, I was seventeen or eighteen years old. I’d found a pattern for a simple pullover sweater with a floppy cowl neck, and bought purple silk-merino yarn that cost significantly more than it would have to buy the same sweater at the mall. It was straightforward knitting and meant to hang loose, with plenty of room for forgiveness on both the technical and physical sides, but still required that I stand in front of my bedroom mirror and wrap a tape measure around my chest, my waist, and my hips.
I stopped thinking, for a moment, about my body as anything other than the vehicle for this beautiful item I wanted so badly to bring into the world. I stopped thinking that it had to look or be anything other than what it was, because the sweater, somehow, would conform to its requests. My body had nothing to do just then with sex, food, pain, worthiness, or value. It was just there, and it was mine, and so too would be this sweater.
The type of pattern I picked was called a top-down raglan, which a decade later is still my favorite construction. You start at the neck and work your way down and outward, making a sort of chest plate–looking piece of fabric that is eventually divided into sections for your arms and torso. It looks distinctly unsweaterlike for a long time, but the real appeal is that you get to try it on as you go. If you decide you want your armholes looser or your neckline longer, you can make tweaks without needing to start over. (The alternatives, among which are sweaters knitted from the bottom up and in pieces that need to be sewn together at the end, are much less charitable.)
So that’s what I did. For three weeks I knitted, wriggling in and out of the sweater in front of that same mirror, making adjustments when I found that it was much too wide around the bust (typical) and when I decided I wanted it to be more cropped (also typical). When it was finished, there was almost no extra work to be done, just a few armpit stitches to graft together and some loose ends to trim.
I tried it on. Even though I’d known it would fit—that was basically the whole point of the exercise—when I popped my head through the neck hole and saw how it skimmed over my body, I was surprised. I guess I’d just expected something to go wrong, that either my knitting wouldn’t be up to par or I wouldn’t. Or worse, that it would be kinda-sorta right, one more item that walked like a sweater and quacked like a sweater but wasn’t quite a sweater, nothing I would want to wear beyond the threshold of my bedroom.
But this? This looked like a real sweater. And I was the real, solid, complete person who had made it.
* * *
There is such power in creating something designed to fit only you. It’s a
quiet fuck-you to any clothing company or magazine or person that’s ever made you feel less. I branched out into more-fitted clothes—tank tops, dresses, an extremely ill-advised pair of shorts—all of which required me to learn my circumferences, my lengths, and my preferences. I started to copy the drapey openwork sweaters at Anthropologie and the lacy crop tops at Free People, and to add little touches of my own: a knitted hem, a breast pocket. I created new patterns entirely; one sweater I made up as I went, switching between five variations of a particular reddish yarn according to however I was feeling at that moment. I learned that I am “short waisted,” whatever that means, and so, therefore, is every garment I’ve ever made. That’s just how they are, the way they’re supposed to be. Their job is to fit me, and so they do. I wish that was how I’d been trained to feel about all clothes, that I wasn’t so constantly barraged with the worry that I was the one who didn’t fit right.
Of course crafting isn’t a cure-all for the poisons that seep in everywhere. So many patterns don’t include enough sizes; knitwear models are still models, and therefore all too often young and thin and white, not at all reflective of the range of people seeking to make things for themselves.1 Materials are expensive, and lessons are time-consuming and not always accessible. I try to be aware of where the yarn I buy comes from, to know that the people and animals involved in its production are being treated fairly, but I know that I slip. I get lazy; I get enticed by a sweater’s-worth of acrylic that’s almost definitely made from the same stuff as a tire. It’s the way I am at the grocery store, where cage-free eggs sound great but don’t ever quite seem to make it into my basket when the other, presumably cage-full option is right there and $2 cheaper.
Besides, “Just make your own clothes!” doesn’t solve any of the central issues: the way bodies are sized up and accepted or dismissed on sight, the way we’re taught to turn our hatred inward, all the ways we are shown again and again that we’re nothing but a collection of problems to be solved. Crafting doesn’t exempt you from the confines of capitalism—you’re still the one buying, spending, investing, hustling. If anything, it’s a moment of suspension, an exception that proves the relentless and insidious rule.
But it can help. It can remind you, however briefly, that you’re not fully at the mercy of the gears that threaten to grind you up. “Look what I made” isn’t just a cute little mewl for attention; it can be a battle cry. “Look.” It can be a command. “Look at me, as I am, as I want to be. I did this. I made this, and you can’t ever take it away.”
* * *
Handmade clothes get a bad rap. They’re often the punch lines in Not Just for Grandmas™ moments: the itchy, horrible sweater that the recently dumped roommate knits in between bites of Ben & Jerry’s, the crocheted vest that the art teacher wears every day of the school year without knowing the mocking names that the boys at the back of the class call both it and her. (Don’t even get me started on Ugly Sweater parties.) These clothes are unwanted, they’re unlovable, they’re awkward and earnest and show a certain delusion on the part of their creator. There are already plenty of clothes in the world, these portrayals argue; who asked you to bring in more? Sit down and be quiet.
This premise is flawed in too many ways to count, not least of which is that (a) crocheted vests are dope and I wish I had one and (b) there are limitless cute/cool/strange/slutty/cozy patterns out there, plus an extra infinity in the minds of people who don’t work from patterns at all. And contained in this critique is, again, the tacit idea that clothes (and food and homes and so many other things that fall under the nebulous banner/market category of “lifestyle”) are frivolous, something that should be beneath concern for anyone who’s smart or important or serious. And, yeah, nobody’s going to knit the cure for cancer, but nobody’s going to score a touchdown that cures cancer either.
I always used to hate the idea of “expressing yourself”; for some reason it reminded me of, like, little kids on the Disney Channel wearing red-tinted sunglasses and dancing on a giant keyboard, this loud and garish assertion of Self that didn’t actually have much to do with the slippery core of you. But I realize that’s what I’m arguing for here, what I fight for every time I decide to put something new in the world, every day that I opt to wear something that I saw through from idea to materials to completion. I want people to ask me about my sweaters and tank tops; I want them to know that’s the sort of person I am, that I have this extremely minor superpower even if they think it’s weird or dorky. This is how I choose to spend my time and my brain space, and I want my physical being to reflect that, at least every once in a while.2 It feels like a better use for my body, at any rate, than just as something to lug around and resent.
And look: it’s not that serious. You don’t have to wage a war every time you choose a ball of yarn, and you certainly don’t have to love something just because someone made it. (This goes double if it’s a hand-me-down.) Or even if you made it. I’ve knitted so many ugly sweaters! And not because I was going to some stupid Christmas party! The gap between expectation and execution gets in the way, or I run out of steam halfway or sometimes 95 percent of the way through, or it turns out that there is approximately one a day per year when the weather is suitable for a wool-blend crop top. I don’t think these pieces are politically useful art or even that anyone should ever want to wear them, let alone me.
But I’m so glad I took the time to make them, that I dreamed up a new idea or saw a picture of a girl in a lacy tank top or an off-the-shoulder sweater and thought, Hey, I could pull that off. And that I did pull it off, in both senses. I have this insane fantasy of knitting my own wedding dress to my exact specifications, of making hats for my future babies and the babies of everyone I love, of covering every inch of my home, wherever that may be, in needlepoint samplers and crocheted floor poufs and blankets that only exist because I decided that they should. I want to make the whole world, but that gets so daunting. And so I start with me.
Words They Need to Invent for Crafters
1. The paralysis that kicks in when you have such beautiful yarn or fabric that you’re scared to start making something, because what if you can’t do it justice?
2. The proud but irritating moment when a project becomes too big/heavy/precious to take anywhere, and so the only place you can work on it is at home.
3. When you make a “typo” in an embroidery and only realize once it’s too late.
4. The blood-boiling rage of reaching an especially fiddly part of a project and then the phone rings or somebody starts to talk to you.
5. The blood-boiling rage of someone you don’t know or like very well asking, however jokingly, if you will make them something.
6. The blood-boiling rage of being told that crafters are supposed to be a calm bunch and therefore should not experience blood-boiling rage.
7. That tiny little mistake you know that nobody else will ever notice but that you can’t look away from.
8. The suffocating silence at the end of the podcast or audiobook you were crafting alongside for hours or weeks.
9. When you lose a sewing needle in your bed and can’t find it, but you know it’s there, lurking, waiting to stab you when you least expect it.
Second Sock Syndrome
“What happens,” a friend once asked me, “when you finish one sock and do not want to knit the other?”
She had knitted one of a white-and-blue pair and was too annoyed to go on to the next. She thought it was lumpy and ugly, didn’t like how the colors of the yarn had pooled rather than striped. I suggested that she punch through and just make the second one anyway, because having a pair would be better than having just one, and also why not? But we both knew that sock was going to remain the only one of its kind.
* * *
Like the Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater, this is a common enough condition to have a name (although a far less sexy one): Second Sock Syndrome. It can afflict any knitter regar
dless of skill level, and any would-be pair of socks, even ones that aren’t a disappointment. Occasionally it strikes mittens, leg warmers, booties, or other twosomes, but it rears its head overwhelmingly in the presence of socks.
This epidemic is partly due to the fact that making even just one sock is hard. They’re my all-time favorite project to knit, portable and customizable and with enough distinct stages to keep it interesting, but I can only manage a pair every half a year or so without succumbing to sock fatigue. (Not to mention the fact that they’re ridiculously difficult to care for if you don’t use yarn that can be put through a washing machine; it’s fine to hand-wash a cardigan every now and then, but foot stink is tough to scrub out.)
And the other part, I suspect, is that socks have a sort of mythic quality: it’s hard to believe that they can be made in the first place. They’re such a quotidian object that it seems more likely for them to grow on vines somewhere or be chipped from the walls of a mine. But they’re also the quintessential knitted item, immortalized in the hands of cartoon spinsters and requested by even the most remote strangers—“Ooh, will you make me socks?”—within minutes of finding out you are, in fact, a knitter. I knew I was a boring, terrible adult the year I started requesting expensive woolen socks for Christmas and Hanukkah (you can’t make them all yourself). Eight-year-old Alanna would be furious with me.
* * *
Here is how you make a sock. You can begin knitting from either direction, the toe or the leg opening. I tend to go for the latter, because it’s how I first learned, but toe-up is generally regarded as the best way—if you run out of yarn, you can just make the sock shorter in the cuff, instead of starting over or switching to a different yarn. But I like to live on the edge.