The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater_Essays on Crafting

by Alanna Okun

  But my unfinished blanket will one day be done. I know this the way that I know the sun will come up tomorrow. For one thing, I’ve already invested enough time and money in it that there’s no turning back now, and for another, I want it very badly. And for another-nother, I want to prove to myself that I can really do it. My friend Anne ran the New York City Marathon; she trained all year. Aude and I went and stood along the route in Brooklyn and then took the subway to the finish line in Manhattan. We complained about the cold and our aching feet the entire time, even though we were not the people responsible for running 26.2 miles.

  This blanket is my little marathon—a half, maybe. Not something that can be completed in a week or even a month, something that feels insurmountable if you try to envision the whole thing at once but that can be accomplished bit by tiny bit. Plus, I get to sit on the couch while I work on it.

  * * *

  I was always a little surprised when I’d remember that I hadn’t made a blanket before, beyond those first stabs at doll-sized home decor. I’d made everything else that I could think of, often just to figure out how a thing was constructed, or to prove that I could: a reusable market bag for the grocery store, a floor pouf stuffed with towels that’s so heavy I can’t lift it with one hand, a saggy off-white bikini top that makes my boobs look like day-old pancakes. The allure of these experiments was in the process, and in the taming of an everyday object—oh, so that’s how you seam up something that weighs as much as a medium-sized dog; that’s how you shape fabric intended to house a round rather than a tubular part of the body. I hold on to these projects not because I need yet another eco-friendly method of carrying tomatoes in the tote bag capital of America, but because they’re physical reminders of problems I’ve solved, techniques I’ve mastered.

  So, then, a blanket: at its heart it’s the most elemental item you can make. Just endless rows, back and forth, ad infinitum. Shouldn’t that be no problem after hours spent figuring out wrap-and-turns and three-needle bind-offs? And hadn’t afghans been my grandma’s bread and butter, my earliest example of what someone armed with a crochet hook and a pile of yarn could do? I’d grown up surrounded by homemade blankets—my bubbe (my father’s mother) made them too, knitted our family a beautiful throw that was lined with red and gold fabric on one side. This might have meant that I didn’t feel the need to add another to the pile, but that had never stopped me from making more scarves, sweaters, and socks than a single reasonable person could ever wear in a lifetime.

  Maybe part of my blanket aversion had to do with the simplicity, that omnipresence—a blanket didn’t seem like a worthy challenge. Sure, it would take approximately forever, but there were no interesting problems to be solved in stitching row after row. Besides, you can’t wear a blanket out in public and smile benignly at cries of “You made that?!” A blanket has to live in one place.

  * * *

  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been a lover of blankets. All three of us kids had special ones. Mine was pink and patterned with sheep on one side (I like to think it was a harbinger of the many thousands of dollars I would grow up to spend on wool) and quilted in white on the other. It was the kind of soft that sticks to your skin even after you’re done touching it.

  I called it my blankie and carried it around everywhere, along with an old stuffed lion named Gloria. Gloria used to belong to my mother and weighed about eight pounds, which made sense when I accidentally (I think) sliced open her tail one day and found that she was full not of stuffing but of hard white beads. I have a distinct memory of sneaking Gloria into my bubbe’s pool. She sank.

  My blankie, though, was sacred. I liked to snuggle under it and wear it as a cape and use it as a cornerstone in my many forts—my favorite method was to unzip the cover of my comforter and nestle inside, cuddled up with my blankie and maybe a book in this dreamy, warm space. Even before I knew anything about fabric or yarn, I liked to create these tiny worlds to my exact specifications.

  And my pursuit of cozy has never been anything compared to Moriah’s. It’s practically her catchphrase: the shriek of “Cozy!!!!” accompanied by a dive for the squashiest couch cushion or the pile of fresh-from-the-dryer bed linens. Her cozy drive is as strong as a truffle dog’s, pointing her in the direction of oversize sweaters and elastic-waist pants that are somehow cuter than anything I’ve ever been able to pull off, plus a formidable array of Snuggies. Moriah collapses into her soft, safe spaces with an exhalation that sounds like nothing so much as relief.

  Her childhood blanket was woven, made up of thousands of pastel threads that grew flimsier with each wash. When she got older, Matthew inherited it, in the classic tradition of third children everywhere. But he managed to make it his own. He christened it his “may-may” and put my blankie commitment to shame, taking it really, truly, appallingly everywhere. You could tell where it had been because it started to disintegrate, leaving a few trailing threads (“may-may strings”) in its wake. Once, our family went on a trip to Puerto Rico and slept on a sailboat, and when I looked out at the sea the next morning I saw a cluster of may-may strings caught on a piece of rock, fluttering in the salty breeze.

  When his may-may became little more than a shred, Matthew transferred his affections. He adopted a beautiful, understated throw from Restoration Hardware that our mother had intended for use in the living room, and spent his remaining blankie-loving days carrying it around. He’s outgrown it now but when I picture his bedroom I still superimpose on it that lovely, muted blanket, totally at odds with his Pokémon-patterned sheets.

  Those pieces of fabric were as much a part of us, for a time, as our hairstyles or our sandals. They meant we were protected, that even if things on the outside were scary or overwhelming we could still envelop ourselves, could block out the sound and the light. Where does that impulse go once you’ve outgrown its container? Into relationships, into apartments, into a ceaseless march of craft projects?

  * * *

  I decided to make my blanket in my old apartment, in my old relationship, right as I was beginning to strain at the edges of both. I spent hours fantasizing about what a solid, solo life could look like and always came back to this hazy idea of warmth, of hunkering down and pulling the corners around me tight, needing and wanting nothing other than what I could give myself. Making a blanket seemed like the most literal possible embodiment of that vision.

  I bought cheap yarn since I knew I’d need a lot of it, more than I’d ever needed for a single project before. I chose a soft cotton in cream and deep pink and navy blue. A craft blog I followed had instructions simple enough for even my junior-varsity crochet skills. I was to start with a circle of six stitches—about the diameter of a nickel—and work outward, making what’s known as a granny square. Even non-crocheters will recognize granny squares: picture a blanket on a great-aunt’s couch or a vest worn by an especially zany art teacher. Chances are, it’s made of dozens of little multicolored squares all sewn together. They’re recognizable by how they sort of explode out from the center, a blue circle inside a yellow one inside a white square. Like an optical illusion with no illusion. Alone they make good coasters or washcloths, and together they form objects that are larger and more complicated than the sum of their parts.

  But my blanket would just be one granny square. A gigantic one, building row by row into a square large enough to cover my double bed, and then some. This pattern subverted the usual way of doing things by boiling it down to its simplest component. Every row would be slightly longer than the one that came before; I’d switch colors every two rows so that it wouldn’t get too boring. I would stop only once I had run out of yarn, and maybe not even then.

  At first, I treated the blanket like any other project. I carried it around in my bag and worked on it whenever I had a spare moment. But within a few weeks it required its own separate tote, and then after a few more it was too big to bring outside the house. It was like Alice (of Wonderland fame) after she scarfs down the “Eat Me�
�� cakes, her legs sticking out of the windows and her neck out of the chimney. I’d never before worked on a long-term project that wasn’t portable; occasionally sweaters become too heavy and floppy in their final stages as they wait for a sleeve cuff or a hem, but they’re still no more of a pain to lug around than, you know, a sweater.

  Because of its size, I’m forced to sit with it. I can really only work on it in one place, the couch, unless I want to drag it over to my bed. It lives in one spot and I come to it, instead of the other way around. It already looks like it belongs there, permanently draped over the arm nearest the window; if you don’t lift it up to reveal the gigantic ball of yarn and the crochet hook hanging off it, it looks like any other blanket. In fact, it acts like any other blanket; just because it’s unfinished doesn’t mean it can’t keep me warm while I work on it, my legs tucked underneath. Visitors to my house have complimented me on it, asked me if I made it, to which I reply, “Yes. I mean, I’m making it.”

  I crochet it occasionally, haltingly, when the mood strikes. I go months without touching it, and then there are weeks when I work on it every night when I get home. For a while I did it first thing in the morning, just a couple of stitches at a time, because I liked how large and grounding it felt as I stared down the rest of my day. It’s a metaphor, sure, but it also just is. That’s something I’ve always loved about crafts: they can contain so much meaning, stand for so much more than they are, and still just be exactly their own size and shape.

  * * *

  I did move the blanket from its place on my couch, once. The Christmas right after my grandpa died and right before my grandma did, I brought it with me to Virginia. It was enormous at that point and thus required its own piece of carry-on luggage (they tried to make me “stow it planeside” on the second leg of the journey, which takes place in an airborne tin can that seats about twenty people, but I refused). I kept the bag at my feet, leaning down to pat it a few times like it was a terrified cat in a carrier.

  I flew on Christmas Day because it was cheaper and because that year felt different anyway. JFK was quiet. I loved it—the five-minute wait in the security line, the breakfast pizza (!) and Bloody Mary I ordered from a strange robotic iPad server in the middle of the terminal, how everyone, staff and fellow travelers alike, was extremely nice, almost conspiratorial, all of us stuck together in this in-between space.

  When I arrived in Roanoke, it felt like I had landed in a museum. It’s a tiny airport, with only a couple of gates and two runways. Security only ever takes five minutes, and there is now a single bar, which serves a Bloody Mary prepared and delivered to you by a living, breathing person. You can see from one end of the long hallway down to where your welcoming committee waits to greet you—your parents smiling and waving, your siblings off at the gift shop, your aunt with her camera, your grandfather tall and solid, your grandma ready to wrap you in her arms and comment on your hair color.

  But that day there was no one. I went down the escalator and out to the parking lot. Virginia is always warmer than New York and that Christmas was balmy, too warm for the knitted presents I had in my non-blanket-containing carry-on. My mother pulled up in her parents’ car and drove me back through the mountains to Blacksburg, where the tree was still waiting to be decorated and the Christmas movies were still waiting to be watched.

  “Why don’t we just have Christmas tomorrow?” someone suggested, and we were all grateful. We used to make fun of a family in our old neighborhood, who on one rainy Halloween called the other parents and tried to move trick-or-treating to the next night. You couldn’t move a holiday, we scoffed, the same way you couldn’t move an ocean. Besides, we knew how to deal with the rain: wrap your whole self in a windbreaker, or for bonus points incorporate it into your costume, and there’s that much more candy for you, the most intrepid trick-or-treater of all.

  But sometimes, it turns out, you do need to rearrange. You have to account for the fact that there isn’t a large, thoughtful presence anchoring the head of the kitchen table any longer. You have to be slower, to understand your own limits. You have to make new traditions.

  “Look,” I said to my grandma the following afternoon, on what we had now decided was Christmas. “Look what I’m making.”

  “Oh, that’s lovely,” she said, touching the familiar-to-her rows of double-crochet.

  It’s all because of you, I thought but didn’t say, because I guess I thought I’d have forever. All of it.

  The following winter, after my grandma had died too, we held Christmas at our house in Needham. We’d never even had a tree of our own before, and thus had no ornaments or lights or backlog of history to draw from. We gave only the gifts that were wanted, instead of the usual mountain: I got a kettle and an electric toothbrush, Moriah got clothes and boots, Matthew got socks. Without my grandma and grandpa it felt a little hollow, a touch perfunctory, as if we were going through the motions because we didn’t know what else to do. We were all tense; I picked a couple of fights. But there were glimmers of new rituals. Moriah made ornaments out of wicker and wood; the following year, the two of us made stockings for everyone, even the pets.

  * * *

  When I started my blanket, I didn’t know who I would be dating when it was finished. I didn’t know where I would live, or what my job would be, or which of my friends and family would still be around. I didn’t even know if I’d still want it! It’s a leap of faith, making something so large. You have to believe that you’ll still feel the same pull that started you off in the first place, even if you don’t know where it will go or who you will be. Even if you still don’t once it’s finished.

  The rows are so long now. Each side measures at least five feet; it’s rare that I finish a full round in a single sitting. And the size makes it almost impossible to determine progress. Increasing by two stitches every row means a lot when there are only twelve or sixteen stitches total, but practically nothing when there are hundreds. How are you supposed to know when you’ve made an impact, gotten further, are closer to where you finally want to end up?

  What I’ve realized is that you can’t, at least not moment to moment. When you zoom out, you’ll see what you’ve done—you can wrap yourself in it, feel the weight of it, even if it seems at the time like it’s made of thousands of nothings. All you can do is trust what you do know, what years of making things and fucking up and starting over have taught you. Each stitch is a step forward, even if you’re going in circles. (Or squares.) Each minute was well spent. Look at that: you made it.

  Notes

  Casting On

  1.  A cribbed version of a favorite quote of mine, attributed to C. S. Lewis; I have an embroidery sampler declaring it next to my front door.

  First Rows

  1.  My great-grandmother died peacefully at ninety-eight, still sharp as ever and in possession of a driver’s license.

  Not Just for Grandmas

  1.  Please read every time I type “millennial,” of which this will hopefully be the last, with as many ironic tildes and asterisks and quotation marks as you can fit in your field of vision. Actually, one more mention: here I primarily mean millennial women. When men are spotted crafting in the wild, it’s worth its very own stand-alone article.

  2.  Last one, truly, in the whole entire book.

  The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater

  1.  That’s not his real name.

  2.  For the blessedly unaware, Engagement Chicken is a recipe mythologized in the annals of women’s magazines, ensuring that your man (always styled thusly) will propose by the end of the meal if you (always a woman) prepare it for him.

  3.  Also not his real name.

  4.  A light-blue cropped hoodie from Delia*s over a purple camisole, which at the time was referred to as a “cami.”

  5.  In fact, they might well have begun as socks for me before I realized they’d be much too large to fit any feet smaller than Joe’s size 16s. He has since—no lie—gon
e on to model XXL socks in a print ad for American Apparel.

  6.  Probably everyone should have made fun of us after a cappella concerts.

  Learning Curves

  1.  I was assigned Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for three separate classes.

  Sixish

  1.  Actual technical term.

  2.  I’m borrowing again; my understanding of Don Quixote stretches only as far as LiveJournal, the online blogging community I belonged to when I was an early teen. There was a drop-down menu of emotions where you could choose how you were feeling on a given day, and “quixotic” was one of the options. I looked it up and liked it very much, the same way I like my apple trilogy.

  Knitting Myself Back Together

  1.  This is, bar none, the thing for which my friends mock me the most: “Alanna, you made sweaters for rocks?” They have a point.

  Body Talk

  1.  Probably the first article I wrote that I was really proud of was an investigation into a phenomenon that the knitting community had long been aware of but that had escaped the attention of the greater populace: former America’s Next Top Model contestants pose for knitting magazines in droves. It’s like there’s a funnel from the judging room to the casting couch at Vogue Knitting.

  2.  In one of my worst and most me moments in recent history, I whined to Aude that the cardigan I’d just finished knitting was too good, and so people just assumed I’d bought it. She snorted at me, as well she should have.