by Clara Parkes
I wanted to say I was rehearsing at Carnegie Hall, or giving a reading somewhere, perhaps recording a new album. I knew that the moment I told the truth, that I was there for a knitting conference of all things, their faces would fall. We’d have a repeat of the elevator scenes, the telltale awkward silence before they could find a way to beat a retreat.
But then something unexpected happened. As soon as I told them the truth, the sound man broke into a smile, swiveled on his stool, and lifted up his pant leg to reveal the cuff of a perfectly executed, clearly handknitted sock.
“I told my mom, I don’t want any other gifts from now on. Just socks!”
PERKY SKEINS AND FAST CARS: Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES, the city of dreams, where palm trees and beautiful people bask in sunshine 365 days a year. With the exception of maybe UGG boots, LA isn’t known for its wool culture. It’s not a place you’d expect to find knitters in great number.
But in 2011, following on the heels of its successful premiere in New York City, Vogue Knitting LIVE extended its reach to Los Angeles. It was a test of how our grounded, joyful reality would rub up against the forever-young illusion of Southern California. As a Mainer, I welcomed a chance to see the sun one last time in September before winter took hold. That’s one among many reasons I and almost 100 other teachers, staffers, and volunteers said yes to the invitation.
Our home for the three days of the show was the crescent-shaped Hyatt Century Plaza hotel. The building is pure 1960s architecture, with balconies running along each floor like ruffles on a flamenco dancer’s skirt. It was built, along with the rest of Century City, on 180 acres of former 20th Century Fox Studios back lot. After opening in 1966, the hotel immediately became a hub for Hollywood’s glamor set—and it remained that way, give or take, until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Fast-forward to 2008, when new owners tried to put the (by now) tired building out of its misery. Local preservation groups sprang to action, and eventually demolition plans were scrapped and a kinder, gentler renovation got underway.
Just nineteen months after the hotel was rescued, we knitters took over. Our taxis and shuttles had to squeeze by a row of glimmering Ferraris that were parked in front of the hotel for the duration of the weekend. Men in suits swooped down to welcome us. They had earpieces with curly translucent cords tucked under their collars. Occasionally, one of them would mumble into his lapel. Although they were mostly summonsing cars from the valet garage, they conjured up images of Secret Service men during presidential visits. Presidents Johnson and Nixon stayed here, and Ronald Reagan was such a frequent guest that the hotel was nicknamed the “Western White House” while he was in office.
But that was long ago. For this brief weekend, knitters would be the guests of honor. It was a difficult dichotomy to grasp at first. The polished-marble, shimmering-glass lobby seemed filled with glamorous women tottering in impossibly high-heeled shoes, their bare legs looking Photoshopped even in broad daylight. They wore no wool, and their bags—barely big enough for lipstick and a cell phone—held no yarn. But glancing deeper into the lobby, I spotted the beginnings of the knitter invasion.
A funny thing happens when more than one knitter gathers in a public place. A solo knitter, presuming she is a woman, quickly fades into the backdrop like a potted palm or a quietly nursing mother. We are a cultural metaphor for invisibility—something Agatha Christie knew quite well when she gave Miss Marple her needles and yarn. What better cloak of invisibility from which to observe the evil-doings of the world? A single knitter is shorthand for “nothing to see here, move on.”
But when knitters gather, we become incongruously conspicuous. We are a species that other people aren’t used to seeing in flocks, like a cluster of Corgis, a dozen Elvis impersonators waiting for the elevator.
Here in our Century Plaza lobby, the flocking had already begun. The hotel’s well-oiled social machine of seeing-and-being-seen began to sputter as passersby slowed and did double takes. Here, just steps from Hollywood, were regular people doing something joyfully regular, and none of them gave a damn what the rest of the world thought.
The event was smaller in scale than its East Coast counterpart, with just over fifty classes and lectures. But the roster sparkled with the likes of Meg Swansen, Nicky Epstein, and Sally Melville. Deborah Norville, avid knitter and host of Inside Edition, was on hand for photos and autographs. A “Beginner’s Lounge” was staffed by Vickie Howell, then host of the DIY channel’s Knitty Gritty. A marketplace brought more than seventy-five vendors, big and small, to town.
I was there to teach my classes about the properties of fiber and yarn construction. At that time, my focus was squarely on wool. Southern California not having a big wool culture, my classes were small. They were held in converted guest rooms, skirted tables replacing beds, with only headboards (permanently affixed to the walls) to remind us of the room’s primary function. One class had just three brave, brilliant students. We sat in a tiny room overlooking the bottom of an air shaft, and I gave them the best class of my life.
At lunchtime, the more adventurous among us bypassed the lines at the hotel restaurant, slipping by the gleaming Ferraris to dodge LA traffic and visit the glitzy outdoor mall across the way. Shops opened directly onto terraces with padded sofas and lounge chairs in convenient clusters. Everything was open to the elements. This being September, heaters had already been wheeled out and set to use. No wonder the city comes to a standstill when it rains.
The glassed-in luxury food court was mobbed. I picked a ramen vendor and met up with Lorna’s Laces owner Beth Casey and her husband, both of whom hail from Chicago. We sat outside and let ourselves get sunburned, as East Coasters tend to do when in the sudden presence of sun.
Our serenity was gradually interrupted by cleaning staff struggling to keep ahead of the pigeons. Each time a table was vacated, it was a race to see who would descend first. The pigeons always won, wings flapping madly as they scattered fried rice and pizza crusts and bits of wilted lettuce onto the pavement.
Afterward, I slipped into Bloomingdale’s and briefly toyed with a wallet that cost more than my entire paycheck for the weekend. Then it was back to my hotel room for a quick nap before more workshops, more demonstrations, more laps around the marketplace. From my balcony, I could see glistening rows of bodies next to the pools below. Over the parking garages and office buildings in front of me was a flat sea of West Los Angeles. Somewhere to my left, barely a mile away, were the rooftops under which Fox Studios made its magic.
Different magazines have different focuses, some technique, others easy beginner projects. Over the years, Vogue Knitting has always put fashion trends first, showcasing knitted works of design icons like Perry Ellis, Calvin Klein, and Missoni. Fittingly, on Saturday night after all the workshops had let out, we gathered under a Hollywood-style tent for a gala evening featuring a presentation by Kaffe Fassett followed by a fashion show.
I’d like to tell you how memorable it was, how much I enjoyed Kaffe’s talk and how inspired I was by the garments on display, but the truth is that I arrived too late for a seat. I ended up ducking out a side door and joining friends for dinner. One of them, an Emmy-nominated hairstylist for television and film, was working on a popular TV show at the time. She regaled us with tales of what the real Hollywood world is like when the cameras aren’t shooting. Somewhere between appetizers and entrees, a soprano appeared out of nowhere and began singing an aria. Our waiter leaned over and whispered, “Don’t worry, they do this every week.”
The show ended at 4:30 PM on Sunday, and the set was immediately dismantled, as if everyone had been waiting for the bell to announce quitting time. Posters were yanked down, the black velvet dressmaker’s dummies stripped of their display handknits. Vendors packed up so quickly, some didn’t even bother taping up their boxes or removing their nametags. They stood on the curb, in the shadow of those Ferraris, guarding their boxes while someone else ran to retrieve the cars.
> I found a quiet chair in the lounge and pulled out my knitting. Some knitters lingered at other tables, too. We weren’t getting quite as many stares now. When my handsome young waiter-slash-aspiring-actor delivered my gin and tonic, he pointed at my knitting. “There was a huge store set up over the weekend,” he began, as if I’d missed the whole thing.
“Oh I know,” I said. “It just closed. Everyone should be gone soon.”
His face fell. “I saw some really cool stuff in there but I had to work my shift.” He paused and looked around at another lingering knitter. “Do you think there are any stores around here where I could, like, you know . . . learn how to do that?”
NAKED LOPI: A Knitter’s Journey to Iceland
I’D BEEN WARNED about the nudity. This was Iceland, after all, the land of Vikings and volcanic hot springs and Claudia Schiffer lookalikes. When you’re five foot nine and weigh 115 pounds, with a perfect complexion and body unaffected by gravity, why wouldn’t you want to strip naked and hop into a pool?
This little factoid had been so discretely tucked into an otherwise exciting weeklong itinerary of yarn fondling and sheep wrangling that I let myself forget it would happen, like that root canal you avoid by chewing on the other side.
It was thus, bleary-eyed and optimistic, that I landed in Iceland one bright September morning just as the sun was peeking over the horizon. Beyond passport control, I met the outstretched arms of Ragnheiður Eiríksdóttir—better known to American knitters by her nickname, Ragga. For several years, this charismatic knitting instructor and designer, also a psychiatric nurse, popular columnist, radio and television commentator, and sex educator, had been bringing a steady stream of knitters to her island. At last, after more than a year of waiting, it was my turn.
Soon enough we were on the road, the intense morning sunrise illuminating the cracks in Ragga’s windshield. A tiny handknitted sweater dangled from her rearview mirror, the Icelandic version of fuzzy dice or a pine-scented air freshener.
The airport is about thirty miles southwest of the capital city of Reykjavík. There is no town, really. Just an airport and open space and that feeling of having landed on a remote outpost. Nearby, I spotted a bleak clump of boxy buildings—imagine IKEA had designed 1970s prisons—that turned out to be an old NATO base. When it was decommissioned, the airstrip became the new airport.
Nearly half of the island is composed of lava fields, and the road into Reykjavík takes you smack dab through them. The smooth strip of Tarmac runs over what looks like a pan of brownies that someone tried to cut before they cooled. Here and there, a dusting of DayGlo-green moss provides contrast.
There was no, “aha!” moment when a cityscape unfolded, when I knew I’d arrived in Reykjavík. Just a gradual increase in traffic, more signs, more buildings. Roundabouts became traffic lights. To our left, a bacon processor adjacent to a mayonnaise manufacturer, or, as Ragga called it, the BLT factory. Hills of tidy, well-tended housing developments appeared on the right, a slightly cheerier, more verdant version of the Daly City you pass on your way into San Francisco.
Finally, I spotted a tall, jagged steeple. It looked like a cross between a Mormon temple and the ice caves in the original Superman movie. This Lutheran church is the largest in Iceland and is the country’s sixth-tallest architectural structure, commissioned in 1937 and completed in 1986. When you’re in Reykjavík, you quickly learn to orient yourself by it.
Ragga told me it was the Hallgrímskirkja.
“Could you repeat that?” I asked.
“Hallgrímskirkja,” she said more slowly.
I tried to repeat the sounds that just came out of her mouth. She laughed, shook her head, and repeated, “Hall . . . grím . . . skir . . . kja . . .”
I have a good ear, and I’d rather assumed that I’d be able to memorize a few key words to ease my way into conversation. I was wrong. Icelandic is a gorgeous, rich, complex, utterly impenetrable mash-up of Old Norse sounds harking back to the island’s first settlers in the ninth century. Vaguely familiar vowels and consonants are punctuated by guttural sounds, faint whistles, and trilly tongue flutters, sounds you didn’t even know the human mouth was capable of making. Written, it looks like a cat walked across the keyboard.
In the end, I would spend eight days attempting “thank you” (þakka þér, don’t make me try to say it again) without ever getting a nod. The closest approval I got was with a phrase that means, roughly, “I am a dumb tourist.”
There had been some apprehension leading up to the visit, mostly because Ragga had been MIA for weeks. I was left not quite sure of where I’d stay, or whether she’d be there to meet me, or whether we’d have a tour at all. At the last minute, she swooped into our inboxes with words of reassurance, but I still didn’t know where I’d be staying. In a hotel, on a couch, sharing a bed with one of my students?
But the news was good. Ragga showed me up to an apartment on the top floor of her building, just steps from the Superman church. Every fifteen minutes on the dot, the bells chimed, usually to remind us we were going to be late for something. Ragga’s internal clock has no hurry to it.
The interior hallway gave off that telltale musty fragrance of mixed lives. Strange spices, oils, perfumes, and another smell I finally recognized as feet. Each doorway had a small rack for shoes. Some were empty, others heaped. I imagined the boots piled high in winter. On each landing, lace-curtained windows offered a glimpse into the backyard world of rarely used decks, balconies, and yards.
It was early yet, not even 8:00 AM. After dropping off my luggage, we walked around the corner and sat on a bench outside Ragga’s favorite café, which was still a few minutes shy of opening. At that hour, it was mostly groggy schoolchildren, groggy parents, and cats. Lots of cats, gazing at us from beneath parked cars, sunning themselves in windowsills, trotting down the sidewalk, defiantly twitching their tails at us. Cats are everywhere in Reykjavík. The other thing I learned while on that bench was that Ragga didn’t have persistent flatulence, it was the abundant sulfur in the city’s water. All of Reykjavík smells, gently, discretely, undeniably of rotten eggs.
The leaves were just beginning to turn, and the air had that distinct back-to-school chill. By December, they’d have just four hours and seven minutes of daylight—versus the sixteen hours we would be enjoying. I found myself entertaining a thought I’d have again and again during my time in Iceland: What must this place be like in the winter? I pictured the streets shrouded in darkness and snow. It must be the perfect place to go after a bad break-up, to hunker down and wallow. Then summer comes, and by July they face the opposite problem: a sun that never truly sets. It just goes into dusk mode for a few hours before popping back up over the horizon.
By now, the café was open, so we wandered inside. The menu was an enigma. I did not see anything that could, if you removed the dots and squiggles, be guessed to be “cappuccino.” Prices made no sense, either, what with 1 króna equaling approximately $0.00886 US dollars. I picked one at random and asked Ragga if it was any good. “Sure! Yeah!” she said. The price was 500 krónur. My brother had warned me how expensive Iceland was. I’d never paid 500 anything for coffee before, but my jetlag-addled brain was incapable of doing the math.
We sat at a table made out of an old treadle sewing machine. Ragga pulled over a tray of nail polish the café made available to customers. I’d seen it on other tourists’ Instagram feeds. She sloshed some mustard yellow on her short nails while we waited for our order. Music was playing, and every once in a while, someone would saunter over to a turntable to switch the record. We went through Talking Heads, Debbie Harry, then the Beatles. I watched long legs with colorful tights and impossibly high-heeled ankle boots—the official footwear for most women in the city—bob up and down to the music at other tables.
These people looked nothing like the ones I’m used to seeing in my neighborhood, even at my favorite indie coffeehouse. These were gorgeous, elegant, finely crafted human specimens. Soft-spoken
and visually dramatic, the women looked like Nobel prize-winning Swedish supermodels, the men like Viking reenactors, but in skinny jeans and Converse high-tops. No matter who it was, no matter how shaggy his or her hair or geometric his or her glasses, everyone was wearing wool. Not the fine Italian stuff, either, but thick Icelandic wool knit into bulky sweaters.
The sweater is called a lopapeysa, and it’s a national treasure. Everyone has at least one, from the baggage handlers to the garbage collectors, mothers and hipsters and old folk alike. I didn’t see a dog in such a sweater, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.
While it’d be much more romantic to think that the lopapeysa has been around since the Viking days, this iconic style is actually a twentieth-century invention. Nobody knows exactly how it started, but this thick sweater with colorful patterning around the yoke (and sometimes waist and sleeve) gained popularity in the 1950s, about the same time my grandparents first set foot on the island. My grandma went berserk with the stuff, jamming her suitcase with finished sweaters and pounds of Icelandic wool yarn, with which she knit her grandchildren wonderfully rugged, scratchy lopapeysur (the plural for lopapeysa). She wore one of these cardigans every day, rain or shine, no matter the season. It was such a permanent part of her wardrobe that the cuffs had to be darned repeatedly to compensate for her compulsive fidgeting. I almost brought one with me to Iceland, but I couldn’t quite bear to risk losing it. The lopapeysa took on a renewed symbol of national pride following Iceland’s economic collapse in 2008. By the time I got there in 2012, they were everywhere.
Nails dry and fully caffeinated, Ragga and I embarked on a walking tour of town. Along the narrow roads of Laugavegur and Bankastræti, we zigzagged back and forth from window to window. Ragga seemed to know everyone we passed. “He’s my cousin,” she’d say, waving to a man across the street. “We go way back,” she’d say about someone else. “She’s a famous fashion designer,” she’d tell me as she pointed to a woman we just met entering a building, or “That’s my ex-husband’s sister.” I joked that she was like the mayor of Reykjavík. “No, he’s way cooler,” she said. “He was in our last Gay Pride parade, in full drag.”
