Knitlandia

by Clara Parkes

  Back at the Craftsy office I started to notice toy weaponry scattered on desks and tables, Nerf guns mostly. Apparently, they were there to help people blow off steam. “Yeah,” one person told me with the raised eyebrow of a non-believer. “You never know when a battle will break out.” At the reception desk, I spotted what looked like a large stuffed dog. Around its neck, a sign proclaimed, “I’m a cake!” All the food-related leftovers from class shoots end up here.

  That night, I met up with Eunny Jang, by then an acquisitions editor at Craftsy, for dinner. Years ago, at age twenty-three, the blogger had been tapped to succeed Pam Allen as editor of Interweave Knits. Once the wunderkind of the knitting world, she had since left the magazine to work for the sewing division of Craftsy—and when we met for dinner, she was still coming to grips with her recent thirtieth birthday. Over plates of pierogies at a bar downtown, she told me that the Craftsy corporate culture was making even her feel old.

  Early the next morning, a new limo pulled up for my ride to the airport. Gone was John. This time, my driver was a young and soft-spoken yet outgoing woman named Betsy. She wore an old-fashioned chauffeur’s hat.

  As we sped through the darkness, she explained that this driving gig was just something she did to fill the time and make extra cash. She liked the people. She’d worked at a yarn store, but recently her passion had turned more to sewing. In fact, she’d begun teaching sewing classes to young girls.

  “Isn’t it scary to put such young people in front of sewing machines?” I asked, thinking of my nieces and their once-tiny fingers.

  “Oh no,” she told me. “They’re great. We do really simple things, like pillowcases, to help them build confidence and develop basic sewing skills.”

  She navigated a tricky freeway merge and then went on, “I love it. I feel like I’m helping them learn so much more than just sewing, like about patience and linear thinking.” She glanced over her shoulder and changed lanes. “I had this one girl who just couldn’t concentrate for long, and I’d watch her start to slip. So I took her aside and said, ‘I know this part is boring, but if you don’t complete this part, you don’t get to do the next part, which isn’t boring.’ And she actually got it!”

  My decision to teach classes online with Craftsy had been mostly a selfish one: By presenting the very best version of my class on an interactive, easy-to-use platform, I could reach more people without ever boarding a plane—and still make my mortgage payment. But here was a foot soldier doing the real work, teaching a group of young girls the old-fashioned way. Not only did these kids benefit from a teacher who could make split-second adjustments to suit the group dynamic, but they were enjoying the group dynamic itself—the joy of discovering something tactile and communal together.

  No matter how slick the technology or charming the person on screen, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to replicate the full extent of the human learning experience online. Nor should we. There’s a time for sitting at home in your pajamas, watching and clicking and quietly forming connections in your mind. And there’s a time for getting out and being with others, for reaching into the picture and becoming part of it.

  CASHMERE DREAMS AND BRITISH BREEDS: A Last-Minute Visit to Edinburgh, Scotland

  EDINBURGH HAD NEVER BEEN at the top of my must-see list. London, definitely, with a swing down to see the sheep farms around Devon. But if it hadn’t been for the Edinburgh Yarn Festival, I’d probably still be ignorant about this distinguished little capital city with its Medieval Old Town, an extinct volcano, and a castle at its peak.

  It was only in its second year, but the Edinburgh Yarn Festival’s transformation from 2014 to 2015 was enough to suggest the hallmarks of impending greatness. Big things were happening for knitters all across the United Kingdom as the country—along with much of Europe—was finally enjoying its own long-awaited knitting boom.

  I’d been in London in 2010 and 2011 for an event called Knit Nation. It, too, foretold greatness—but most of the teachers had been flown in from the States and Canada, and many of the students were either North American expats or very well-traveled Brits. Even the organizers were from away, Cookie A from the United States, Alice Yu from Canada but married to a Brit. At that time, just a few yarn stores offered anything beyond the international brands. Breed-specific wool, although in a country renowned for its breeds, was still rare. Classes like mine on the construction of yarn and qualities of breed-specific wool were a little on the fringe. Most British farmers were piling their fleeces in a heap and burning them for lack of a market. But the line outside the first Knit Nation marketplace suggested which way the winds would soon blow. Just a few years later, Edinburgh was sprouting its own, very much homegrown, festival—and I wanted to be there to witness it.

  After a restless night on the transatlantic flight, I finally spotted lights below. Just a few faint flickerings like the ones I imagine people spotting when their planes make landfall over my tiny Maine town. Then, a blush of pinkish blue on the horizon followed by intense clusters of golden dots. The land gave way to jetties, with long, illuminated roads snaking out to small islands like lollipops.

  In the distance, I saw another shoreline and more lights before clouds swallowed us. At 167 miles to Edinburgh, we tipped our nose down, the engine lowered to a purr, and we began our final descent. The female flight attendants had removed their ballet flats and were back in their patent-leather pumps. Rick, their smooth-voiced male counterpart, had removed his apron and donned a crisp navy blazer with wings pinned on the lapel. Six minutes to go, I watched the final stragglers make for the bathroom.

  At immigration, a plump, ruddy-cheeked woman gestured me forward.

  “Reason for your visit?” she asked.

  “I’m here to play,” I smiled.

  “You’re a tourist,” she corrected me.

  “Yes, yes, I’m here as a tourist.”

  It was at this precise location, or thereabouts, that several US nationals had been waylaid just five years ago on their way to the first (and last) UK Knit Camp. Problems with work visa paperwork resulted in nail-biting days of negotiating and, in the case of one teacher, an unexpected return flight to the United States. With that history still fresh in my mind, I didn’t mention the words yarn or knitting to this woman for fear she’d drag me into a room and interrogate me. She smiled, typed something into her system, handed me back my passport, and wished me a nice stay.

  It was barely 7:00 AM and the small airport was still waking up. I made my way outside and to the tram stop, where a shiny new tram would whisk me the twenty minutes to town. Like most European cities, Edinburgh has a large and efficient public transit system. Bigger routes have the double-decker buses and all offer free Wi-Fi—helpful if, like me, you’re an international traveler with no roaming plan.

  Already my credit card wasn’t working.

  “You Americans are always in a rush,” giggled the young woman who’d come over to help me at the ticket machine. “You just have to leave the card in there for a moment. . . .” We stared at the machine in silence, and this time it worked. I tried to explain that our machines yell at us if we don’t remove our cards fast enough.

  The tram closed its doors and headed for town. The sun was now rising on a wonderfully wet, dreary landscape of muddy fields, bare trees, gray skies, and emerald-green grass. Gradually, flat office parks and suburban shopping malls replaced the empty fields. We passed the hulking black metal skeleton of Murrayfield Stadium, its parking lot still empty. Garbage was scattered along the tram line, plastic bags fluttered in the bushes. At each stop, tired commuters got on, took their seats, and stared blankly at their smartphones. Schoolchildren swayed and chattered in lovely Scottish accents.

  Travel lends a glow that makes liars of us all. Here was the same gray day that drives me to despair in Maine, the same garbage and mud and crowds of baggy-eyed sniffers on public transportation, and yet here I rejoiced in how romantically dreary it all was. “Travel is a state of mind
,” explained writer Paul Theroux. “It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.” I suspect life is 97 percent attitude and only 3 percent actual experience. How else can it be that I drink the same tea every morning—made with the same water, in the same cup—and yet it tastes better on certain days, worse on others? The same seat on a plane feels different during takeoff and landing depending on whether I’m coming or going.

  I got off the tram at Haymarket Station, a bustling stop just a few minutes from central Edinburgh. Checking my map, I started walking toward my hotel. At each intersection I gave myself whiplash looking right, left, right, left, then giving up and running for dear life across the street. I couldn’t quite believe the “Look Right” markings on the road because everything in my cellular make-up said that traffic should be coming from the left.

  Suitcase clattering on the sidewalk, I turned down a side street and spotted a familiar figure: Ysolda Teague on her bike, wearing an old tweed jacket, wool shorts, thick tights, and paint-splattered leather shoes, waiting for me. My hotel being not too far from her home, we’d made plans to meet for breakfast—plans firmed up, I might add, thanks to that free Wi-Fi on the tram. It was too early to check in at my hotel, so I left my suitcase with the front desk and we started walking. “It’s hard to find any place that’s open before eight o’clock that isn’t a Starbucks,” she explained, as we made our way, bicycle between us, to a place fittingly called Milk.

  I’ve known Ysolda since she made her first knitting trek to the United States in 2009. She was barely in her twenties then, gutsily piecing together an unprecedented, months-long teaching tour on the fly. This young designer relied on the kindness of guild members, friends of shop owners, and strangers met over the Internet to get her safely from one place to the next. She surfed her way across some of the finest couches and guest rooms of North America, forming friendships that endure to this day. “How else would I have met Jess and Casey?” she said, referring to Jessica and Casey Forbes, the founders of Ravelry.

  “I wouldn’t do it now,” she added, glancing up from her bowl of muesli. “No way.” In the decade that had passed since that first tour, the Scottish designer has matured into a levelheaded businesswoman. But the fearlessness remains, the willingness to try anything. Until Ysolda, nobody had even thought to investigate the feasibility of bringing an Airstream trailer onto the TNNA show floor. (“Totally possible,” she said.)

  This fearlessness, combined with a refusal to accept orders from anyone else, has left Ysolda in a tricky situation for one so young: Having gone straight from college to running her own business, she likes to point out that she’s never had a real job. “I’m pretty much unemployable.”

  One major growing-up milestone she has yet to achieve is getting her driver’s license. “It’s the only thing I can’t teach myself,” she told me. “I’d much rather go to an old airfield, prop a book on the steering wheel, and figure it out on my own.”

  Instead, she rides her bike across Edinburgh every day to reach a new studio space that’s double the size of her previous one. Her bike is beautiful and substantial, built by a man who also knits. “He’s very minimalist,” Ysolda explained. “He has one hat, one sweater. When he’s done knitting a project, he unravels it and starts over.”

  It would be easy to say part of Ysolda’s success was just timing. She had never even seen a copy of Vogue Knitting or Interweave Knits before her first pattern was published online. She rose entirely through the ranks of newcomers, meeting other designers (including up-and-comers Eunny Jang and Stefanie Japel) on a site called Craftster. In 2005, she discovered the online knitting magazine Knitty, then just three years old.

  “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Knitty,” she said. “They made it look really easy to submit a design, so I did.” She was nineteen when her first pattern—a cardigan called Arisaig—was published. “I had no idea there was a person called a technical editor,” she said. “I just charted out each stitch on graph paper.” Ysolda didn’t even have a blog yet. That began after Knitty asked for her bio and said, “Oh, by the way, this is a great place to link to your blog.” Her pattern appeared on the cover of Knitty, and overnight, her blog traffic spiked into the tens of thousands of readers. They asked where they could find more patterns by her, and she responded accordingly.

  You could say that Ysolda had the good fortune to enter the scene when Knitty was still in its infancy, and rise just as Ravelry was clearing a runway for independent knitwear designers. But personality, skill, and persistence were equally key.

  Ysolda’s decision to sell her patterns herself at a fair price—in those days, around six dollars per pattern—instead of handing over all the rights to a publisher or yarn company in exchange for a few hundred dollars was a game changer for the industry. She was also among the first to offer her patterns as downloadable PDFs rather than as printed leaflets—which she did mostly because of her geographic remoteness.

  Historically, knitting patterns have been provided free, or at greatly subsidized prices, by yarn companies to help sell yarn. More recently, designers had to hustle to make a living, spreading their work across yarn companies, books, and magazines whenever the opportunity presented itself. But nearly always, the rights to their work were lost in the process.

  Ysolda still remembers her first TNNA show, when the owner of a major yarn company stood, dumbstruck, in her booth.

  “What do you do?” he had asked.

  “I sell patterns,” she answered.

  “Yes, but what’s your business?” he asked again, unable to conceive of a business model built around patterns alone.

  It’s her same sense of “why not?” fearlessness that inspired her to book a booth at this year’s Handarbeit, the handcrafts and hobby trade show in Cologne, Germany, that has been long considered the exclusive domain of men in suits. Even without seeing it, I knew the impact Ysolda’s booth would have. Her spaces are charming, cozy cottages of cardigans and twinkle lights, baby sweaters and colorful shawls. Before showtime, she is in boots and overalls, wielding a drill with the skill of a teamster. But once the doors open, all you see is warmth and charm.

  Only a fool would mistake that outward softness for weakness, the prettiness for a lack of acumen. She is smart, stubborn, shrewd, and unafraid to go after what she wants. Ysolda marches to a drumbeat entirely her own.

  When she was a child, she came home from school one day and complained to her mother that nobody would talk to her.

  “You should go up and talk to them,” her mother had advised, to which Ysolda responded, “No, they should come to me.”

  We’d left the restaurant and were walking along a busy street now, Ysolda pushing her bike, me racing to keep up. Suddenly, the buildings parted to my right and I saw a deep wooded gully, on the other side of which rose a steep hill with the famed Edinburgh Castle on top, clear as day. That gully, she explained, had been the city’s original sewer.

  Ysolda and I parted on Princes Street, I planning to wander more and she off to her studio to finish getting ready for the festival. I tucked into an ancient graveyard to get my bearings. I saw mid-March crocuses and snowdrops, the beginnings of daffodils, blooming Lenten roses, a low, stillbare tree sporting bright pink panicles of flowers. I saw lush green grass and I smelled moist earth. So different from the frozen Maine I’d just left.

  Beyond the wrought-iron gates was a bustling Princes Street, with its chain stores, its Boots pharmacy, Waterstones bookstore, and Marks & Spencer department store. I passed the tall black spires of Arthur’s Seat and then a fortress of a hotel beyond which lay a bridge spanning a sea of train tracks leading into Edinburgh Station. Accents drifted in and out, beautiful bubbling snippets, and I couldn’t stop smiling.

  Just past 9:00 AM and already my lack of sleep was starting to hit. I’d committed to staying awake all day, come hell or high water, both to battle jetlag and to enjoy every second of my four-day stay.


  If my plan was to work, I needed more caffeine—which came in the welcome form of a neighborhood coffee spot recommended by Ysolda. Through the tiny door, I stepped into a warm space with white walls and succulents and good music, its hand-lettered signage and table of cakes all signifying the international language of hipster. A sincere and friendly staffer labored to make the perfect foam heart in my drink.

  I wandered across the street to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. (Rather, I scampered across the street while nervously glancing back and forth and back and forth.) They had a special exhibit dedicated to the Great War. It was poignant and heartbreaking. One picture in particular got me. In it, four men were lounging on the grass, cigarettes in fingers, smiling for the camera, their army tents in the background. Their faces were sweet, young, full of both dread and potential. Three of them would be killed in action later that day, a card beneath the picture said. The fourth would be seriously wounded. A sobering reminder of the collective trauma this nation endured barely fifty years ago.

  Everyone had told me I needed to visit the Royal Mile, a historic road that begins at the base of the Old Town and runs up, up, up its spine to the castle. After a quick lunch at the museum, I headed there next, crossing the bridge over the rail lines, passing the ornate facade of the Scotsman Hotel, until I reached the street.

  A gilded shop sign advertising cashmere jumped out at me. Then another. And another. Each marked charming storefronts with quaint window boxes and inviting window displays. My quickening pulse and grabby hands slowed as I realized that each store carried nearly identical goods, mostly plaid scarves, neatly stacked by color. Some stores also had men’s and women’s sweaters, a few went so far as to offer kilts. But mostly, just scarves. One particularly sympathetic saleswoman pointed me to the scarves that were actually made in Scotland, whispering that I should always ask.