Yarn Harlot

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  I stomped my foot, banged my coffee cup, and scolded him with generally effective and helpful things like “shoo,” “scat,” and “git off with ya.” He stared me down and I held my ground. I held it, that was, until the bastard (I have it on good authority that he was born out of wedlock) leapt from the fence onto the fleece, not more than a yard away from me, and screamed squirrel obscenities in my face. This scared the daylights out of me. I ran. I’m not proud of that.

  Inside the house I pulled myself together and tried to figure out what to do. I laughed a little—imagine being frightened of a tiny little beast like that! Fortified, I opened the door to take another stab at fleece recovery, but the vicious little mammal advanced on me like I was out to defur him. For my own safety. I was forced to jump back into the house. There was no doubt in my mind that he had every intention of killing and eating me. He had the fleece, my beautiful fleece, and I was trapped in my own mudroom. I needed help.

  My husband is useless at times like this. Yes, he can tell you at least one funny moose-hunting story and I have heard him give very solid advice on how to defend one’s family from a bear, but smaller mammals are not his forte.

  “Is it a gray one?” Joe asked, when I explained my plight. “God, I hate the gray ones.” He barely suppressed a shudder. Joe is from Newfoundland, home of largish creatures, and he has made a poor adjustment to the smaller mammals Ontario is filthy with. Once when we were camping in Sandbanks Provincial Park (or as we like to call it “Sandbanks Provincial Raccoon Reserve”), Joe and I had, at four o’clock in the morning under the light of the moon, what is now politely referred to in our marital shorthand as “The Raccoon Fight.” The raccoons were ripping our campsite up, stealing every scrap of food that we had, and Joe (despite my stern urgings) would not go and defend us from the bandits. The raccoon raid and our argument had ended with the now infamous line, “Get out of this tent and fight like a man.”

  If Joe won’t defend food—our only food, I assure you—he certainly isn’t going to do battle for a Shetland fleece. No, I was on my own.

  I returned to the backyard to try again, only to discover that lifty lightfingers had evacuated, presumably to stash as much fleece as he could carry before returning for more. Quickly, I snatched up the damp fleece and brought it inside. Victory! He’d only gotten a pound or so.

  The next morning, I couldn’t let it go. My squirrel tolerance was at an all-time low. After complaining to anyone who would listen, and being referred by a friend of a friend, I found myself on the phone with one Frederick W. Schueler, Ph.D., curator of the Bishops Mills Natural History Centre and a heavy-duty wildlife dude. Fred had a couple of theories and a lot of information. I learned, for example, that squirrels subjected to overfeeding (as our antagonist surely was) become (and I quote Fred here) “deranged.” Overfed squirrels apparently get cocky, overly brave, and develop a grotesquely inflated sense of self-esteem. Their inflated egos make them believe that they can take over an entire backyard, terrorize a family of five, and outwit a wily knitter determined to keep her fleece. (I am paraphrasing Fred here.) Furthermore, squirrels tend to be aggressive (no kidding, Fred—you don’t say!) and the urban overfeeding only makes them more so. Overfed squirrels, Fred says, are insolent. I can confirm that, having been chased into my own mudroom by a furious wad of fantastically fast fur with murder in its eyes.

  I pointed out to Fred that this whole wool fetish thing hadn’t really come to a head with my hoarding small-pawed stash-stealer until I had put out the gray fleece. While he had stolen other things, and I’d learned a thing or two about his preferences (he doesn’t take acrylic, likes wool, and is fond of alpaca but will not take qiviut … perhaps sensing that the arctic musk ox is too big for even him to take on), he has never actively defended a conquest before. Why now? Why scurry from the backyard when I pop out to retrieve a skein of white Corriedale or brown Romney, but go right to the wall for a gray Shetland?

  “Gray?” asked Fred. Now there’s something I hadn’t thought of. Gray Shetland, gray squirrel. Perhaps his fascination was some instinct, some primitive urge to defend his like kind. Perhaps I had misread him. Perhaps his behavior was instead noble. Our little squirrel out there defending his young or a poor fallen fellow gray squirrel. Or perhaps (as Fred suggested) perhaps it is simpler. Perhaps the squirrel was responding to the most primitive of all calls to arms.

  Perhaps … it’s love.

  Now that I could get behind. I could almost feel sympathetic. Imagine my furry foe, out there in the backyard, wracked with passion for his gray furry beloved while I try to drive them apart. Naturally he would fight me. (Let’s forget for a moment that the romance of this beautiful interlude is totally wrecked by the part where he takes pawsful of his beloved and stuffs them into his cheeks. It spoils the mood.)

  This brought us to the next point, however. What the hell was he doing with all this wool? “Nests,” Fred assured me. I wasn’t so sure. I reminded Fred that our little freakin’ friend had two full fleeces (stolen a little at a time) and about twenty skeins of yarn in every color of the rainbow. Squirrels build nests in trees (Fred concurs) and that seems like a lot of fiber to take up a tree. Fred had told me that the home range or stomping ground of an urban gray squirrel is about an acre. I thought about that. If we used my home as the epicenter for the squirrel’s turf, then there were thirteen trees close enough that they could house his nest. None of them was hollow, so if our wool-stealing buddy was … er … squirreling his stash up a tree, I would have seen it. Hell, my neighbors would have seen it. People would be talking about it. I would hear things on the street like “Hey, did you see that colossal multicolored squirrel nest down the street? I swear it’s got pink mohair in it.” It seemed unlikely. We needed another theory.

  Fred, of course, had it. Sometimes squirrels will make use of holes or gaps in houses, building nests in the walls and attics of buildings. This made sense. I would expect that sort of good judgment from a beastie with the taste to get defensive about Shetland wool. He was clearly not a stupid animal. I looked out the window and gave it a thought. One acre: That’s seven houses. Somewhere, likely all in one pile in one of these seven houses is all my wool and fleece. I wondered how I could find out which one. I toyed with the idea of knocking on the doors and quizzing my neighbors about surprising energy savings. Given wool’s insulating qualities, it was entirely possible that in some nearby house, a husband was turning to his wife and saying, “Honey, doesn’t the kitchen seem warmer this winter?”

  There are, of course, ways to deal with animals that you don’t get along with, but I’m an animal too, so I try to live with the local fauna. I understand that the reward for my tolerance may be to get ripped off by a deranged squirrel with megalomania, an urge to stash (which I can understand), and a torrid love affair with his kindred gray fleece. And so I asked Fred my last question.

  “What’s the average lifespan of an urban gray squirrel?”

  Cracking the Whip

  There have been some complaints from my family, or as I like to call them, TAKE (Team Against Knitting Enjoyment), that my yarn has been turning up in all possible nooks and crannies and attacking people with double-pointed needles bared. The last straw may have been when my husband, trying to put on a sweater he hadn’t worn for a while, encountered a sock-in-progress stuffed down its sleeve. Don’t look at me like that. The sock was originally perched atop a pile of other stuff in the sweater closet, but owing to a shortage of space it fell to the floor each time I opened the closet. Very annoying. Stuffing it down the sleeve of the sweater hanging there capitalized on unused space and made the closet tidier. You need to think outside of the box when you have yarn-control issues.

  In my continuing attempt to live in harmony with these nonknitters I have decided to try and bring things under control a little bit. I’m going to clean out my knitting bags, my closets, my baskets, my freezer, and my bins in an attempt to consolidate my yarn collection. Note that I have give
n up attempting to reduce the stash—past forays into yarn nonproliferation strategies have proved to be folly. Mysteriously such efforts only increase the stash. True stash reduction being a nonstarter, I have undertaken a condensation approach.

  While corralling stash, I found some long-abandoned projects and I began tossing them in a pile. As the pile grew, an idea began to form. (My ideas should come with a warning. Some of the worst disasters of my life have been preceded by the thought, “Hey! You know what I should do?”) My idea, before the whole thing got ugly, was that I should immediately vow to finish all these projects. I’d have a huge head start on Christmas, and it would feel good to have so many finished things. So far, most of these works-in-progress were more than half done; in fact, a lot of them were mostly done. I surveyed the pile. There weren’t even that many of them.

  That was it. I decided to make a commitment: I, Stephanie, do hereby make a deadly serious promise to myself that I will not cast on any new project until I have dealt with (in whatever way I deem reasonable) all of my unfinished projects. I was cracking the whip, I was getting it together. I was going to finish these projects and then I would be the kind of knitter who has one project at a time (maybe two, if circumstances demand it) and works on that one item until it’s done. I’d always wanted to be that kind of knitter. Things seem to get done so quickly when you only have one project. (It is worth noting that I did not pause and reflect about why I have never been this kind of knitter … but self-examination is not for those in the grips of a new plan.)

  I decided to go around the house and gather up all my projects. I found two sweaters on the top shelf of the linen closet along with a scarf and mittens. The freezer yielded two shawls, a baby sweater, and socks (three pairs), and the empty space in the piano (Don’t judge me—remember about thinking outside the box?) held a hat and scarf. One final check of my bedroom closet turned up an almost finished cardigan. I found two mysterious rows of ribbing on needles under the hair dryer in the bathroom. (I don’t even know what those were going to be.)

  I put all of these jilted projects on my bed. By now, it was quite a big pile … but never mind. I’d made a promise to myself and this time I was following through. Still scrounging around the house I found a wrap that only needed ends woven in and a baby sweater for a kid who was now in the third grade.

  I kept looking for more forsaken projects, but it began to dawn on me that perhaps it wasn’t in my own best interests to look too hard. The pile on my bed had reached epic proportions and was distracting me; I was beginning to find it daunting. I checked a couple more hiding spots and decided that I’d certainly found them all.

  The pile on the bed now resembled what would be left behind if every member of an enormous and eclectic knitting guild was forced to evacuate the club’s meeting place, taking nothing along. I began to take stock of the mountain.

  I started adding up the unfinished projects. When I counted more than ten, I gave myself a stern talking to. How did I lose control like this? This tidying up would be good for me; it would be a self-imposed revolution. When the ruling class loses control and gets decadent, a revolution is just the ticket to restore balance. I simply never imagined that I would be the first against the wall when the revolution came.

  When I got up to twenty knitting orphans, I started wondering what on earth motivated me to abandon these projects in the first place. Why did I do this to myself? There’s that cotton intarsia sweater … I loved that sweater. Why did I put it down? Oh yeah, while I love wearing cotton intarsia sweaters, knitting them makes me feel like I’m getting meningitis.

  I kept looking through the woolly deposit of projects. Now I’d counted more than thirty. Why didn’t I finish this hat? I lost the pattern, that’s why. Any reasonable woman would have given up and ripped it back, but did I? No, I saved it, because I believed that even though it had been years since I lost the pattern, it might yet turn up.

  Still counting … thirty-five. These socks? I put them down because I was going to the movies and couldn’t pick up stitches in the dark. I cast on another pair instead, completely forgetting these.

  After careful assessment, I realized that the pile could be roughly divided into several subpiles.

  Pile one: Good projects gone astray. Projects I adored that lost their place in the lineup because of my criminally short attention span. These projects deserved better. These projects were worthy.

  Pile two: Projects of questionable worthiness. These were the ones where something clearly went wrong. They were missing patterns or yarn; they were knitted at the wrong gauge; they turned out to be as much fun as making your own toothbrushes out of the rough hair of a Persian camel. These, well. These I didn’t know what to do about. A wise knitter would have reclaimed the yarn and tried again. I’m not a wise knitter, so I didn’t have a plan yet.

  Pile three: “I must have been drunk when I cast this on.” This was stuff other people gave me, stuff that I bought because I fell for a 50-percent-off sale. Some acrylic that I started before I knew I liked wool better. Stuff with bobbles. Why did I start anything with bobbles? Bobbles were the work of some evil three-dimensional demon sent to vex me. I always thought I was going to conquer the bobble and I never did. Maybe if I wore a necklace of garlic while I was knitting bobbles … I hadn’t quite figured out what to do with these either. Clearly, stuffing them into well-hidden locations around the house wasn’t helping, although it probably did lower our heating bill.

  By now, the pile was scaring the crap out of me. I was feeling as if I had personality traits that I didn’t think of myself as possessing. This was the work-in-progress pile of a fickle, fickle woman. A heartless, spontaneous, wanton knitter who didn’t mind trashing a project on a whim. A woman who cared nothing for staying power, getting things done, or following through. It was also the pile of a woman who apparently didn’t think that there was anything wrong with buying as many knitting needles as it took to fill this urge, no matter how much this made her look like she had a porcupine fetish. Also (as I looked over the variety of things I had rejected or abandoned) I was either a person who really loved diversity or had a split personality. Wool, cotton, silk, lace, cables—I had forsaken them all at some point. I was clearly an equal-opportunity nonfinisher.

  This was disappointing. All these were projects that at some moment in my past, I adored. For each and every one of them there was that magic moment when I loved it (or the idea of it) so much that I trashed everything else I was knitting. My knitterly heart may be fickle, but it’s open. All of these yarns and projects were, at one time, my very favorite. They deserved more respect than this. Even the crappy acrylic could be better loved by another knitter than serving as box stuffing. The hat could be ripped back, reclaiming the yarn that I loved.

  Okay, I told myself, I’m taking control. Today I tossed out a yarn catalog without even looking (much). I’m going to duct-tape shut my stash boxes and maybe put them in the attic with a drop cloth over them with some sort of electric field going on to try and make it harder to start new things. I am going to change my ways. I will begin with pile one today, and I will not cast on anything new until I’ve dealt with half of the total works in progress. I am freeing up space and opening the door to knitting hope again. I am not going to let the yarn down again. I will try to do better.

  I had no idea I had so many size-four needles.

  Nothing in My Stash

  There is nothing in my stash. Despite my having … well … let’s just leave it at a lot of yarn, nonetheless there is nothing to knit in my stash.

  I’m a logical woman. I understand that I live on a planet with basic scientific laws about mass, space, and volume. I believe that these laws are true. If my stash really takes up this much space and yet contains nothing, there must be a black hole in my own home. Perhaps I should let NASA know about this.

  I begin the delicate art of stash examination. I take my stash out of its boxes, its bins, its bags, its cupboards, its drawe
rs, and its hidey-holes. When I have it all out, I come to two conclusions. As expected, I have a lot of yarn. As I suspected, there is nothing to knit in the stash.

  I stand back, surveying the stash, and say aloud, “I have nothing to knit.” This simple sentence gets my husband’s immediate attention. “Sorry. What did you say?” The look on his face is beyond description. “You think you have no yarn?” He is clearly incredulous. I can see his point. A woman standing hip-deep in yarn who says she has nothing to knit might need some kind of professional help.

  Here’s how I explain it to him. Stash isn’t just stash; it has distinct components that affect its knitability. My stash consists of the following:

  Core stash. This is yarn that to be completely honest, I am likely never going to knit. It is discontinued yarn that is too rare to knit. It is yarn that is too expensive and is too special to knit, or it is yarn that is so beautiful that I am not worthy of it. In my Core Stash is some of the Patons Ballybrae that they don’t make anymore in a color so perfect for me that when we met I knew it was kismet. There is Irish Aran wool, the real stuff, soft, thick, and perfectly cream. There is the lace-weight Shetland that is far better as an imaginary shawl; my real knitting could never match the shawls that I knit with my imagination every time I hold it. Core stash is the foundation of every good stash. It is inspiration. It is beautiful. It is the reason that I knit, but it is not for knitting.

  Souvenir stash. If I look deep within my knitterly soul, I don’t believe that I’m going to knit this either. The soft blue handspun that I found in a tiny shop in rural Newfoundland, the wool that I got in Hawaii (especially valuable because it may have been the only wool in Hawaii), the tweedy yarn my friend brought me from Scotland, the cotton from Italy. This is remembrance yarn. This yarn is postcards of my life. Here are the leftovers from my first stranded sweater, the twelve colors from an intarsia sweater that was nothing short of a personal victory. With this yarn I can document every trip, baby, and yarn shop of my life. Who would knit that?