Yarn Harlot

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  “Wow,” she says. “That looks complicated. I could never do that. I just don’t have the patience for it.”

  People tell me this all the time. They are simply not cut out for knitting. It’s too hard for them. They aren’t the type. I’ve prepared a speech for moments like this. It begins with a statement about the simplicity of knitting, and ends with a two-minute tutorial. I’m about to launch into this speech when I happen to glance at the woman’s name tag: DR. SUSAN P. ROGERS, SURGEON, NEUROLOGY DEPARTMENT.

  I’m so stunned that it’s all I can do to smile in her general direction. In fact, I may not be smiling; I may just be staring at her in quiet stupefaction. She doesn’t think she can knit? She’s a brain surgeon! A freakin’ brain surgeon who doesn’t think she has the skills or patience to knit? I was speechless. I’m a writer, I’m basically unemployable, and I can knit. How can someone who has one of the most complicated, tedious, and scary jobs in the world think that knitting would be beyond her? The woman uses microscopic instruments to play around with human brains for a job, but she thinks that my tinkering with two sticks and some string is something she doesn’t have the patience for? I find myself hit by a second wave of shock: For the sake of every single one of her patients, I hope she is wrong.

  This brain surgeon gets me thinking. I’ve long believed that anyone can learn to knit. Anyone who wants to, that is. I have not yet formulated a plan to force people to knit that is likely to be successful, but the one where I locked resistant people in a freezer filled with yarn and needles has promise, if I can work out the ethical issues.

  Still, why does this idea persist that knitters are people with a special aptitude? Sure, there are some knitters who take what’s really a mundane act to an art form, and we can’t all expect to be like them. But simple knitting? Five-year-old Danish children can manage it. Illiterate people all over the world can knit brilliantly. But not a Canadian brain surgeon?

  Knitting is way less complicated than, say, reading and writing, but we expect everybody to be able to do that. Reading is a serious undertaking. A person must be ready to learn, remember, and adeptly use a code of twenty-six symbols (and that’s just English) along with the mysterious sounds that each of these symbols represent, and the relationships they have with one another that change the way you decode them. They must be able to manage these symbols in complex strings, putting the code together first into words, then into phrases and sentences. Compared to English, knitting has only two pieces of code, the knit stitch and the purl stitch, and all the knitting in the world is varying these two actions. If you only ever learned these two pieces of knitting code, you could make a really fine blanket.

  English also has all these crazy rules, and we inflict the need to know them on mere children. Why, you need to know about words such as “which” and “witch” and that you can “while away” your time “while” knitting. In English, you park in a driveway, drive on a parkway, and “double parking” is really just stopping in the street and doesn’t involve parking at all, unless you mean that stopping is parking and that parking is never the verb that means “going to the park” even if you are going to sit down when you get there, thus parking yourself to knit for a spell. It’s complicated. Really complicated. And yet the world is full of people who read and write English proficiently, perhaps even know a couple of other languages. But they will still look you in the eye and tell you that even though they have a Ph.D. in philosophy, have learned Chinese for a trip to the Orient, or are a freakin’ brain surgeon that they simply couldn’t learn to knit.

  I think it’s all about attitude. Knitting is only complex if you have already made up your mind that it is. Historically speaking, there wasn’t any room for “It’s too hard” in knitting. Virtually every child was expected to knit in medieval England, turning out stockings that would have impressed the heck out of the brain surgeon. In Latvia, a girl needed to knit a multitude of pairs of mittens for her dowry, and the history of Latvia isn’t filled with tales of women who remained spinsters to their sad and lonely deaths, all because they weren’t the knitting sort of girl. You knit. Period. It was assumed, just as we assume with reading and writing now, that just about everyone is capable of the act.

  A while ago I was knitting a sock on the subway when a lady got on and stood next to me. She was wearing a brightly colored dress, and had bags and bags full of shopping. When she spoke to me she had a thick Jamaican accent. She was the very picture of competent powerful womanhood.

  “Look at you! Is that knittin’ or crochetin’?” she demanded in a big loud voice, and she reached over fearlessly to feel the wool dangling from my work.

  “It’s knitting,” I replied, “It’s a sock.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned! How come you got so many needles? Oh, never mind. … You are goin’ in a circle, you are makin’ a tube! Slow down now … How does that go? Are you just movin’ dat loop? No, I see now, you are wrappin’ the wool around.”

  She was very interested, and her voice was booming. Her voice was, in fact, loud enough that everyone in the subway car was straining to look at what was going on. If I were less polite, I might even say that she was yelling.

  “Look at this!” she bellowed, tugging on the sleeve of the man standing near her. “It’s a sock! She’s knittin’ it!” The man smiled politely at me and then at the sock and looked desperately out of the window at the dark wall rushing by. This woman was clearly ignoring the code of the Toronto rush-hour traveler. You aren’t supposed even to speak to other people on the subway, and you certainly don’t yell at them about socks and knitting. If she grabbed him again, the man looked like he might get off at the next stop, whether or not it was his right one.

  “Show me what yer doin’!” she yelled. I knit a stitch or two, showing her how to work it.

  I was starting to wonder if she were crazy. I decided that she couldn’t be that nuts. If yelling about knitting is one criterion for institutionalization, some of my knitting friends are at risk of being picked up by the men with the huggy coats. I demonstrated for a few more minutes until she got it.

  “So you just makin’ loops in layers, den it’s a sock!”

  She was enchanted. I could tell. Some people are born with a longing for the fiber arts. Others are called to them on a crowded Monday night subway ride. The excitement was plain on the woman’s face. I could tell that she was thinking about taking up knitting. I was thrilled. I seemed to have converted someone, and I didn’t even need the speech I was going to give the brain surgeon.

  She stated her summation with a simple yet joyous eloquence that I envy.

  “Well, shit, girl! I can do that!”

  One Little Sock

  It is a little dark in the hospital labor room. A knitter sits in a rocking chair beside the bed. She rocks and knits, rocks and knits, mostly because there is nothing else to fill this moment. The woman in the bed is finally asleep, but even with drugs to help her sleep and numb her contractions she still moans a little with each one.

  The knitter pauses in her work and leans forward to the edge of the bed and smoothes the woman’s hair. They are alone in the quiet room. She wouldn’t dream of being more than an arm’s reach away. You never leave the brokenhearted.

  The knitter is also a doula, a labor companion, and she has done this a hundred times—sat with a woman in labor. She always knits something for the baby during the quiet waiting times, times while they wait for labor to get interesting or when people are resting, like now. She starts with tiny little socks. They get done pretty quickly. For the fastest labors you might only finish a single sock. If things go on a little, sometimes she gets to knit a hat that matches. Only rarely do things go on long enough that she makes a wee sweater. When women asked about the order of operations and she tells them, “Socks, hat, sweater,” they shudder a little. “Not the sweater!” they say. It’s pretty upsetting to think that you could be in labor long enough to get a whole outfit. The knitter always laughs and tells
them she’s a really fast knitter, and that she’s sure it will just be socks.

  Mothers love having something that was made for the baby while they were having the baby, and they often find the doula’s quiet knitting reassuring. They look over during their labor and see her knitting, and they know everything is all right. Who would just sit there if things weren’t all right? If she’s knitting, then they are okay.

  The knitter-doula loves her pager. When it went off this morning, she was so happy and excited that it almost didn’t matter that she was going to have to leave her first cup of coffee. There’s nothing like waiting for a baby. The beep of a pager sounds so insignificant, but it might as well be trumpets blaring to announce the impending arrival of a whole new human being. Every time the knitter hears it she thinks, “Now we’ll get something good,” and she scurries off to pick up her wool and needles on the way out the door.

  Tonight her wool is soft blue. When she’d arrived at the woman’s house earlier that day, the woman had asked her what she had chosen. Blue, even though they think this baby is a daughter. The woman has dark hair and eyes, and the knitter imagines the baby will have them too. Dark brown hair looks pretty with pale blue. Pink would be more traditional, but the knitter and the woman aren’t traditionalists.

  When she arrived at the woman’s house this morning, the knitter put her soft wool yarn and tiny needles on the table and gave the woman a hug. She became the doula, and asked all the questions, filled in forms. The water had broken a little while ago, clear and perfect, and contractions had started shortly after. Everything was exactly as it should be. It would be a long time before it was time to go to the hospital though; things were moving slowly. “Not the sweater, right?” asked the woman. “No, no” laughed the doula-knitter, running her practiced hands over the warm, round belly.

  She and this baby had already met. They had played games of “I poke you and you kick me.” The baby liked to lie on her right side and deeply resented the doula’s friendly poking. The doula knew the baby’s body: the lively curve of the bum, little knees, elbows, and heels.

  But this time, when she poked, nobody poked back. The doula packed up her knitting.

  “We’ve got to go,” she told the woman, and they phoned the hospital for advice. They took the fast way to the hospital, and she comforted the woman with wool, casting on a little sock on the way. It was meant to be a good sign, knitting the sock. No need to panic, no reason to stop knitting. They worried with pale blue wool all the way.

  At the hospital, the knitter put away her work again and told the doctor and nurse that they have come because the baby is “quiet.” She said this in a way that she hoped meant nothing to the woman and everything to the doctor. “Quiet,” she said again.

  Suddenly everything went very fast. The gentle knitting was replaced by monitors, beeps, and ultrasounds, cold things that plug in. The woman and the doula were both badly frightened now. The nurses were impossibly gentle, the doctors impressively kind. The baby was still quiet. There was only bad news, the worst news.

  Hours later the whole thing had gotten too cruel. It is a horrible truth that you must finish what you start, even though it seems too sad to do. The doula counseled carefully. They had planned a natural birth, since it would be better for the baby, but now? Now it isn’t better. “Ease the pain,” she soothed. “It hurts enough.”

  By then it was late, and the woman was very, very tired. When the medicines worked, she fell asleep. The doula-knitter hoped that she would sleep for a long time, for when she wakes up, it would be sad work.

  Now the knitter sits down in the rocking chair. She thinks about it for a little bit, and then she picks up the pale blue yarn and starts back to work on the sock. This will be over long before she knits a sweater; in fact there will probably only be time for this one little sock. The knitter is careful not to knit the sock too long. Nobody is going to grow into it, and she wants the woman to have something just the right size.

  Let us call the woman a mother now, for though there is no baby to take home, there once was one. The daughter played poking games and rolled over and heard her mother’s voice. Even though the mother will have no child, she will be a mother. This one little sock will be her proof.

  What Passes for Perfect

  Lmagine for a moment: You are cuddled in your favorite knitting spot, feeling pleased with the progress you have made on your complex project. It’s been challenging, and you really are proud of yourself for getting this far. You spread the knitting out on your lap, smooth it with your hands, and start to feel a little smug. You run your fingers down your work…. This is a wonderful knitting moment. Then you see it. Down there, right near the bottom, the fourth row. It’s a mistake.

  How you respond to this exact moment defines your knitting personality.

  There are Type A personality knitters out there. They are going to fix every error, every time. Used the wrong color in the second row? They will rip back eighteen inches of complex Fair Isle. I’ve seen them do it. It boggled my mind. Watching yards of unraveling two ply come out of a sweater is enough to give me nausea. I applaud Type A knitters; I admire them; I wish them well. I know that the search for perfection makes them happy, But for me, I just know that there is a very fine line between “searching for perfection” and “getting crazy enough to throw myself on a pile of double-pointed needles and hoping for a fatal puncture.”

  I think about ripping out my work, I really do. But I’m a happy knitter, and I want to stay that way. I have therefore developed several other strategies. If you aren’t a Type A knitter, maybe these can make you happy too.

  (Warning: If any of these solutions makes you feel lightheaded or causes a ringing in your ears, it may be that you do not need to lighten up but are actually a Type A knitter. If so, it is vital that you use Type A solutions or you will hate everything that you knit and not sleep nights at all.)

  Problem: Doing the long-tail cast on, you realize that you do not have a long enough tail. You need to cast on 250 stitches, and you are only going to make 246.

  Type A solution: Undo the cast on, make a longer tail and cast on again.

  My solution: Increase four stitches in the first round/row. No one will ever know. This really isn’t going to work if you are casting on 12 stitches, but 250? May my wool be my witness, no one will ever, ever know.

  Problem: You discover that your interpretation of the cable chart was … umm … creative. Twenty rows after the fact, you discover that the traveling stitches to the left of the cable aren’t meant to travel at all.

  Type A solution: If you are going to do a thing, do it right. Unravel those ten stitches down twenty rows and embark on a process of knitting them back up that requires your pattern, a magnifying glass, natural light, another “refreshment,” an hour of your time, and the precision attitude of a neurosurgeon.

  My solution: Carefully determine what you did wrong. Write it down. Now, repeat it every time you come to this part of the pattern. Say after me: “I altered the pattern to better reflect my own personal style.”

  Problem: While knitting the body of a fine-gauge Fair Isle sweater, you discover that you really need to sit in better light/not knit so late/not knit without your glasses because when you move to the light/wake up/put on your glasses, you can see, to your horror, that on the chart you have been following, what you thought were all large dots (dark blue) are actually interspersed with small dots (light blue). This means that you have entirely missed the light blue.

  Type A solution: Rip out all your work, all the way back to the first insidious little small dot and redo it, meticulously adding the light blue.

  My solution: Are you kidding me? Put on your glasses, set the light blue aside for socks, and move on with your life. Eat chocolate if this doesn’t feel right. Trust me, you’ll get over it.

  Problem: While knitting a stegosaurus sweater for your nephew you sort of completely forget to knit in the eyes. Oddly, this rather obvious detail i
s only discovered during blocking.

  Type A solution: Probably rip back the front and reknit, but on a relaxed day; maybe put the eyes in with duplicate stitch.

  My solution: Explain to your nephew, using cautiously devised detail and passion, how dinosaurs only developed eyes in the early Cretaceous period.

  Problem: While gloating over the gloriously soft and fuzzy mohair stole you knit your sister for Christmas, you notice that the lace on row 2 is wrong.

  Type A solution: You run a thread through the row above the error, then snip a thread in the offending row. Draw the mohair painstakingly through, undoing all the stitches in that row. When all the live stitches are exposed, knit down to what would be the cast-on edge and cast off. Pay no attention to the throbbing vein in your forehead.

  My solution: Fuzzy stole? How fuzzy? Fuzzy enough to obscure the error? I bet it is. Try squinting.

  Need more help rationalizing? Legend has it that in ancient Persia, the famous carpet weavers would deliberately make one error in their rugs. The idea was that “only Allah is perfect.” It would be rude to try to compete with God’s perfection.

  Are you meant to correct every mistake? Is that dropped stitch providence? What about the road not taken? How would your life be different if you didn’t fix it? What about the romance of the muse? Imagine for a moment that you use a quick fix instead of a three-hour one … Would you catch an earlier bus? Who would be at the bus stop? Perhaps the missing light blue in my sweater is a message. Maybe it’s better that way. Maybe these seemingly trivial moments are memos from the divine. Perhaps we have no right to alter the path chosen by the art itself. Let art be for art’s sake, move past the practical to the ethereal. I am but a mere mortal not entitled to influence the course of the world. Perhaps what passes for perfect is perfect by itself. I’m not ripping back my sweater; I’m letting it choose its destiny.