Yarn Harlot

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Careful examination of the yarn revealed that although she had knit the first sock drawing from the center of the ball, and she had begun the second sock drawing from the center of the ball, the colors were inexplicably appearing in a different order. After ruling out differing dye lots, (good thought), our test subject slowly worked out that in fact the yarn was exactly the same but had been wound into balls at the factory in a different order. (One point granted for coming up with the answer; two points deducted for calling it sabotage and muttering about conspiracy.)

  Stephanie then decided that what needed to be done here was either to knit from the outside of the ball, which would be inconvenient for her, as much of the center of the ball had been displaced by this early knitting process (One point deducted for using the phrase “stupid pain in the arse.”) or rewind the ball into the correct self-patterning order. Stephanie retrieved her very fun ball winder, clamped it to the table, and smiled a little smile for figuring out such a good solution. (One point granted for figuring out a good solution, two deducted for not remembering that Pride goeth before a fall.) She rewound it at great speed, chuckling to herself at the joy of ball winders. (We’re letting this one go, ball winders are really fun.)

  When she had rewound the yarn, Stephanie located the correct spot to begin her socks and then noted that she had not solved her problem; the yarn remained wound in the wrong order. (Two points deducted for foul language.) Class … can anyone tell us where Stephanie went wrong? Yes? You in the back … Yes, that’s right. If one takes the center of a center pull ball, and puts that into the slot on a ball winder (hereafter referred to as the center of the ball winder) and winds, then you still have the former center as the current center. Good for you for figuring it out on the first go. (Three points deducted for Stephanie thinking that rewinding it again center to center would fix this problem, and another one point deducted for foul language, as well as an additional point for what she almost said to Joe when he asked her what the hell she was doing.)

  Eventually, it occurred to Stephanie that if she wanted the inside of the current ball to be on the outside of the next ball, she would have to do something other than rewinding the yarn perpetually from center to center, and she had a major breakthrough (Two points for finally figuring it out; one point deducted for being, you know … “slow.”) and rewound it from the outside to the inside. This final action meant that after a prolonged period of winding she finally was ready to begin her sock. (One point deducted for casting on the wrong number of stitches when she was ready to continue; however, two points granted for not setting fire to the entire thing when she realized it.)

  Final score: Out of a possible 14, Stephanie scored −3. Tomorrow’s class: an examination of the minimum intelligence level required to knit.

  My Family, and Other Works in Progress

  The Rules

  I like to think of myself as an equal opportunity knitter. I will knit anything … well, I’ll knit anything once. We will not speak of terrible mistakes with intarsia in cotton, or the decision that lace-weight cabled sweaters were wise. I’ll knit anything that I like, and since I like knitting, the world is my oyster. I’m even more flexible than that, since I’ll knit anything that someone I like likes. I’ll also knit to prove a point or serve a dare. I’ll knit almost any object (though I still don’t quite see the point of woolly wine bottle covers or condom cozies or willy warmers) and I’ll knit just about any color.

  But sadly, not all recipients of my woolly love are as free, commodious, or inclusive as I. Instead, they constantly fetter my whims with their own restrictive rules. Color, for instance. Take sage green. This morning I showed my lovely husband, Joe, who is naturally the manliest of men, a fine sage green wool; I was considering it as a possibility for a pair of felted slippers for a male friend. Joe looked at the wool for a fraction of a second and announced that not only would he never wear it, but that it was “a funny green.”

  Joe is not a good barometer for acceptable manly color-sense. He is firmly embedded at the straight-Newfoundlander-man end of the color sense scale, and it might be that he’s not the best guide to what other men might find acceptable. Joe’s personal rules for color are as follows: He will wear absolutely any color as long as it is gray, black, dark blue, or brown. Deep murky green may be acceptable if it’s so dark as to be indistinguishable as green. White is okay in small doses, but only on certain parts of the body. You’d be as likely to get him into white pants as you would to get him to wear a negligee to a hockey game. Joe will not wear a garment that combines two colors, even if both colors appear on the acceptable color list. Exceptions might be made for subtleties, like black stitching on a gray shirt, but this is pretty dodgy. There is no chance for a Fair Isle sweater within these rules, verily not even stripes. If Joe sees a man wearing even the most conservative gray-on-gray pinstripes, he will giggle to himself and mumble things like “Whoa … what’s he thinking?” Inexplicably, Joe owns and wears a bright yellow raincoat with a silver stripe on it. It’s just a little curveball that he throws in there to attempt to keep me confused for the duration of our marriage.

  Since Joe operates on the cautious end of the male color scale, I decided I couldn’t completely trust him on the appropriateness of sage green. I called my friend Ken. Ken sits firmly on the other end of the what-men-might-wear scale. Ken actually wears color, and in combinations. He has even been known to be a little avant-garde with the color thing. He once owned a pair of very stylish pants in yellow ocher, and he sports T-shirts in colors straight out of the crayon box. Ken owns many striped things and even dares to flaunt the occasional paisley tie. Therefore, seeking some balance in the question of manly color, I phoned Ken. I described my dilemma and the sage green yarn. Ken is a careful thinker, and he asked what I would knit from it. “Slippers,” I replied, sure that he’d vindicate my choice. Any man who owns and often wears a kilt (which Joe insists on calling “a skirt”) isn’t going to shut me down. See? The key to getting the support you want is knowing who to call.

  “I dunno about sage green,” pondered Ken. “On your feet? Men don’t really wear color on their feet. There’s a line you don’t want to cross with green … how dusty is this ‘sage’?”

  For crying out loud. What is this? It’s not really possible that these two men both believed that a pair of sage green slippers could emasculate someone. I know that the time I happily asked Joe what he thought of the “pretty mauve socks” for my brother, I was completely pushing it, but weren’t we starting to get a little silly here? It wouldn’t even cross my mind to judge a man’s worthiness by his casual at-home footwear. I strangle back the urge to say things to Ken like, “Big talk from the man in the skirt,” or, “You’re probably wearing stripes; what do you know?”

  When does this happen to men? At what age do they generate these rules about masculine fashion faux pas? My little nephew Hank is four and he would seem to be completely oblivious about all of this. He once asked me for a pair of pink dragon mittens, since pink is his favorite color. These mittens would replace his mousie mittens, one of which vanished somewhere in between the park and his house. (We were concerned about the winter weather and the fact that the mousie is lonely and likely cold. We took some comfort in knowing that the wee beast is wool [and a mitten] and may therefore be better prepared for his unexpected adventure than a real mouse.) I suggested to brokenhearted Hank that perhaps, simply to prevent the pink dragon mittens from slipping off unaccompanied, I could put a string on them.

  The look on Hank’s face said it all. The string plan was soundly rejected. Not because he is a big boy, not because strings are demeaning, and certainly not because the presence of a mitten string speaks to a certain lack of faith in his ability to keep a dragon from meeting the same fate as the mouse, but instead … get this! Mitten strings (even on a pair of pink dragon mittens) are not “for boys.”

  It’s not just about color either. Gender-based knitting rules apparently extend to textu
re, style, and fit. My brother is colorblind, and he’s the perfect person to help me work out the manly sweater persnickety protocol. I showed him a pattern book full of patterns for men. I think I’ve ruled out the variables here. He can’t reject a pattern because it’s not a manly color; he can’t tell what color it is. Not just that, but all the sweaters in the book are shown on men, so if anything I’m biasing him toward thinking the sweaters are appropriate. He rejected eight of the ten choices. I learned the following: Cables are manly, but not too many. Too many cables on a sweater and you start running the risk of “fussiness.” Ditto Fair Isle. Stitch patterns must travel in straight lines. Anything “curvy” and they start suggesting a certain feminine allure. This curvy rule apparently also applies to very large sweaters, or very large cables. Lacework of any kind was right out, even if the eyelets make a very macho geometric pattern, and in case it occurs to you, my brother was also not fooled by calling it “openwork.”

  I was also advised that V-necks are a little touchy, and that I’m out of my mind if I think that there is a beefcake use for mohair. Alpaca is perhaps a little soft and drapey, but tweeds and smooth wool yarns got the thumbs-up, as did any stitch pattern that had a name like “moss” or “bark” or “rope.” You could swiftly pass over “vine,” “leaf,” and anything with the merest suggestion of a bobble, should you wish to knit my brother a sweater, and just keep on walking when you get to the bouclé aisle in the yarn shop.

  Where does this leave a knitter? I haul out virtually every men’s pattern I own, all the books, the magazines, the leaflets, and the stuff I’ve printed out from the Internet. I pore over them for hours and discover that once you apply all the rules that I’ve gleaned, out of the hundreds of contenders, there are only a handful that pass muster. I hunt up some yarn, some plain gray wool (“steel” gray, not “dove” gray), and cast on a sweater for Joe, a sweater so plain that I’ll likely have to knit it in small chunks to avoid putting myself into a coma. As I cast on the bazillion stitches it will take to go around Joe’s forty-eight-inch chest, I think of the final irony. Not only do men want sweaters so plain they could give you narcolepsy, not only do they want them in boring colors without even a little “yarn over” to keep a knitter on her toes, but they also want them in a yarn with no interest. The irony, I think, as I embark on the first of a hundred thousand mind-numbingly monotonous rounds, is not that we knitters are driven to knit for them despite all of this, oh no … the final crushing blow is that they are so often, much, much bigger than the knitter.

  What She Gave Me

  She was cantankerous, unkind, harsh, ill-tempered, and tidy. (It’s the tidy ones that really get to me.) There are lots of other words for the kind of woman she was, but in my family we were discouraged from using that kind of language. We just said that she was “A hard woman to love.” That doesn’t mean that no one loved her, just that it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. She was my grandmother and looking back, I realized that I loved her because she was in my family, because that was the expectation, and because, well, I supposed that at some point it became a force of habit.

  I remember a lot about my nana. In my first memory I am very young. My mother tells me I would have been three and a half and my brother was a toddler. We were sleeping over at my nana’s house because my parents had somewhere fancy to go. We didn’t want to stay. I have a vivid memory of my brother screaming and screaming in the other room for much of the night. My mother tells me that the next morning, when they arrived to pick us up, James was still crying, and my nana said he was “stubborn and a crybaby.” It wasn’t that she hadn’t taken care of us. It wasn’t as though she had endangered us or had been awful; she just hadn’t answered his cries. It was his bedtime and that was it. She had put him in bed and walked away. No concern for a little guy in a strange place without his mum. She’d closed the door and left.

  It was always like that. It was not that she was cruel; she was operating on her own system of rules and balances. We could watch TV, but we weren’t allowed to change the channel. (I believe that this is actually the root of my deep-seated and unreasonable loathing for Coronation Street.) You could sit on the couch but you had to keep your feet on the floor. She would make you dinner, but it was awful, right down to the spumoni ice cream that she served us. Like everything else, the ice cream was an enigma. She loved her grandchildren and bought ice cream for us when we came, but she wouldn’t go all the way and buy ice cream that we liked. It was like her affection for us was an enormous game of “keep-away.” My entire childhood there was not one conclusive piece of evidence that she loved me. Hints maybe, but no proof.

  Take the knitting. My nana was a professional knitter who worked for a shop. People would come in and choose their pattern and yarn; the shop would then send it out to my nana to knit up. She was very good and very fast. She knit for us too. Incredible things, things I look back at now with awe. Dresses, sweaters, a pleated skirt and sweater set, a pants suit. A pants suit! Can you imagine how long it would take to knit a kid a pants suit? We still have some of the things that she knit and they are technically spectacular. They represent hours and hours and hours of painstaking expert knitting. There is a sweater there that was knit out of fine, fine yarn and I can feel my hands cramp up just looking at it. She had six grandchildren and we were all showered with knitted gifts. That’s love isn’t it? You look at all that knitting and finally say, “Aha!” There’s the proof. No one would spend that much time on knitting for you if she didn’t love you. Knitting an entire wardrobe for a grandchild must be an unqualified expression of adoration and affection—except for one thing.

  It’s all horrible. Each one of the pieces was a masterwork of knitting skill, an homage to breathtaking ability with the needle, a veritable tribute to dexterity—and each one of them was so unbelievably ugly and uncomfortable that you’d wonder if she wasn’t out to punish us. They were the stuff of nightmares. If the color was good, the neck would choke you; if the neck was good, the color was so bad that you would wonder where she bought yarn that surprising. If the color wasn’t too bad and the style was okay, then you could be assured it was four sizes too small. There was always something.

  I remember getting a birthday present at her house. It was wrapped in pink paper with a ribbon and a bow and I still can feel the tickly feeling in my stomach as I unwrapped it. The anticipation, the hopefulness! A dolly? A set of books? My grandfather had made me a dollhouse and I wished more than anything for tiny furniture to go in it. Breathlessly I opened the crisp white box inside and lifted the pink tissue paper … and there it was. A knitted sweater and skirt made out of scratchy acrylic the exact color of barf. It was covered with cables that looked like stacked hearts and it was the perfect size; it would have been beautiful, it would have been proof of her affection, except that it was the horrible yellow-green-brown color of barf.

  That’s the way it was with her. There was always a catch, always the moment where you would look at it, then at her, and wonder to yourself why someone would spend hundreds of hours knitting you a birthday present that would make you look like a hairball. She was baffling.

  It only got worse. Once I had this stuff, this token of her esteem, which would leave me wondering, “With knitters like this, who needs enemies?” the real horror would begin. I had to wear it. My grandmother had knit this uncomfortable scratchy barf-colored sweater and skirt because she loved me, my mother explained. Now, to show her how much I loved her, I would wear it. It was this vicious circle. She knit them because she felt she had to, we wore them because we felt we had to, and quite frankly, I don’t think anybody felt the love.

  Our relationship never improved. I never liked her and she never liked me, I didn’t recall a hug or a kiss, and in fact, I didn’t have any sort of evidence that she ever loved me at all, except for one thing.

  It was summertime, and I sat in the warm, quiet rose garden in her backyard, under a willow at the side of the yard in a wooden lawn chair. I reme
mber that my feet didn’t touch the ground. Even now, more than thirty years later, I can remember the exact details of everything around me. I’m wearing a blue dress, and my nana is beside me and her dress is white and green, one of those Sears catalog housedresses with no waist. In my lap is a ball of yellow yarn and in my hands are cream-colored plastic needles, and I am knitting for the very first time. I remember every moment. I remember wrapping the yellow yarn around, bringing the needle through the loop, and the thrill of dropping the old loop off. There was something about it that was immediately right—instantly satisfying and spiritually moving. I was taking one thing and turning it into another. It was magic, it was orderly, and it was the first time in my life that I felt a sense of mature accomplishment. I was four, and I was making something. I felt powerful. I remember those moments the way that I’ve heard other people speak of moments of religious epiphany. When I finished a whole row of knitting, I proudly laid the work on my lap and looked up at my nana. “You missed a stitch,” she said, and showed me the one. “Keep going.” And with that, she went into the house.

  Well, I kept going. It’s a long time now since I gave up trying to figure my grandmother out, a long time since I stopped wearing barf-colored sweaters in a futile attempt to make her love me or to make myself feel what I was supposed to. It’s been a long, long time since I accepted that not every grandmother bakes cookies, tucks you in, and is soothing, loving joy. Now, long after that “hard to love woman” is dead, my whole house is full of knitting and yarn and needles that give me so much happiness that I occasionally (well, maybe more often than that) wonder if I’m normal. The irony is not lost on me that a woman with whom I shared only mutual dislike, a woman whom I loved for no good reason I can think of, and who never once did anything that made me feel completely accepted, now has a legacy all over my house. I wonder then, if her love was some strange genetic thing, like baldness or being nearsighted, and it was there and real and undeniable, but like chromosomes, it was invisible to the naked eye and that like baldness, it simply skipped a generation.