The Yarn Whisperer

by Clara Parkes

  You can always fudge what others don’t need to see. We shove stuff into closets and under the bed before company arrives, and good manners dictate that they don’t go snooping. But once something leaves your hands and goes home with someone else, all the rules change. This person has free reign to scrutinize. I gave a particularly beautiful pair of cheater-toe socks to my sister-in-law, who immediately behaved as if I’d embedded a hacksaw into both toes. To this day, no amount of explaining (and confessing) will do—she’s convinced that all handknitted socks are instruments of pain. Which has conveniently gotten me out of knitting her socks for Christmas, but it also makes me feel like I’ve let knitting down.

  As soon as I began knitting for other people, especially the likes of my sister-in-law, I realized I could no longer coast on my sloppy compromises. My pride was on the line, the entire reputation of knitting was on the line, and my friends and family deserved better. I had to work on this.

  Thus began my slow journey from Kitchener dreader to true believer. While it didn’t happen overnight, it was propelled by one particular collision of project and circumstances.

  In my mid-twenties I was pretty sure I’d never have a child of my own, so I was determined to become a memorable auntie for everyone else’s children. I just needed my friends to start breeding. Finally, one sunny February morning, my friend Jeanne announced that she was having a baby. Showtime. This was it. I would go full-out Martha Stewart and, naturally, there would be knitting involved.

  At the time, Debbie Bliss was just about our sole source for the adorable, charming, and whimsical. Among her creations was a knitted all-in-one outfit that made the wearer look like a teddy bear. It buttoned up the front, with sleeves that had attached mitts and legs with integrated booties. The hood even had two little ears. Perfect. I procured bear-worthy brown wool yarn and got the project under way. I don’t think I even swatched, I just cast on and started going.

  As is often the case, life intrudes. The yarn turned out to be splitty, the gauge finer than I expected, my progress tediously slow. Work got busy. Then my grandfather suddenly got sick and passed away, pulling me into that weird limbo place where my mind was mostly in the past. Things like work and relationships and knitting cute onesies for fresh new babies had no appeal whatsoever.

  Fortunately, Jeanne’s baby knew nothing of my life and continued to grow. Soon a beautiful little cherub named Nadiya was born. Gradually my own appetite for life returned, and I resumed work on the little brown outfit.

  Debbie Bliss tends to write her patterns row-by-row, while my mind thrives in the narrative big-picture realm. This project had many odd-shaped pieces and few schematics to show me (a) what they were supposed to look like and (b) how they were all going to fit together. The only way to know was to finish knitting and hope that, in all my distraction of late, I didn’t lose count or miss a crucial row, like Bugs Bunny and that notorious left turn he should’ve taken at Albuquerque.

  The baby was crawling by the time I finally finished. Proud and relieved, I wanted to feel like I’d darned the ends of everything that had passed through my life since I began the project, that I’d converted my own sadness and sense of loss into a beautiful object that a new generation could cherish.

  But something was not right. No, it was more than not right, it was wrong. Undeniably, irrefutably so. When I held up the little brown suit to admire, both feet were pointing in the wrong direction. As in backward. If you had dressed the baby using those feet as your guide, it would’ve seamed up the back with a hood that smothered the face. I’d knitted a cruel straitjacket with bear ears.

  As I pondered what Freud would make of my mistake, I considered my options. Unraveling was not one of them, nor was tossing the whole thing into the trash. There was only one choice: I’d have to operate. No shortcuts, no glue, and no sloppy three-needle bind-offs; this baby deserved to have feet done right.

  Immediately that inner voice began its “you can’t do it” mantra. But for some reason, I didn’t listen. I grabbed a good pair of sharp-tipped embroidery scissors and aimed them at a stitch on the ankle.

  Snip.

  This normally innocuous sound suddenly became loud, like the open-mouthed crunch of a tortilla chip in a church. There was no going back. I carefully extracted the strand from its row until two shivering, opposing rounds of stockinette stitches stood before me. I turned the foot around so that it was in the proper position. Using my grandmother’s darning needle for good luck and the surrounding stitches as my guide, I began slowly and carefully weaving the yarn back through the opposing loops, re-creating the arch, dip, swoop, and dive that forms each stitch.

  Toss a person into a pool, and he’ll either sink or swim. Chances are, if he manages to swim, he’s going to be so busy staying afloat he won’t have time or awareness to yell, “Hey! I’m swimming!” Likewise, I didn’t yell, “Hey, I’m Kitchenering!” to the world. I just quieted my mind and did what the needle wanted to do. It worked. By the time I finished stitching up the second ankle, I felt positively invincible. Like I’d been forced to take apart an entire Volkswagen Bug and put it together again, and the car actually started. I still hadn’t taught myself the science behind the why of what I was doing, but that was beside the point.

  The outfit was promptly wrapped and shipped to Jeanne, who offered suitably enthusiastic praise. She slipped Nadiya into it for a picture, and I suspect that was the only time she ever wore it. That’s okay. Only you and I know what really went into that outfit, and why I have not knit another one since.

  The final nail in Lord Kitchener’s coffin came several years later. I was at the Interweave offices in Loveland, Colorado, putting the finishing touches on a magazine I’d been hired to edit. (I only edited one issue, which is all I’ll say about how well that went.) Across the room from me sat Ann Budd, formerly managing editor of Interweave Knits magazine, creator of several Knitter’s Handy Book of … books, knitwear designer, and one of my personal heroes.

  She was rushing to finish a sock for a photo shoot that afternoon, and I apologized for distracting her (which I was). “Oh no, I’m almost done,” she said. “I just have to finish the toe.”

  I gave an agonized groan, knowing just how hard the last few hundred feet of Mt. Everest can be.

  “Oh, toes are eeeeeasy,” she said.

  I groaned again, and this time her head popped, groundhog-style, over her cubicle wall.

  A minute later she was by my side, needles and yarn in hand, showing me how Kitchener was done—on a real sock that was just hours away from being immortalized on the glossy pages of a book. More than that, she explained the why of Kitchener. She showed me how all that convoluted threading nonsense boils down to a simple concept. You thread each stitch first in the opposite direction of how you’d go into it, and then you come back and thread it in the same direction as you’d go into it—at which point it’s safe to drop off the needle. Once you get that idea, the rest falls into place.

  Just imagine Mario Andretti showing you how to down-shift on a curve, or Julia Child in your kitchen demonstrating the proper technique for flipping an omelet. When a hero teaches you how to do something you’ve struggled with for a long time, and you really get it, you feel fantastic.

  Ever since, I’ve embraced every opportunity to use Kitchener for toes or anything else that requires the same level of seamless connectivity. Every time I work it, I feel clever and strong. Kitchener serves as my gentle reminder not to give up on things quite so easily. I used up far more energy finding ways to avoid this stitch than I did finally facing it head-on. Kitchener has shown me that when life unravels you, when things don’t work out quite right, there’s usually a good stitch waiting to put you back together again.

  BRIOCHE

  I LOVE TO BAKE. Depending on the day, I might even love it more than knitting. Feeding and clothing people go hand in hand, two primal human needs that were once the purview of families and communities. Today, faraway factories and machine
s spit out thousands of loaves of bread and up to a million articles of clothing in a single week. Those of us who still choose to make these things by hand? We’ve been relegated to the “artisanal” domain, creating now from choice rather than need.

  Maybe it’s the dough that attracts me to baking, as yarn attracts me to knitting. We manipulate both raw materials—we wrap, twist, pull, tug, tap, fold, and stir—to form something greater than the sum of its parts. Considering how symbolically similar yarn and dough are, I find it surprising that only one knitted stitch has been named after a baked good: the brioche.

  Brioche is a sweet, buttery, yeasted dough that’s tinted gold from eggs. It is perhaps the single most tempting dough to eat raw, its complex sweet and savory flavors balanced by a satisfying caramel-like chew. Yet when baked, it puffs up, up, up into an airy crumb of a pastry.

  The traditional brioche is baked in a small round pan, slightly deeper and more angled than that of a cupcake. It emerges golden brown with its center puffed up like a giant nipple. But the dough also makes a bread that, when sliced, dredged in egg, fried crisp, and then slathered in maple syrup, has been known to make even the most discerning adults moan with pleasure.

  Brioche stitch, on the other hand, is based on a trio of increases, slipped stitches, and decreases. Combined and repeated at regular intervals, they form both the yeast and the kneading action for your fibery dough. The resulting fabric is dense yet springy, with deep furrows that have a look of ribbed corrugation. No nipples to be found.

  I think everything should be named after a baked good. People were always calling me Éclair when I was growing up. I know a parakeet in Oakland named Baguette. And if I had a child, no matter if it were a boy or a girl, I’d be sorely tempted to name it Croissant.

  The croissant is the perfect knitted pastry. It is a product of slow, steady patience—and yet undeniable simplicity—involving nothing more than flour, yeast, sugar, salt, butter, and milk. These ingredients are the culinary equivalent of hearty wool fibers, perfectly willing to be all sorts of things.

  As in knitting, the magic of croissants lies in the process, in what your hands do with the dough. After an initial mixing, kneading, and resting—the casting-on of your materials—you add the magic amalgamating ingredient: butter.

  Then, it’s simply a matter of rolling, folding, and chilling. You roll, fold, and chill again. The chilling and resting are perhaps the most essential parts of the process. Dough needs time to rest. Let those buttery stitches settle into their new fabric, perhaps stockinette?

  A few years ago, Clare and I were stuck at home for Christmas, just the two of us in our farmhouse on the hill, while everybody else lounged by the pool with my mother in Arizona. I decided I needed a capital-P Project, something big that would keep me from feeling lonely. I looked through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking to find the longest, most involved recipe—and the answer was croissants.

  Her masterful recipe documents the process better than any other I’ve seen since. It’s written clearly, helpfully, and without a hint of intimidation. I followed it, step by step, and on the third day we feasted on the most flaky, succulent, and flavorful croissants I’ve ever had—up there with the ones I consumed fresh daily when I lived in France. So astonished and smitten was I that I forgot to feel gloomy about being away from family over the holidays. If anything, we were both happy not to have to share our bounty with anyone else.

  If the croissant is your ideal stockinette, the mille-feuille—with its “thousand” alternating layers of flaky pastry and rich cream filling—would have to be stockinette into which you’ve added alternating rows of frothy high-calorie cashmere, or perhaps a brushed mohair that wafts from a silky core.

  Cupcakes and muffins would be the honest bobble, puffing proudly and invitingly from the fabric surface. Feather and fan is the freshly baked cannoli, its slender middle tube forming a tunnel through which the sweet mascarpone filling passes before billowing out from each end.

  Garter stitch, rest its soul, would be the oft-misunderstood whole-grain bread. It’s packed with body and bounce, with robust nutrition and substance. Yet it often plays second fiddle to its nemesis, the baguette. How she taunts with her perpetually skinny, perfectly tanned form. The baguette is the homecoming queen, the head of the cheerleading squad, and if you were to knit her, she’d have to be the slender, perky I-cord.

  The madeleine, my madeleine anyway, is knitting itself. When Proust dipped one of these simple bite-sized, shell-shaped cakes in tea, the taste triggered a flood of childhood memories. It’s called “involuntary memory” when a seemingly unrelated sensory experience triggers a memory. For me, a mere glance at yarn and needles—whether in our hands or someone else’s—can unleash powerful recollections.

  Sometimes when I’m knitting, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a window. The mirror image of my hands alters them just enough so that they don’t appear to be mine. Clear as day, they are my grandma’s hands. Just one brief look, and I’m transported to a whole other dimension between past and present, a never-never land of in between.

  I’m watching my grandma expertly maneuver her needle tips and yarn in graceful, elegant arcs. I’m so young that I may not even know how to verbalize what I’m seeing, but the impression is right there, infused into my cells.

  From there, I fast-forward. I’m sitting in the backseat of the car, my grandma by my side. Her hands are folded over her small brown leather purse. They’re beautiful hands, small and shapely, and they do not stand still. They are in a constant state of motion, thumbs quickly orbiting one another, fingertips fidgeting, then both sets of fingers rubbing the bag’s frayed leather handles. She’d stopped knitting, her mind having forgotten how—but her hands couldn’t stop moving.

  As time passed, she began to narrate everything she saw around her in a whispered mumble. We strained to listen, curious what her world looked like. Usually she was simply trying to remind herself what everything was. “That’s the youngest boy, standing by the window …”

  The narration grew more random, “Get the … yes, yes … that goes there … Good, good …” until we could not see her world at all.

  My brothers and I decided that she must have engaged in top-secret government plots when we weren’t around. “We bomb the embassy at midnight,” she’d mumble into a secret microphone in her collar before changing quickly back to jibber-jabber when we returned to the room.

  Other people have knitting memory recalls, too. “I haven’t seen someone do that in ages,” a stranger will smile, eyes already getting that faraway look. “My mother used to …” or “My grandmother always made us …” or “I used to do that.” I’m especially fond of the men who tell me their knitting stories, relieved to have found a confidante who understands.

  I have another memory, too: that of being a child lured by those guilty-pleasure, plastic-wrapped confections at the convenience store, products that purists might not even deign to call “pastries.” I’m talking about the Little Debbie, the Ding Dong, or the ever-perky Hostess Sno Ball filled with cream, coated in marshmallow, and then rolled in bright pink coconut flakes. All were off-limits. We gazed at them longingly, assuming they tasted far better than they actually do (which I didn’t discover until recently).

  These blasphemous “baked” goods are the edible versions of those easy, bulky knits that deliver swift instant gratification, the sugar-high of the bind-off, while lacking any enduring nutritional value. I doubt Elizabeth Zimmermann would have admitted to knitting a “Fun Fur” scarf … but then again, who knows what pleasures she snuck secretly when nobody else was looking?

  CASTING ON

  BEGINNINGS ARE BEAUTIFUL things. They’re the tank full of gas and the open road, a brand new notebook and a freshly filled pen. Reality hasn’t had time to intrude. All you see is the vast and exciting opportunity that lies ahead.

  In my knitting, I’m a starter. I go great guns at the beginning, sprinting several laps b
efore suddenly losing my steam. It’s the ongoing maintenance that I struggle with, like weeding the garden and keeping my desk clean.

  Ours is a rather quiet start. While the painter stares at his blank canvas and the baker at a freshly wiped marble slab, a knitter’s beginning involves an empty pair of needles and a strand of yarn. Our mission is to transform that inanimate strand of material into a luxurious three-dimensional object.

  The first note in knitting—at least the simplest, most common kind—is made with just our fingers as we wrap, pull, and tug the yarn into a slipknot. That first slipknot is the yeast of our knitted fabric, the mother stitch from which all future stitches are born. Without it, our yarn remains mute and inanimate.

  Not all fabric works like this. Woven material has the benefit of two parts, the warp and the weft. Each runs perpendicular to the other. The entire length of warp is measured and tied to the loom long before the weft ever snakes its way in. Their eventual intersection locks the fabric into place, creating a firm, fluid, durable material.

  But knitting is a purely monofilament creation. Like the carved stone inscriptions in Ancient Greece, knitting is “written” boustrophedonically—that is, a single strand of fiber wanders from left to right, then right to left, and back and forth it goes, building upon each row to form fabric.

  We have a few rhymes for teaching children how to knit. “In through the front door,” begins one, “once around the back, out through the window, and off jumps Jack.” One version has Jack peeking in the window instead of jumping through it, but essentially it’s the same—a sort of serial breaking and entering. We make stitches by inserting a needle into an existing loop, forming and pulling a new loop through the old one, and then dropping the old loop off the needle. That’s it. Repeat for each stitch along each row, and you’re knitting.