All Wound Up (15 page)

These mistakes at least make sense to me—and that sense is almost immediate. I can feel the enormity of what I’ve done wrong sweeping over me as the house fills with smoke or the PTA lady looms over me as I lie bleeding in the grass. There’s a clear lesson, something I’m supposed to learn, and that makes me feel better. What I hate is when mistakes fall upon mistakes, which heap over errors, which lie atop missteps and are crowned in stupidity resulting from a failure to think, even when reminded to do so, ever so gently—like with a low-hanging branch or 324 cupcakes. Every once in a while, this is how knitting goes for me, and this is how it went, starting one Monday night, when I decided to knit a lace shawl from lovely, proper instructions written by the very experienced Nancy Bush, and ended up Wednesday night with nothing but a reminder that you can have the best directions in the world, but if you won’t read them, you’re probably going to live through the knitting equivalent of running into a tree… over and over and over.

I start trying to tink back the stitches to avoid another rip, which I fear might take the will to knit right with it. After dropping several stitches back into the cast-on edge, generally screwing up and knitting like I am stunned as a bat, I cram the whole thing into my bag, fish out sock yarn, and knit some nice, quiet 2 x 2 rib, just to remember I’m okay at this.

This time, all goes well. I cast on 331, yarn double. I knit two rows, yarn single. I start the “right side” of the chart, mark the center stitch, and knit the “left side” of the chart. I even get the right side on the right and the left side on the left. All goes well until I get to the end of the row and have stitches left over, but do have 331 stitches, which would be grand except there were decreases and it should be less. But I have no idea where it went wrong and I don’t know if I even care and for a terrible moment there in the middle of the night I may have thought about the fact that I have Nancy Bush’s phone number and maybe I might just hold her personally accountable for my pain, even though it isn’t her fault at all and that’s not why she gave me her number, and that if I have to rip this out again, which I totally do, because the four rows (4) that I have knit are arse, I am going to hurt someone (and seriously, how hard can this be?). Then I toss it in a basket, watch a rerun of
Law & Order
, drink two glasses of wine, think about chewing the yarn into little bits, and go the hell to bed.

I am now knitting a garter stitch scarf in an attempt to protect my sanity and the lives of those around me.

am a free-range knitter. I knit everywhere I go and almost all the time, and this lands me and my yarn in public pretty often, doing our thing. If you knit around regular people, you’ll notice sooner or later that they want to talk about it. (The same is true, by the way, if they see your stash. Unless you’d like to take a stab at explaining that you don’t belong on an episode of
Hoarders,
maybe keep your stash out of view as much as you can.) It turns out that despite my best efforts, knitting and knitters out in the open are still infrequent occurrences in most of the Western world, and it’s interesting to watch people try to make sense of this event. Some people try to ignore it but fail, stealing odd glances over their books on the bus, watching intently while pretending they’re not, but other, bolder people will begin a conversation about it. (Let us forget, just for now, about the third group, who want to talk about your knitting but not with you. They’ll sit feet away from you and have a conversation about you and your knitting as though you were deaf. “Hey, Martha, look at that lady there. See that? She’s knitting, I think. That’s peculiar, isn’t it? She seems sort of odd…”)

The people who would like to discuss it with you, they aren’t always sure how to start, and so they invariably ask first, just to be sure, “Are you knitting?” (Every once in a while on a cranky day when I’d rather not discuss my behavior with a stranger or be an ambassador for knitting, I am tempted to say, “Nope. Not knitting” while continuing to do so. I feel sure it would put a stop to the whole business, though it’s untested.) Generally, I answer that yes, I am indeed knitting, and when they ask what, I tell them it’s a sock (my out-of-home knitting of choice) and then they all watch for a bit. This reaction is pretty universal. I used to think that they were just interested, but it turns out that the staring and silence is really a symptom of someone who’s suddenly rather busy adjusting their world view to a place where socks can be made, not just bought. Once they’ve made this shift, they ask one of two questions. If they contain knitter-potential, usually they ask if it’s hard to do. (This is because they’re already thinking about doing it themselves.) If the knit-force is not with them, usually the next question is, “How long does it take to make a pair of socks?” It’s not an unreasonable question, since even moving at a good clip it’s pretty obvious that socks aren’t churned out in less than an hour. Knitting, even fast knitting, is still slow, and so I tell them the truth. A pair of socks takes me fourteen to twenty hours of knitting, depending. At this point, most normal people recoil in horror, tell me how unreasonable that is, and silently renew their inner commitment to getting socks the normal way, from the store.

I am not unsympathetic to them. If you really think about it, knitting is absolutely a ridiculous way to get clothes. Before you all get out the pitchforks, let’s be honest. A pair of socks from the store cost almost nothing, comparatively. They are cheap in terms of both time and money. Sure, homemade socks are infinitely better, but most folks haven’t experienced the supreme wonder that is a pair of perfectly fitting socks; They’ve been dodging along happily with their discount store socks forever, and no harm has come to them, and because there’s nothing wrong with the logic of our detractors, it can be hard to convince them that knitting makes sense. Most of us could get good, serviceable clothes that you can wear in public without shame for next to nothing, again comparatively speaking. Every store has swathes of socks for a few dollars, and whole racks of sweaters that you can pick from, and for less than thirty bucks and an hour of your time, you can be standing in a sweater that fits and doesn’t need the ends woven in. In the face of that, how do we defend what we’re doing? The yarn for a sweater alone would be more than $30 a lot of the time—hell, I’ve knit thirty-dollar socks and forty-dollar mittens. They can have socks for next to no money and in no time, but ours are pricey on all accounts, and they can’t find a way to relate it to other things that maybe they themselves do—or have seen done—and understand.

Think of the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel— the pope’s personal chapel. Do you have any idea how long Michelangelo stood with his neck twisted up on a freaking scaffold to come up with that? Four years. Four years to have a ceiling painted. It’s got more than 300 figures and it’s widely regarded as one of the most remarkable works of art within the entire realm of human expression. It isn’t just a painted ceiling of 5,000 square feet; it’s 5,000 square feet of frescoes—paintings done on wet plaster one little bit at a time—largely by one guy. Just consider that. Did anyone say to Michelangelo, “Hey, Dude, aren’t you getting a crick in your neck from painting that ceiling for so long? Isn’t this sort of ridiculous, slow, and expensive?” Did anyone take him aside and say, “Mike, baby, wouldn’t it make more sense to just paint the ceiling white with a big old roller and put the paintings on the walls like everybody else?” Nope. They didn’t, and even in retrospect nobody thinks it was a crazy undertaking. In fact the Vatican spent twelve years and many millions of dollars restoring the whole shebang a while ago. Obviously, even though it was technically a stupid way to paint a ceiling (if we’re following the sock rule), it’s got a value that makes sense to us, enough sense to value and invest in it. We get that, and we get other aspects of it too.