All Wound Up (16 page)

Take food. Almost everyone understands that there’s a value in taking the time and money to prepare a beautiful dinner for a family or guests. Almost nobody thinks that you’re being ridiculous if you spend a whole day in the kitchen making something gorgeous, almost nobody is going to ask you why you’re bothering, and almost nobody will suggest that you’re entirely off your rocker for not picking up boxed macaroni and cheese and winging it at the lot of your guests. (I keep saying “almost” because I want to leave room for the possibility that one terrible day I’m going to be reduced to serving just that, likely as a result of knitting too much.) Almost nobody is going to suggest that the weird powdered cheese is a better option than, well, just about anything you could give to your guests… and maybe that’s where we start helping them understand how knitting your clothes really is something that makes sense.

That powdered cheese and stale macaroni might be what gets you through a particularly scrappy Tuesday when you’re really only coming up with dinner because you’re too pretty for prison, and that’s where they send parents who don’t provide children with food, but you still understand the value of that slow, special meal you could be making. We all understand that it’s cheaper and easier to grab takeaway on the way home and fling it at the ravening hordes, but nobody uses that as a reason why you’re not serving up McDonald’s at Thanksgiving. Special things, like homemade bread and soup, or a cake you made yourself, are slower. They take a long time, and they cost extra money, energy, and effort, but it’s well understood that your time and money are really that secret ingredient that your mum used to say that she was adding—the one she called love. The value of what you put into making something is transferred to that thing, and it becomes valuable just by containing it. Why knit socks? Why not serve sandwiches at weddings?

All of this means something—something good—about investing and going slowly, and putting your time and money into your efforts to show you care, and that is something that should reassure the slower knitters among us. The longer it takes you to make something, the more valuable it is.

nce upon a time there was a very nice knitter who lived in a tiny two-story house with a lot of yarn, a chronically late husband, and some untidy teenagers. This may sound a lot like the beginning of a fairy tale, but this knitter was keenly aware that she was not a princess because a princess would have had way less laundry and way more of a castle, which is really not what you call a house with only two closets, but I digress.

Despite the wee house and the very minor failings of her family (and sadly, herself) the knitter still thought that mostly she was living something absolutely close enough to a fairy tale, because even though the place seemed to be seriously short of dusting elves or pastel birds that hung up the laundry for her, things were really pretty good. Nobody in the house was ever hungry; though the house was tiny, it was warm and safe; and the knitter did have all the yarn she could ever need for her whole life… although she doesn’t really like to talk about that, because it makes her family ask questions about why it is that she keeps buying yarn, so for the purposes of moving the story along, let’s gloss over that little detail.

One fine day when the sun was shining and the knitter was doing what she did best, which would be sitting around working on a sweater while planning to play dumb when the family discovered they were out of bread, as well as contemplating what other women did with their hair that made it look so much better than hers, she began to run into trouble. As our intrepid knitter began the armhole shaping with a predictable bit of casting off to begin the hole, she turned the page to the next instruction, and there it began. The next instruction was something like “cast on a few and then increase a whole whack,” and really, any way our knitter tried to slice it, that’s not how armholes go. For there to be a hole, there needs to be fewer stitches, we’re all pretty sure of that, but knitting can be odd as fish, and every knitter has met a pattern that makes no sense but still makes a sweater, so this knitter, despite being really pretty experienced and clever at this business, tried hard to make the instructions work.

Some time later, the air thick with expletives and generally unladylike language, the knitter was casually gnawing on the edge of her counter to relieve a little stress while she tried to figure out what could be wrong. Not only didn’t the instructions work, they didn’t even occur over the right number of stitches, and try as she might, the knitter couldn’t comply with them—but she was still committed to trying. She wasn’t giving up, partly because she doesn’t like to think of herself as a quitter or someone who can have her spirit broken by an inanimate object like yarn, and partly because of the nature of knitting errors themselves. Knitting errors are sneaky. They lurk in corners waiting for a knitter to let down her guard, and then they insinuate themselves into the work. It’s not like a mistake in tennis where the ball sails past you and you’re instantly aware that you’re wrong about where the ball is in space and time. It’s more like a mistake in baking, where a cake might simply fail to rise while it’s in the oven. The mistake isn’t clear, glaring, and immediate. It’s sneaky and underhanded and reveals itself slowly while you stand around hoping against hope that it still might come together.

Knitting mistakes being what they are, and this knitter, being intimately acquainted with that truth, had done what almost all experienced knitters do when they find a mistake. She had carefully examined the most recently row knit; she had determined that it didn’t have the right number of stitches to make the next row work; she had decided that it was therefore wrong; and then (having been shafted by something like this before, in a way that was absolutely memorable) she had gone to her trusty box of all-knowing (a laptop connected to the Internet) and had asked that box if there were any corrections to the pattern. There were not, and so, heaving a sigh of enormous regret, the knitter ripped back a row of her work, and checked there for the offending error that was the source of the armhole’s bizarre nature.

Sadly, so sadly, that row didn’t have the right number of stitches either, and so the knitter went back another row, cursing violently, and another, cursing violently
and
creatively, and so on, ripping back row after row, checking the pattern a million times, and recounting a million times, and trying really, really hard to understand how she could begin with the right number, follow the instructions for increasing and decreasing the right way, and still end up with the wrong number, and then the phone rang.

Now in most fairy tales, this would be the moment where the fairy godmother showed up. In a flurry of wings and sparkles, a kindly fairy godknitter would descend upon our poor knitter and not only wave a magic wand and sort this sweater out, but have the leftover sock yarn sorted in a way that made it seem usable and reasonable, instead of a weirdly obsessive collection that nobody in their right mind would be keeping. (Having given it a great deal of thought, I’m also convinced that she would be wearing a handknit gown with a beaded entrelac bodice. It’s the only possible thing that could give her the credibility she needed to be taken seriously as a reliable rescuer of knitters.) We’ve already determined, however, that this is not a real fairy tale, and that this wasn’t a real princess (you could tell by the frazzled expression and ruined demeanor—princesses never have ruined demeanors) and so the person on the other end wasn’t a fairy godmother but a knitting friend of our hapless knitter, which was mostly the next best thing. This friend was used to knitting ruining demeanors and being the source of foul language, and was immediately sucked into solving the problem. She asked all the relevant questions: Were the right number cast on? (They were.) Had the knitter stopped knitting her size and accidentally taken up with another? (She had not.) Had she checked for errata to the pattern? Consulted the Internet? Considered that the yarn was faulty? (When all else fails, blame the unlikely.)

When they had exhausted the obvious, our knitter threw a massive fit, slammed the teakettle around for a bit, and had a bit of a cry, and then her friend had a clever thought. “Hold on,” she said. “Let me get my copy of that pattern; we’ll walk through it together.” So it came to pass that the knitters began to scour the pattern, line by line, looking for where the whole thing had come off the rails. “See that?” asked our knitter. “Right there at the bottom of that page. Cast off twelve stitches. That makes sense. I did that. Sixty four is what I had, then I cast off twelve which should give me fifty-two, which I have…” (They paused there to get a calculator. That may seem like simple math, but a failure of simple math could have been the root of all evil here, and it would have been ridiculous not to double check that it hadn’t changed.) “Now look here!” exclaimed our knitter. “It ends there, you turn the page, and everything becomes madness. Suddenly there are supposed to be seventy stitches, and that’s not right, unless I was supposed to cast on twelve instead of cast off twelve… but that still doesn’t come out right… and then look here!” She paused to stab the offending sentence hard with her finger, mostly because it was hard not to be angry when there were the ruins of a sweater on the table with its yarn pulled out like innards at a goring. “Here you’re to cast some on and then begin increasing again. I don’t see how that’s going to make an armhole unless I’m trying to put wings on it!” She was enraged to gasping by now and shoved both the book and the yarn violently away from her. “That’s it!” she screeched, sort of aware that she was starting to sound like a harpie, but depending on her friend to understand. “I don’t get it. I hate this book. I hate this sweater, the yarn is stupid too, and I can’t believe that anyone even allowed something like this to be published. You’d think they’d be more careful. This page is fine and then you turn it and it’s like the bloody editor nipped off and got blasted. This is my time they’re playing with, and for an instruction to be so reprehensibly wrong is just… well, it’s reprehensible. Maybe it’s a joke or even on purpose. The lot of them are sitting around the yarn company right now, laughing until they can hardly breathe, just thinking about me losing my mind. I bet that’s it. I should write a letter. I should…”

Here, having patiently been waiting for an opening, and seeing that one was not forthcoming, the knitter’s friend gently interjected, “Steph?” (It is a complete coincidence that the knitter has the same name I do.) “Steph? I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. I see that page seven is fine… then I turn the page and page eight makes sense, too…”

It was at this moment that all the good sense and ability to double check and problem solve was restored to our fair knitter, and, with a sinking feeling, she looked at her page numbers. Page seven… flip… there it was. Page ten. For one horrible moment she wondered if her book was faulty and it was still someone else’s fault, and she took a deep breath, surveying the carnage of the sweater and the afternoon in front of her, and then she rubbed the pages a little between her fingers… and the two pages that had been stuck together fell apart without so much as a whisper of a sound.

The silence was eerie, and the knitter could tell that her friend was sore afraid. “Never mind,” said she, and ever so gently hung up the phone, and went to lie in the road.

f there was some weird game show where contestants had to match people to their wardrobes, I think that I would be a really easy one, as long as we stuck to my store-bought clothes. I am a sensible woman who doesn’t own lipstick, nail polish, or high heels, and I pride myself on my practical and reasonable approach to my wardrobe. I like plain, simple clothes for a whole bunch of reasons. I like plain clothes because I’m sort of shy and I don’t like to stand out and because I am physically modest and don’t care for anything flashy or low cut. Also, I think I missed the day at school when they explained how to put together an outfit. So, in a desperate attempt to make sure that I don’t put together the wrong things, I’ve decided to err on the side of caution. Plain black pants go with any plain top, plain shirts go with jeans every time, and plain tops and plain pants can always go together, especially if they are the same color. This does make me look like I’m wearing a uniform a lot of the time, but I figure that it’s better for people to say, “Hey, Steph? Did you know that when you wear a brown top and brown pants you sort of look like a dishwasher repair guy?” than, “Hey, Steph? There’s no easy way to say this. You know that seizure that Marie had? It turns out that the doctors think it was caused by the way your shirt and pants clashed.” I have fashionable teenaged daughters, and I can’t count the number of times that I’ve gone to them with an outfit that I think is pretty good, only to have them tell me that it’s too much or not enough or that I’m dressed like a dishwasher repairman or that they are starting to see the flashing lights that they think indicate that the combination of my skirt, blouse, and jacket are giving them a wee bit of brain damage. I can always tell that I’ve misstepped when I ask them if I look okay and they say, “It depends. Are you leaving the house?”