Free-Range Knitter (18 page)

Dear Stephanie,

Thank you for your inquiry about our product. We regret to inform you that the yarn you wrote us about (Winterwool, sport weight, in color #24, “Spring greens”) has been discontinued and is unfortunately no longer available. We hope that you will continue to use and enjoy our other products.

With kind regards,
Robert

Customer Service Representative
Winterwool Inc.

Dear Stephanie,

As I mentioned in my previous letter, Winterwool sport weight has definitely been discontinued. We understand that this has
caused you some inconvenience, but yes, we are really sure it is unavailable. Please accept the enclosed coupon for 10% off of the worsted weight with our regrets.

Sincerely,
Robert

Customer Service Representative
Winterwool Inc.

Dear Stephanie,

Thank you for your response to my last letter. I’m very sorry that you have three quarters of a sweater knit out of that yarn, but that doesn’t change the fact that we no longer sell this product. I understand that you feel entitled to “some sort of explanation” for our “irresponsible decision making,” but there was simply no demand for the product.

In the future, since our product line can change without warning, we suggest that you purchase sufficient yarn to complete your project.

Regretfully,
Robert

Customer Service Representative
Winterwool Inc.

Dear Ms. Pearl-McPhee,

I regret my unfortunate choice of words in my last communication with you. Clearly I misspoke when I said that there was no demand for this yarn. I disagree with your base premise that there has to be some of this yarn somewhere in this place and assure you that our warehouse is a tidy and organized unit. There is no point in me acting on your suggestion to go down to the warehouse personally to conduct a search. Furthermore, I feel I must defend the company somewhat from your statement that this occurred right out of the blue. The product was discontinued almost nine months ago, and the color you’re seeking was discontinued almost two years ago. Perhaps in the future you could look into starting a project right away so that any shortfalls have a better chance of being spotted before they become so obviously painful for you.

I assure you we are not “holding back on the goods” so that we can have it all for our “private stash.” We are a yarn company; our goal is to get yarn out of here, not keep it in. Heck, I’m not even a knitter.

Apologetically,
Robert

Customer Service Representative
Winterwool Inc.

Dear Ms. Pearl-McPhee,

As a customer service professional, I don’t think that if I were a knitter I would better understand what you’re going through, and I think your insinuation that I do not care one little bit that Christmas is coming and there’s no way that you’ll have time to make a different sweater before then is “way off.” From your choice language I can tell that this situation (for which Winterwool Inc. cannot be held responsible) is upsetting you a great deal. I have checked with the pattern support department to see “what the hell” you’re supposed to do, and it is their suggestion that you make the sweater into a vest, as there should be adequate product to complete one. This seems to me a reasonable solution. I hope it helps. Regarding the second point in your most recent letter, I have to tell you that your suggestion that the company attempt to contact knitters to warn them of the impending discontinuation of product lines is a little far-fetched and nothing at all like the tornado early warning system, even if we did list it in the newspaper. I will, however, direct your idea to the appropriate departments, just the moment I have a minute.

Thank you,
Robert

Customer Service Representative
Winterwool Inc.

P.S.: No, I don’t think that it is a brutal irony that our slogan is “Working to please knitters.”

Madam,

I regret that there is no further action I can take to assist you in this matter, although I do feel badly that your husband dislikes vests so intensely. I personally have nothing against them. I will pass along to the pattern department your disappointment that this was the best they could manage and report your belief that you wouldn’t have run out of yarn in the first place if they hadn’t calculated yardage, as you so eloquently claimed, “like a six-year-old with a broken calculator.” I assure you that there is no yarn here that will help you, and I can give you my full and personal promise that the answer would not be any different if you came down here, as you suggested, to personally conduct a search for the “two measly skeins” that you need to finish. There is no more. There has not been any for a long time, and there is nothing that any department here at Winterwool Inc. can do to assist you in this matter, even if you do talk to my mother. I think that you may have an easier time learning to live with this if we no longer communicate and end this difficult chapter of your life.

Robert

Customer Service Representative
Winterwool Inc.

Madam,

Although my position that nothing further can be done to help you locate further quantities of Winterwool has not changed, I did not want to leave your fourteen messages from Tuesday unanswered. I do understand the purpose of customer service, and I am sorry you feel that I do not. I must insist that you leave the level of my education out of this dispute, and I do not need to know how much you spend on wool each year, although if the figure you left on my answering machine at home (how did you get that number?) is correct, I would hazard a guess that you have problems that do not include a shortage of wool, although if true, it may explain why you think we are hoarding it. Please stop calling me, and for the love of God, walk away from the sweater. It’s just not worth it.

Robert

Customer Service Representative
Winterwool Inc.

Woody Allen said, “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.”

I have, for most of my knitting life, been a knitter with no money. I know that sounds a smidge dramatic, and I want to stress the difference—or at least the difference in my head—between a person with no money and a knitter with no money. A person who has no money might be looking for innovative ways to use a cardboard box for adequate housing, whereas a knitter with no money is looking for innovative ways to get knitting stuff. I wasn’t starving or homeless, and I had money for a home much, much better than a cardboard box, and I certainly had food (though there were some memorable plain-pasta-with-margarine-sauce meals toward the end of a student loan or two), but I was a knitter with no yarn money.

At the beginning of my knitting poverty I was a student, and I lacked knitting experience as much as cold cash.
I solved the issue by knitting with the absolutely cheapest yarn I could find. I went to discount stores and bought huge balls of appalling yarn with no regard for what it was made of or whether it possessed any quality that I might want in a finished project. I didn’t worry about mundane things like whether the yarn I had chosen was stretchy enough for cables or fine enough for lace. I didn’t worry that you couldn’t block a plastic yarn, and I had chosen a pattern than needed blocking. I didn’t worry about anything, not just out of ignorance but because there was no point. The reality was that I could buy only yarn that cost a dollar a pound. Introspection or investigation was pointless, since there were no options. Finding out that there were better things I couldn’t afford was only going to be painful.

There were yarn shops in my neighborhood, and I peeked in them occasionally, but the prices (which I now think of as quite reasonable) were so far out of my reach that not only was it a joke to think about buying it, but I couldn’t even imagine anyone taking that much money out of their budget to knit with the yarns I saw there. I wondered how the yarn shops stayed in business. I mean, could there really be enough knitters with more money than sense to support them? I may have even made fun of the fools who bought that stuff. (Considering my current stash, I sometimes wonder whether I permanently damaged my Karma with that. I half expected to get struck by lightning the first time I bought cashmere.)

During this period the yarn I bought was invariably acrylic, and this was more than twenty years ago. Acrylic in general was a shameful thing to do to a petrochemical, and I was buying the cheapest choice I could find, and generally speaking, the rule with yarn is the same as everything else. Except for good deals and good luck, you get what you pay for, and quality follows cash.

During these discount store scouring days, people didn’t exactly clamor to get on my knitting gift list. Why on Earth I thought that if I bought awful yarn I would get great sweaters, I really don’t know. I was experienced enough to grasp that if I bought rotten apples I couldn’t have good applesauce, but I think that I was tricked by the way that knitting is an act of transformation. I was already turning yarn into something else, and I think that meant that I really believed that I could turn crap into good stuff. When things turned out crappy, and there were some unbelievably crappy things knit by me during that time, things that live in family legend and are still spoken of at family gatherings, I thought that it was my skills that made my finished projects nasty or stiff, wear poorly, or stretch out of shape. I knit along, trying to turn straw into gold, and I failed miserably most of the time.

Over and over I was struck with what seemed to be totally random disasters. My grandmother (who invested time and money in her knitting) had given me an old pattern book that had a baby blanket in it. Knit lace, executed in a fine and almost transparent British wool. Lacking the resources to buy the yarn recommended (and smart enough not to get sucked into buying something so
clearly unnecessary), I had gone to the discount store and bought a bag of acrylic mill ends that I thought would work. The balls and half balls of yellowy-white acrylic were packaged in a clear garbage bag (that should have been a tip-off for me, but I was young and that gave me false confidence), and I hugged the huge bag all the way home. It was about $3 for a blanket’s worth. I thought I was a genius. $3! I was giddy with my thrifty glee.

The problems started immediately. First, there was the issue of density. Since the yarn recommended was lofty and delicate wool, and my yarn was extruded plastic, my version was sort of heavy, in the same way that Dolly Parton’s hair was sort of big in the ‘80s. I did not let this deter me. There was also a problem trying to work the instruction “Pass slipped stitch over” in a yarn with no stretch at all. When I managed to yank the stitches over to where they should be, they stayed there, gaping rudely instead of snugging back like a more elastic yarn would. I didn’t let this deter me either.

In addition, because I was knitting lace, the whole thing looked like the bricks of ramen noodles you buy at four for a dollar. (I was well acquainted with these.) I phoned my grandmother and told her that my stitches weren’t nice, and my work didn’t lie flat like the picture. “Block it,” she mandated. “Blocking evens out your work and stretches lace to open it up.” I looked up
blocking
in my book and followed the directions. The book and my grandmother both agreed that blocking made knitting “flat and even.” (The book and my grandmother also probably agreed that all bets were off if you were knitting with discount mill ends, but they
didn’t say so.) I followed instructions, wetting and pinning out my work, but (probably because I was trying to block the yarn equivalent of a waterproof sailing rope) the knitting didn’t respond the way the book said it would. I still remember the tragic confusion I felt when I took the pins out of my beautiful lace blanket, and as my hours and hours of work were released from the tension, it sprang back to its original form. It was still rippling and twisted, the stitches still gaped, and frankly, it still looked like crap.

In a monumental moment of formidable stupidity (though at the time it felt like ingenuity, and it would have been if it had worked), I tried to counter these problems in a new way. I swear now, as I swore to my mother then, while trying desperately to peel, scrape, and otherwise scour the layer of blackened plastic goo off of her iron while I sobbed and the acrid scent of scorched acrylic filled the air, that it had never, ever occurred to me that a yarn could melt. The blanket was entirely ruined.

After that I got a pretty good job, and things improved fast. I invested in better yarn, patterns, and tools, and lo and behold, the stuff I was making started looking better, too. Julia Child said that you should cook with the best ingredients you can afford, and my own mother told me that you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but I had no idea what good materials could do to produce good knitted stuff. Suddenly the sweaters were soft, light, warm, and elastic. Shawls stayed blocked, mittens felted slightly in a bath and became warmer and warmer with wearing. My knitting needles were a pleasure to work with, my knitting
basket overflowed with success and joy. I was in heaven. I was now a regular at the yarn shop, and I took back everything I had ever said about people who wasted their money on wool. (I now mocked people who bought sweaters.) I was enlightened. Good yarn was a pleasure all by itself.

Enter my first baby a few years later, and exit the whole yarn budget. All of it. I was right back to only affording crap, and not much of it, but something had happened. I had staggered back into the discount store, picked up a big ball of yarn that I had happily knit for years, and noticed that it was crap. I’d gotten a taste for the good stuff, and there was no way I was going backward. Now I had a problem, though. I wanted only the good stuff, but I still didn’t have any money to buy it with. I could really afford only yarn that cost less than carrots, and short of selling the baby, which though lucrative had obvious moral problems, I was screwed. This time, though, I got to thinking creatively, and I found that with ingenuity, focus, and the sort of clear reasoning one usually associates with nuclear physics rather than knitting, I could knit with the best of them. I recycled yarn from thrift store sweaters, I offered to knit yarn shop samples in exchange for store credit, I put out the word that I accepted yarn orphans happily, and when Christmas or my birthday came, I wanted only one thing. It worked out, and three babies (and ten years) later it got easier.