Hooked for Life (7 page)

Some of it is more than a little odd. I know fashion design is supposed to be pushing the envelope, but some of these things should have stayed sealed up. And I just know that thirty years from now, knitters will
be still be mocking us—not for the granny-square shrink tops from the ’70s but for some of the asymmetrical, oversized, randomly fitted “fashion” that is strolling down the catwalk today. And it won’t be the average, everyday crocheter who will have been responsible for these atrocities; it will be a big-name designer.

Not that it’s all awful, by any means. There are some Seventh Avenue designers doing wonders with crocheted lace and beautifully tailored pieces that fit like a dream. Sometimes when I want a laugh, though, I stop in at a high-end store and look at the prices on a crocheted jacket—they can run into the thousands of dollars. I laugh not because I don’t think they are worth that—we all know the amount of time a beautifully finished garment can take so a few thousand dollars seems about right to me—but can you imagine what would happen if any of the thousands of crocheters who sell finished items tried to get those types of prices? There would be a panic in the shops! Because something tells me the maker of that sweater doesn’t get nearly as much money as the person whose name is on the label.

Actually, as fashion styles trickle down through the price points, what bothers me is not the $3,000 sweater at Neiman Marcus but the $15 poncho at Target. Whoever made that crocheted garment, and if it is completely crocheted it was definitely a person not a machine, didn’t get paid nearly enough money for her work. I understand that the cost of living in whatever country she lives in is not the same as in the United States, but she probably got an hourly rate that we could pay with pocket change. If we train consumers to shop a discount store for crocheted fashion, then when they run across someone selling a few pieces for a fair rate, the customers think they are overpriced.

Anyway, if fashion history tells us anything, it is that no one trend lasts for too long. If you like crocheting garments for family and friends
to wear, quick, do some nowwhile they are still in style. I have crocheted when it was in style and I have crocheted when it wasn’t, so I know that we have to take advantage of our current stylistic cachet while it lasts. In a few years, only the crocheters will be wearing crocheted garments.

I
am an experienced crocheter—I have been doing it for decades. I should know how long it takes to make a stitch, a row, a sweater. Yet each and every time I set a firm deadline for a project I find I have underestimated the time I need to finish something by a rather large margin. If I say, “Yes, I can absolutely have that in the mail to you by Tuesday,” and it happens to be Thursday, I can pretty much guarantee you that the only way that would be possible without breaking any of the laws of physics would be if I neither slept, nor ate, nor took potty breaks. Those first two I might manage, but the last is problematic …

I have been known to choose delivery services based on what time their lobby window closes rather than which one is cheaper or more reliable. For the record? The local UPS deadline is 1:00 P.M., the USPS is 5:00 P.M., and for those really desperate dashes, there is a FedEx a twenty-minute drive away that accepts packages until 8:30 P.M. You get
a FedEx package from me, you can pretty much bet that I was weaving in ends until 8:29.

Recently, I had an afghan to finish, and the crochet time warp was already on my mind, so I did a little math. I looked at all the pieces I had done and wrote down which pieces were not finished. I was on public transportation and was starting a new section so at the end of my forty-minute ride, I counted how many rows I had finished. Twenty rows in forty minutes (okay, they were pretty narrow rows) equals two minutes per row, give or take. When I got to the subway, the next leg of my journey, I used the calculator on my cell phone to figure out how many rows were left to do (X rows times two minutes, plus X hours to assemble the pieces and X more hours to crochet on an edging). When I started, I was guessing it would take about ten hours to finish the afghan but the calculator told me it was a bare minimum of twenty-eight and a half hours if all went well. As it happens, it took me about thirty hours. Ten hours? Ha! I wasn’t even close. Of course, how much crochet time did I have to comfortably make it to UPS? Twelve hours. Darn, FedEx again! And no sleep, and no meal breaks and—well you get the idea.

The other facet of the crochet time warp is that when I have my crochet mojo going, time passes and I am completely unaware of it. Same project, different day … I had the house to myself and a deadline to make, so I sat down in front of a crime show marathon on cable TV and started to crochet. The marathon started at noon. I was going to town on the afghan border and my stomach started to growl a little, so I thought I might take a break and go get some lunch. It was a little darker than I expected—was there a rainstorm blowing in? No, it was dusky and I was starving because it was six o’clock, not two, as I had thought. Where had the time gone? Lost in the crochet time warp.

As you can see, sometimes the crochet time warp is a bad thing (missed deadlines due to underestimation of time needed) and sometimes it is a good thing (blasting through a project without it feeling like work). What I think we need to do here is harness the power of the crochet time warp so that we can use its powers for good and not evil.

If only I could crochet through a root canal, those are some hours that I wish would flash by at the speed of light.

T
o keep, I mean. We talk about stash taking over the world, and at least in this house, it does. But stash, to me, is mostly full skeins, or sometimes half skeins that go with other skeins—sizeable chunks of the same color and dye lot that I could conceivably use for a project with little to no trouble.

But then there are the other storage boxes—smaller than my regular stash storage boxes—that are labeled “odd balls and bits.” I started collecting the smallish bits of leftovers to store in one of those boxes, and next thing you knew there were two boxes, then three. Frankly, there are a lot of wee little balls of yarn in this house that are leftovers from finished projects. And when I set out to find them on my last ill-advised attempt at yarn containment, I found many more than I bargained for. It seemed like a good idea to get rid of some of them, but I find it physically impossible to throw yarn away. So here they sit.

Sometimes I consciously start on a stash-busting sort of project that is specifically designed to use up the partial skeins I have lying around. But often times those projects call for small amounts of yarn that are still smaller than what I have lying around so I use some odd balls but I don’t use them up. If there is anything more useless than a thirty-seven-yard ball of yarn, it is a seven-yard ball of yarn. But back in the box it goes, because I can’t throw out yarn.

I donate a lot of yarn to a local senior citizens’ center, but I don’t want to give them the ratty little balls because I think that would be at least a little bit insulting. I want them to be happy when I come in holding garbage bags full of yarn, rather than thinking I am giving them actual garbage.

In perusing a knit and crochet publication put out by the
New York Herald Tribune
in the late 1940s, I saw directions for a crocheted, multicolored afghan that began with the instruction, “Gather several lengths of worsted yarn
such as everyone has about the house,
and tie them together, winding them into a ball as you go.” (Etc., and emphasis mine.)
Such as everyone has about the house …
then it’s not just me, and it hasn’t been just me for quite some time! Everyone has these yarn ends about the house—too small to use but too pretty to throw away.

Sadly, my other phobia in relation to this issue is knots. I hate weaving in two trillion ends, but I hate knots in my work even more. I nearly foamed at the mouth at a recent crochet and knit conference, when the class instructor told us to change yarns randomly by tying them together with a tight overhand knot, and trimming the ends close to the knot. Knots in my work? On purpose, no less? I did it because I am a good student (who did not really want to foment revolution in the classroom) but it made me crazy. It’s making me a little bit crazy just now writing about it. So I am guessing that making my own Magic Ball, which is
what many contemporary crocheters call these tied together yarns, is not the answer.

I decided that I had to have some standard—a firm mathematical concept that would guide my bits storage. If a ball of yarn has less than X yards remaining, it is no longer a ball of yarn, it is trash. I had to be able to think of something I could actually do with the yarn or it had to go. Of course it doesn’t take a whole heck of a lot of yarn to do the first round or two of a granny square, so the smallish balls didn’t really go anywhere but back in the box.

Recently I was finishing up a bunch of afghan models for a pattern book. I had left way long ends on the squares because I wasn’t sure how I was going to assemble them, so I figured the ends would make good stitching-up yarn. It turned out that I didn’t need a foot or more of yarn dangling in every color, so some colors I used to assemble and some ends I had to weave in, cutting off an eight- to twelve-inch tail when I was through. The tails started to pile up, and I had to do something with them. Had I finally reached my mathematical limit? Could I throw away a foot-long tail? I decided I could, and was heading off to the kitchen trash can when my daughter stuck her head in the doorway. “Hey, aren’t those wool?” she asked. “You know, I could needlefelt with those, you should keep them.” And then she went on her merry way.

I grabbed a ziptop plastic bag and threw them in, collecting more and more as I finished the afghan, until there were at least a hundred pieces in there. I looked, and I thought, and I pondered, and then I went to the trash can and threw them all away. Apparently I
had
found my limit and twelve inches was it. I was even good enough not to separate the longer tails from the shorter ones. I just threw caution to the wind and chucked the entire contents of the bag.

I am kind of hoping though that the seagulls and other nesting animals that hang out around the garbage dumps will snag these little woolen bits and take them home. Just think how soft and warm their nests would be. And then the strands would not have gone to waste. Maybe I should take up needlefelting …

I
love all of the many forms my crocheting can take—from delicate lace made with a tiny hook and cobweb-weight cotton to a thick scarf made from bulky-weight wool. But sometimes when I am picking a project, I am less interested in what it’s going to turn out to be than in how it fits into my available crafting time.

If I am home my comfy corner chair with my special light on and every tool I could ever want on hand, the sky’s the limit so far as technical challenge goes. There is something incredibly satisfying about working on a very complicated pattern and watching the results grow under my fingers. Even if I have to frog my efforts twelve times, that thirteenth time, when I win the battle of crocheter vs. crocheting, at least temporarily, can leave me grinning for days. And while I am working on the piece, I am totally involved in it … counting stitches and rows, working for hours to get an inch of fabric, trying to imagine how this puzzle piece is
going to fit in with all the others and give me the end result that I want. My crocheting absorbs all of my attention—in fact, requires it, lest bad things happen.

But if I am out and about with only short spurts of time to crochet or in the company of people who are likely to want me to listen to them while they speak to me, I want brainless crochet. I want something that I could pretty much do blindfolded and standing on my head without messing anything up. In short, I want chimp work.

I cannot take credit for “chimp work” as a descriptive term, although I wish I could. I vividly remember the first time I heard it. It was the wee hours of the morning and I was working in the costume shop of a film shooting in New York City. There were two complicated garments yet to be finished, more to pack and ready for the shoot whose scheduled start time was mere hours away, and several of us were buzzing around like over-caffeinated bees trying to get everything finished while at the same time not making stupid, sleep-deprived mistakes. One of the assistant designers came over and asked if he could help. I raised an eyebrow—as a general rule on professional film sets, stitchers do not design and designers do not stitch. I wasn’t quite sure how much help he could actually be—I had never seen him so much as thread a needle, and while I am sure he knew how to sew, he probably wasn’t as practiced at whomping out garments as the rest of us who did it full-time. He blurted into the silence, “I didn’t mean finish the dress, but I’ll do chimp work if it helps.” I fell apart laughing. “Chimp work” is such an expressive phrase that even if you have never heard it before you know exactly what it means: mindless, brainless repetitive work that someone with minimal skills can accomplish. I set him to putting a jillion decorative iron-on fabric pieces onto a garment that needed them and went back to stitching. Every few minutes I smiled to myself, watching him with the iron. Chimp work, indeed.

Chimp work is the opposite of mindful crocheting—it’s what you do when your hands need to be busy but at least part of your brain is required elsewhere. Sock legs, scarves, and extra-large granny squares are great chimp work. Once you get going, you can have a conversation, look at the scenery, ponder higher mathematics, or the meaning of life—whatever else it is that needs to be done.

Now I have a sort of mental file of the available projects on hand, which ranges from chimp work through “I might have to look at this every few moments to make sure it is doing what I want it to do” on up to “If anyone so much as looks at me while I am in the middle of a row, I am going to lose my place and mess this up to a spectacular degree.” What those projects turn out to be sometimes matters less than you might think.