The Yarn Whisperer (13 page)

That's what transcendental swatching is all about. Tethered by the familiar and predictable physical motions, our mind is free to float up, up, up into the sky. Whenever we drift too far, a dropped or snagged stitch will pull us back to the present. We focus and fix before flying again. To the outsider, it may look like I'm working on a humble-looking square, but my mind is making huge blankets, ambitious turtlenecks, perfect-fitting cardigans. I'm orchestrating vivid scenes, sorting out problems, traveling to faraway places, while the only finger I'm actually lifting is the one required to form each stitch.

Whenever Casals went through the physical motions of his familiar walk and Bach preludes, his mind and spirit were free to wander—and the fruits of those wanderings were the foundation of his day. My grandfather didn't knit, didn't really swim, couldn't play a cello to save his life. And he certainly didn't take walks every morning. But he did listen to Bach every day, and he did research everything he touched. I swatch every day, and I, too, tend to research everything my fingers touch. My grandfather frustrated me so as a child, but maybe I'm more like him than I ever imagined. Our lives followed decidedly different paths, but we both seem to have found similar ways to dip our toes into the cosmos.

THE DROPPED STITCH

EVERY THURSDAY
morning for the last eight or so years, I've had a standing coffee date with my friend Pam.
Our success rate is about fifty percent, but each week we still try. I've grown accustomed to sitting and waiting, pulling out work to entertain myself. Eventually I'm either interrupted by her familiar voice or by the realization that I've been stood up yet again.

Sometimes life intrudes, and occasionally I'm the one who doesn't show up. Other times, we go out of our way to email in advance and formally schedule our coffee. Really, we're going to do it this time. “Yes, I'll see you then,” we say. “Nine-thirty sharp.” But it doesn't happen.

It's a funny thing when you're left sitting alone at a table for two, expectantly gazing at an empty chair. Left untended, the mind easily wanders into
that perilous land of past abandonments, mulling over the lowest moments in agonizing detail. Suddenly I'm no longer sitting at Coffee By Design, I'm a fourteen-year-old freshman at University High School in Tucson, Arizona. It's lunchtime, and I'm purposefully walking back and forth between the two main buildings just to avoid the painful prospect of sitting alone in the cafeteria, which I did for three solid months until I discovered the drama club.

Not that I mind eating alone now. I cherish it. I get to eat where I want, order what I want, and enjoy my own company. I can stare into space, read a book, or eavesdrop on other people's conversations to my heart's content. But it's harder when you're staring at a chair where someone was supposed to be. How easy it is to take that absence personally, to assign it far deeper meaning than it deserves. How embarrassing to say, “No, I'm expecting someone,” when someone asks to borrow the chair—and then watch it sit so conspicuously empty.

With Pam, a decade of friendship has taught me that it really isn't about me, it's more about how she lives, manages her time, and moves through the world. I am just one of many stitches on her busy needle.

And then the call comes, usually thirty-four minutes later. I'm tempted not to answer, because what kind of fool waits half an hour for someone to show up? Me, that's who.

“Clara!” She always sounds jubilant, as if she's just discovered a $100 bill in her coat pocket. “Are you still there?”

Of course I am.

“It'll have to be a quickie,” she always says.

“Of course,” I always say. “I'll be here.”

The thing is, it never is a quickie, and that's what keeps me coming back. Once she sits down and we start talking, the connection returns instantly. We take up exactly where we left off. I forget I was alone or that I doubted she would return, and I simply enjoy the happy comfort of a friend's company.

Stitches are social creatures, too. They long for connection. Only during the moment of conception do they sit alone on your needle, drumming their fingers on a table set for two. They wait for their neighbor to join them and make the fabric complete—for a stitch always needs neighbors in order to be fully realized. Alone, it can do little. Stack even one solitary stitch on top of another and you start to have something. Add a few friends on either side, more voices to the choir, and your fabric grows cohesive and beautiful. A community of sorts.

Before those friends come to claim it, a lone stitch can be somewhat unsure of itself. It has nothing to hold it in place and keep its dreams alive but the force of twist and crimp, memories of past loops, and anticipation of future needles. It doesn't always see the big picture of what it's going to become. It only knows that it's hooked into the guy below, hopefully has someone to hold its hand on one side or the other, and will eventually be secured by someone upstairs. Those are the hopes of pretty much every knitted stitch.

Should the unimaginable happen—should that loop of a stitch inadvertently slip from your needle's grasp and be set free—you will quickly learn everything you need to know about that yarn's true character.

Yarns are like people. Some have abandonment issues. They don't do well when stood up. They look at the empty chair, they check their watches and realize what's happened, and they panic. Glancing around, they see happily secure stitches just out of grasp, mocking, sneering, like teenagers in a cafeteria. They look up for the reassuring arms of the next row, but they see only air.

The first instinct of a fretful yarn is to flee the scene of embarrassment. In most fabrics, the nearest exit runs straight down through row after row of comfortably seated stitches. The fretful yarn may upturn everything in its path—chairs, tables, trays of half-eaten Tater Tots and chicken nuggets—until finally, like a dog on a leash, it's stopped in its tracks by a firm yank of the cast-on row.

But not all yarns respond in this way. Some stand their ground, not the least bit unnerved by their disconnection or solitude. Their stitches can sit suspended for hours, days,
years
even. They bring their own books. They write letters home. They nod to passersby, reach out to pet strangers' dogs, completely confident that eventually someone will notice their absence and come back to pick them up. “Oh, hello there,” they finally greet the returning needle, sliding in quickly and putting on their seat belt. “Nice to see you again.”

What makes a yarn react to abandonment the way it does? Why do some people crumble when faced with that empty chair, while others take it in stride? Does it all boil down to confidence—spunk, determination, security in one's self and one's own place in the world? Ironically, the most opulent and
imperial yarns—the ones with slick and glossy surfaces that glide past their neighbors without so much as a how-do-you-do—tend to slink out the emergency exit the fastest.

Whether it's from vanity or perhaps shyness, these slippery silks and smooth worsteds seem to have fewer deep and abiding connections. They look so beautiful in the skein. Their smooth and dense construction may help them last longer in the world. But what kind of life do they have? They're so intent on holding it together that they rarely relax, let their hair down a little, get to know their neighbors. They sit upright in their fabric, arms held in to preserve their personal space. Knit them too loosely and sunlight will stream in between each stitch; too tight, and the stitches quickly get grumpy and stiff from the forced intimacy. They expect life to go a certain way.

As you can imagine, when crisis strikes and this stitch suddenly finds itself teetering alone on a high ledge, it rarely knows whom to call, who may be home at this hour, which neighbor might have the tallest ladder. And the neighbors? Well that's the problem, because they're usually all made from the same stuff. Unless true disaster strikes, most doors will close and the abandoned stitch will be left sprinting for that red EXIT sign.

But those yarns with outgoing personalities—the ones formed from a noisy and jubilant community of lofty, crimpy fibers that are always in one another's business—those yarns come together in times of trouble. Each stitch, even the tormented teenager who just wants a little privacy now and then, fundamentally supports the others. They willingly expand and contract to fill whatever space you give them. Need to add three
more place settings for dinner? No problem, they smile, we can stretch the meal. And when the needle suddenly disappears and leaves a stitch stranded, the others reach out instinctively. “We've got your back,” they say, and they mean it.

These are the good, old-fashioned woolen-spun yarns like your proverbial (and my actual) grandmother used to knit, made from shorter, jumbled fibers that are allowed—even encouraged—to protrude and mingle. I'm talking about the more traditional farmhousey yarns of yore, those fuzzy Shetlands, spunky Finns, even the occasional sumptuous Merinos. Therein lies the rub, for despite their humble appearance, these yarns can sometimes contain the most tender and luxurious of fibers. But instead of uniform smoothness, these have bounce and body, smiling eyes, a ready laugh.

Depending on where you go, these rugged-seeming woolen-spun yarns may not be sitting at the popular kids' table. In fact, they're more likely to be sitting in smaller groups outside, on the grass, under a quiet tree. But you know what? When push comes to shove comes to slipped needle and dangling stitch, when a chair is empty that's supposed to have someone sitting in it, those are the yarns that will always wait for you. They are loyal to a fault, forgiving and secure in their own twist and tenacity. You want them on your side.

BEATING THE BIAS

IN MY LIFETIME
of knitting, I can count on one hand the number of projects I've knit out of pure cotton.
Ditto linen and hemp. I admit with regret and resigned determination that I have a personal bias toward protein fibers—things grown on the backs of animals—that leaves me predisposed to avoid fibers grown on seed and stalk. Like cotton, linen, and hemp.

It's not their fault. These are perfectly good fibers, ancient and strong, that have clothed us since the early beginnings. Can the ancient inhabitants of what are now Mexico, Peru, Egypt, China, and India all have been wrong? I just prefer my fibers squishy and elastic, that's all. I like a yarn that hugs my fingers, that tugs back when I pull on it, that stretches and bends and embraces my body. A yeasted dough, only in yarn form.

Fibers grown on seed and stalk have many qualities, but bounce and elasticity are not among them. These fibers are smooth instead of curly, their internal molecules preferring a direct path to a meandering one.

The smooth nature of seed-and-stalk fibers poses few potential problems in knitting except one: When you knit a large piece of stockinette fabric and are expecting a tidy square or rectangle, you may be surprised to discover that your fabric has begun to tilt sideways, like my mother's wedding cake after its bumpy August journey across Washington, D.C., in the back of a VW Bug. It arrived the Leaning Tower of Buttercream, but artful placement of toothpicks and flowers from the garden set everything right again.

The word here is
bias.
It connotes a line that runs diagonal to the grain of a woven fabric, usually at a forty-five-degree angle. In people, it forebodes an inclination or tendency, usually erring on the side of prejudice. “I have a bias against aluminum needles,” says one knitter. “I absolutely must only knit with hand-carved Burmese teak harvested sustainably by little schoolchildren.” Another interrupts, “I'm biased about commercially farmed lettuce—all my greens come from a vegan farm two miles away and are delivered on horseback in hand-woven baskets.”

A bias often reveals a limited worldview, a fear of the unknown or the misunderstood. The green pickup truck I spotted in Ellsworth, Maine, a few years back with a red, white, and blue bumper sticker that said, BOYCOTT FRANCE. The child who refuses to eat avocado because it's green and smooshy.
Or the knitter who refuses to try certain fibers because she's already decided she doesn't like them. I suppose if I gave them time and used them in the right context, I'd grow to love them. But I don't use them, and that's the problem.