The Yarn Whisperer (3 page)

After all, did Elizabeth Zimmermann encourage us to knit on with fear and uncertainty? No. Her exact words were, “Knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crises.” And so I shall.

THE THING ABOUT BOBBLES

MY MATERNAL GRANDMA
always wore turtlenecks.
Not until late in life, after dementia took its toll, her long braids were lopped off, and her Icelandic sweaters replaced by wash-and-wear polyester gowns, did I discover the reason why: Her upper chest and neck were peppered with a faint, fleshy constellation of skin tags. According to my mother, my ever-tactful grandfather felt compelled to snort at some point in the summer of 1957, “Ruth, put on a turtleneck; those things are disgusting.”

From that moment on, she never left the house uncovered again. I can find no photos of her ever sporting a bathing suit, shorts, or even a short-sleeved shirt. When she came to visit us in Arizona and the temperatures hovered around 100 degrees, the turtleneck was still firmly in place, sleeves marching defensively to her tiny wrists. It was her
version of a burka, protecting a Victorian modesty that concealed a painfully fragile ego. According to family lore, she even changed into her pajamas in the closet.

How funny, then, that at the same time my grandma was so carefully covering up her neck, she was furiously adding bobbles to everything she knit, like a chef gone wild with a pastry bag. Using a seemingly endless supply of off-white, worsted-weight wool procured who knows where, she adorned pillow cover after pillow cover with complex Aran patterning that featured, always, a proliferation of bobbles.

Bobbles are the skin tags of knitted fabric, wobbly nubbins that protrude and dangle, make babies hungry, invite fiddling, distract the eye, and consume acres of yarn. While skin tags may appear suddenly and when least expected, bobbles exist only when we want them to exist.

A bobble is formed by adding several stitches onto an unsuspecting stitch, working them back and forth independently from the rest of the fabric, and then binding off all but that original stitch—which then rejoins the party as if nothing had happened, only now sporting a giant hump on its back. “Who, me? Oh, must've been that second piece of cake, ha ha,” it laughs nervously as it inches into the crowd. A bobble is a whispered conversation that everyone overhears, a prominent sidebar, a weekend in Las Vegas caught on tape.

As with any protruding three-dimensional object, we've developed all sorts of techniques to make a better, firmer, tighter bobble. We've learned that if you add and bind off the extra stitches in stages, row by row, you create a rounder, more robust
bobble. We've discovered that if we wrap the neighboring stitches as we go along, we can give greater support to full-figured bobbles. We've found that if we work our bobbles too close together, we'll end up with an unattractive unibobble, that it's far wiser to lift and separate our bobbles with plenty of stockinette stitches. Saggy bobbles? Try twisting the stitch in the row directly above the one in which you added the bobble.

As much as I'd like to say that bobble beauty is in the eye of the creator, it's also in the eye of the beholder. And nothing beats the awkwardness of two ill-placed bobbles on a grown-up woman's sweater. No, far better to space them evenly throughout your work.

But be careful. Adding bobbles with reckless abandon can be dangerous because there's no getting rid of a bobble once it's there. You can add new ones after the fact, no problem. But you can't freeze one off a sweater, cover it with a Band-Aid, and expect it to heal. Slice a bobble off your fabric, and the surrounding stitches will quickly open into an ever-widening yawn. A bobble is there to stay, till death do you part.

Many knitters scorn bobbles with the same disdain reserved for a neighbor's barking dog or the lumbering Winnebago that refuses to pull out of the passing lane. They are fiddly and tedious to work, always hitting the “pause” button when you've just begun to gain momentum. To knit a sweater with bobbles is to tour a museum with a friend—you know the one—who insists on stopping at each painting and reading the information card, word by word. There you stand in the doorway, eager to move into the Impressionist room while she
lingers among the Pre-Raphaelites, still reading the second paragraph of the third card on the fourth painting.

Even the word
bobble
doesn't bode well. It means to make a mess of something, to mishandle it. When a horse makes a misstep before a race, it's called a bobble. Likewise, an athlete bobbles when fumbling the ball. To bobble is to lose one's grip, which is what many people think you've done when you start adding bobbles to everything. I certainly thought so.

I suspect bobble mania is especially likely to afflict those people made uncomfortable by bare walls and unadorned space. For them, a sea of stockinette is like an empty windowsill with nary a seashell or figurine to keep it company. Their immediate instinct is to put something on it, and bobbles are the knitter's favorite figurine. They adorn and punctuate the three-dimensional language of stitches, they are the smack of a dot at the bottom of an exclamation point or a wad of chewing gum on the sidewalk, a fibery tumor.

I was rather indifferent to bobbles, until the day I spotted The Jacket. Knit in bulky yarn, it had a shockingly deep collar of bobbles matched by an equally substantial swath along both cuffs in a charmingly 1960s Jackie O style. I was mesmerized. These bobbles were not discreet or subtle, they were loud, proud Dolly Parton bobbles stomping their feet on every available inch of fabric. They created a honeycomb of stitches filled with a plush, fibery sweetness I found simply irresistible.

Suddenly, and against all my better judgment, I felt a desire stir deep within my knitting loins: a desire to cast on and create this coat for my very own self. Could I, in knitting this veritable
bobblepalooza, transform an eyesore into an attraction? Could I make peace with bobbles? I had to try.

The recommended yardage alone told me I was in for a long trip. You'd normally need about 840 yards to complete a comparably sized and shaped coat—and that's using a thick, bulky yarn. But this baby was asking for 1,200 yards, maybe even more. I ordered 1,400 yards of a plush, full-bodied wool yarn, figuring I could always use the extra for a matching bobbled hat and mitts. (When in Rome …)

I cast on at the bottom and worked my way up. The pattern has you add raglan-style sleeve shaping and then—only at the very end—top it all off with a heaping helping of bobbles. Progress on the body was fast as my needles cranked out sheets of bulky stockinette.

Just as I caught myself thinking, “I should have this done by the end of the weekend,” I hit the bobbles. They say that driving in Africa has two extremes—one minute you're speeding along on smooth, new tarmac, and the next minute the pavement ends and you're dodging potholes big enough to swallow a Jeep. After cruising along in my smooth stockinette, I was now in first gear wondering if I'd make it to the next town by sunset.

Then something happened. A switch in my impatient brain clicked off. I stopped focusing on time and speed; I stopped anticipating the next row and the row after that. I settled into the deeper, slower pleasure of the moment and of each stitch. I savored the experience of watching that rounded shape begin and grow and finally mature into a full-bodied bobble. I became excited when it was time to bring each new bobble home
to meet the family. I loved watching how the other stitches adjusted to the newcomer, and I felt almost giddy as the slow, steady body of bobbles unfolded on my needles.

I felt a sense of solidarity with my grandma, with all those bobble knitters who'd come before me. They'd stumbled upon this secret and guarded it so well. They'd endured the sneers and eye rolls of anti-bobblers, blithely continuing on their merry way. Now I understood.

I love my bobble coat more than just about anything else I've ever knit. I'm not sure it's the most flattering of garments. But when I wear it, I can quickly spot the bobble haters in the crowd and connect with the bobble sisterhood and brotherhood, those who know the secret. I love how the collar feels, and I love how it adorns and protects a neck that is beginning to sprout its own, far smaller constellation of skin tags.

Speaking of which, last week I went to the dermatologist for my annual checkup. She looked at my freckles, she measured the creepy mole on my back, and then she glanced at my neck.

“We can freeze these off if they ever start to bother you,” she said.

I considered it for a moment. I thought of my grandma and her turtlenecks, and of how readily she could've had her own skin tags removed. Yet she didn't.

“You know what?” I replied, “I'm good, thanks.”

A GOOD STEEK

WHEN I WAS
eight years old, I came home from school one day to discover everything in my house on Bittersweet Road in Rochester, New York, had been packed and taken away, and that I was to be trundled into a car pointed west—far, far west—with only one parent coming along for the journey.

If this story had a soundtrack, here's where you'd hear a needle being yanked off a record. We met my father at a park, and my brothers and I said goodbye while my mother sat in the car. Then we drove away. Simple as that.

For my mother, it was the beginning of a glorious new life of sunshine and self-discovery. For me, propped in the back of an un-air-conditioned car with a spider plant, a Sony TV, and sullen brothers for company, this was my first real exposure to emotions beyond the realm of dropped ice cream cones
or a broken toy. My heart hadn't grown a callus nearly thick enough to protect it from what was happening.

As the car continued to pull us farther and farther away from home, I couldn't help but also be curious about what I saw out my window. New things. An indoor/outdoor pool at a Holiday Inn in Illinois, the Mississippi River, a real palm tree, a hotel lounge with a live band playing “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” where I was allowed to order ginger ale for the first time.

Onward we went through the sweltering heat and increasingly barren landscape. With each state we crossed, my mother grew more jubilant, my brothers and I more impatient. I remember being hot and uncomfortable. The Instamatic camera I left in the back window melted by the time we reached Texas. Tucson was our final destination.

This was not the Tucson of today, with its multistoried resort homes, splendid golf courses, and outdoor shopping malls with fire pits, air-conditioning, gelato, and Tiffany's. It was a dry, flat place best remembered with the silence and faded colors of a Super 8 home movie.

We arrived at dusk and checked into a Howard Johnson off Interstate 10. The air smelled sweet, and a green, spiked thing was growing in a pile of rocks by the parking lot. It fascinated me. The soft fuzz between the thorns felt just like the surface of a peach. That evening I learned my first lesson of the desert: Never pet a cactus, no matter how soft it looks. It took days to pick all the tiny thorns out of my fingers. Welcome to Arizona.

Of course, my mother reminds me that we all knew about the move for months, that I even helped with some of the packing.
She also points out that we left on an August morning,
not
suddenly one day after school. Rationally, I know this to be true. But my eight-year-old brain still remembers the whole experience quite differently; no amount of preparation would've changed this.

Cut something apart, and there's always a momentary shock to the system. What was once whole is now sundered. Slice through the veins of your knitted fabric, and the newly exposed stitches may easily unravel as they scramble back toward a home that no longer exists. At the same time, there's no doubting the sense of possibility that accompanies this opening, a curiosity about what the new fabric may hold.

There's a way to do it right, without pain. We work a series of steps called a steek, so that the stitches are prepared for what's coming and can absorb the shock, heal without any scars, and even thrive in their new environment. According to Alice Starmore,
steek
is an Old Scots word for hardening a heart or closing a gate—a fitting way to describe what you're doing to get those stitches ready for what
could
be a traumatic experience. Even now, I keep discovering stray loose ends from that shocking cut when I was eight years old. A favorite cup will get broken, a pen thrown away by accident, some unexpected change is foisted upon me, and I am overcome with a powerful panic I know is not rooted in the present.