The Yarn Whisperer (7 page)

Everyone, that is, except for the man who left work promptly at 5 p.m., as usual, only to discover there was no way for him to get home. The new traffic patterns had made it technically impossible for him to get back onto his street. Around and around he drove until finally he gave up, parked on a side street, and walked the rest of the way home.

This is one of my father's favorite stories. It
usually comes to mind when I'm driving and stuck in my own maze of uncooperative one-way streets. But I also think about it when I start a new stitch pattern. They're mostly pretty straightforward. A sea of stockinette. Easy ribbing, the straight and endless roads that cross the Australian Outback.

But some patterns do wild things. When you move those stacked stitches around, split them up and swap them over and under one another, force sudden merges and yields, driving becomes much more interesting. Your roads sprout new lanes, fork off in different directions, pass through busy rotaries. They can be detoured by giant bobble boulders, blasted with yarn-over potholes, or forced into sudden dead ends.

Some of the most beautiful and intricate knitted city planning comes in the form of cables and traveling stitches. They produce smooth streets that slither back and forth, soaring and diving across the fabric surface. Cables are created by intentionally reversing the chronological order of stitches, like skipping ahead in a novel. Instead of working what's next on the needles, you put those stitches aside and work the ones that follow—only then coming back to complete the stitches you left behind.

Cables are the knitter's version of highway overpasses and tunnels guiding lanes of stitches on their merry way. Usually they're worked in even pairs—one over one, two over two—for symmetry, but you can work as many or as few stitches in a cable as your imagination permits. The more stitches you overlap, the bigger the cable will be, the higher its overpass will need to be, and the deeper its tunnels must dive. Wide cables
are like L.A. freeways, their beautiful maze of overpasses and off-ramps leading every stitch home. Occasionally traffic will snarl from a jackknifed big-rig, a mis-twisted cable. You'll send in a wrecker to unravel the whole thing—or maybe use the Jaws of Life to cut an outside strand and reknit your way back in.

Some patterns shake things up, veering from symmetry with a lopsided cable. Swapping many stitches over just a few produces the knitted equivalent of a tall person and a short person sharing the same umbrella. While the tall guy can never stand up straight, the short person still gets wet.

We usually nest our cables within a bed of purl stitches. This helps them “pop” visually, but it serves a deeper structural purpose, too. When you do anything out of order, it can be a source of stress. Say you have a line of people waiting to get into a movie theater, and three guys in back suddenly cut right in front of you. Folks are going to complain, right?

The same thing happens when you pull stitches out of line and jam them ahead of the ones that were patiently waiting to be knit. Knitting is an innately linear activity. Stitches love to stand in line and wait their turn. Cables disrupt this natural order. They put physical stress on the neighboring stitches, pulling some painfully tight while making others pucker awkwardly. The surrounding fabric will do whatever it can to bring the tension back to normal, and bands of purl stitches act as bumpers to absorb that jarring change in tension. We usually space our tense cable twists between smooth straightaways to let the stitches loosen their grip on the wheel and relax a little before the next bend comes.

An ambitious product marketer may insist that “true” knitters turn their cables with a cable needle, just as the guy at Williams-Sonoma will suggest that a food processor is the only real tool for chopping vegetables. A traditional cable needle is a rather stout, curved or straight object with pointed ends and a slightly thinner center. This shape allows for easy maneuvering of stitches without risk of them sliding out.

It's a pretty and helpful tool, but so is a bent paper clip, a toothpick, a coffee stirrer, a spare pen or pencil—even a bobby pin works in a pinch. You just need something to keep the first half of your hopscotching stitches safe and sound while you work on the other ones—especially if you happen to be working with a slinky silk or bamboo yarn. But some yarns, those with a lively halo of robust, high-crimp fibers, don't need a cable needle at all. The fiber ends instinctively reach out and grab the fibers around them. Those stitches will just sit there patiently waiting for you to pluck them back up and slide them onto your needle. If you're at the International Space Station for a six-month stint without your cable needle and suddenly have the urge to turn a few, rest assured, you can.

Our knitted roadways also rely on something called a “traveling stitch” to funnel traffic from lane to lane. Unlike overlapping cables, traveling stitches have no overpasses or tunnels. Their motion is derived entirely from the side-to-side movement of a stockinette road that's bordered on either side by reverse-stockinette bumps.

Traveling stitches declare eminent domain on all that they encounter, just like my Great-Aunt Kay did every time she got
behind the wheel. Need to veer right? No problem, simply take whatever's there and merge it into your stockinette road. Want to pick up your great-nephew at the library? Drive your stitch onto the sidewalk and right up to the front steps. Merge successful, mission accomplished. As an added bonus, the honking of the other cars will let him know you're coming.

We merge through decreases, whether by knitting together the main road and its purl neighbor or slipping the main road, purling the neighbor, and then slipping the main road right over it. To make up for the stitch they took over when merging, they'll leave a new stitch in their wake. Traveling stitches are the driver who assumes the yield sign applies to everyone else, the nightmare freeway that is constantly merging busy lanes with no advanced notice, the great-aunt who weaves blithely from lane to curb and back again, never heeding the blaring horns of those around her. The traveling-stitch highway is a perpetual collision of lanes and cars, with the biggest one—that blundering tractor-trailer of a knit stitch—always winning.

We have many guides to choose from in the world of stitch travel, but Barbara Walker is our Rand McNally. Armchair travelers leaf through her pages and dream of the open road, mapping out stitch by stitch, turn by turn. Intrepid knitters do it when mapping out their very own journeys. And designers—the GPSs of the knitting world—do it when formulating that pattern for a hat, sweater, or scarf.

I have a friend who lives at the end of a narrow one-lane road in rural Virginia. She frequently has eighteen-wheelers show up in her front yard, their GPS having insisted that the
road did something it hasn't done in nearly thirty years. One guy in Texas named his GPS Christine—for the evil Plymouth in Stephen King's horror story—after it instructed him to turn directly into oncoming traffic.

Putting blind faith in anything is rarely a good idea, whether it's a GPS or a knitting pattern. It's far better to develop your own instinct, learn for yourself what works and what doesn't—and learn
why.
Here I'm reminded of the cars my grandparents used to let my brothers and me drive when we'd visit them in Maine. First we had a VW 1500 Squareback, which my grandparents had imported from Germany in 1962. The bottom had rusted out (you could see the road through a crack on the floor) and the heat was always on. The windshield wipers moved at the speed of the engine, forcing us to keep it revved up high in the rain—until one fateful evening when the driver's side wiper gave up, bounced off the hood, and landed somewhere along the side of the road.

As challenging as the car was to drive, the Maine roads were even more so. At one spot on the winding two-lane road near my grandparents' summer house, the road curved just before a small bridge. The sign said 45 mph, but we'd never gotten close. The tires would squeal at 35 mph; our hands would cling to the dashboard for support. Somehow this idea of not being able to reach the speed limit amused us to no end.

The next year, my grandfather replaced the 1500 with a VW Rabbit he'd got cheap after an engine fire. The gas gauge didn't work, someone had scraped FUCK YOU into the paint on the roof, which had then rusted in place, and the speedometer
jumped from 25 to 60 with the spastic regularity of an EKG reading. We didn't ask how it passed inspection, we were just thrilled to have a car with a radio and seat belts. Our prospects for The Curve had improved.

But by July the starter was on the fritz, forcing us to pushstart the car. There were four of us and only two doors, making each ride an adventure. With my oldest brother, Jeff, steering from the open driver's door, we started to push. “OK, Clara, get in!” he'd yell, and I'd climb into the back. “Eric, go!” In went my brother, taking the spot beside me. “Janet!” His then-girlfriend hopped in the passenger seat and slammed her door shut, all three of us briefly in a moving car with nobody behind the wheel. Then Jeff slid into the driver's seat, slammed his door shut, and popped the car into gear. We held our breath, and when the engine finally lurched and sputtered to life, we all shared the smug satisfaction of having done something rather clever, like when you replace the flap in a toilet tank or turn a heel for the first time.

Later that summer the car—which by then we'd dubbed “the Shit”—lost its muffler. We began leaving the keys in the ignition whenever we parked it, but nobody took the hint. Not that they could, since it wouldn't start.

We never did make the curve at 45, not in that car or any one since. The road wants you to drive at a certain speed, and thankfully no amount of foolishness will change that. Maybe my grandparents put us in that car on purpose, knowing that its ridiculous limitations would keep our impatient recklessness in check—just as I'd never start a new knitter with laceweight yarn and slick needles. They need to do laps with a bulkier yarn first.

Then, and only then, can they develop an instinct for stitches—take curves, try new roads, give an occasional pushstart, even let them get lost so we can help them find their way. Time behind the needles is the very best teacher.

Stitches are a responsibility, they are our babies. Their fate rests entirely in our hands. Each stitch needs to be considered carefully, its origin and final destination taken into account. We are the architects of their future, and they're trusting us to do right by them.

At the end of the day, we want all our stitches home safe and sound. We want to prevent anyone from taking a curve they cannot handle, or blithely driving off a cliff, confident there was going to be a bridge. And we
really
don't want the streets of our fabric to be haunted by that lost and lonely stitch who, after a long day at work, can't find his way home.

OUTED

I SPENT MY
college years at a small women's liberal arts college in Oakland, California.
I hadn't chosen Mills so that I could be at the forefront of the women's movement. I wasn't particularly interested in feminist studies, and I certainly didn't have an aspiration to live in a gender-divided society. No, I'd chosen Mills because my mother's best friend had graduated from there and, oh, because it had a pretty campus.

Picture an oasis of early twentieth-century California architecture: tiled rooftops, arched entryways, heavy casement windows opening to a forest of tall, fragrant eucalyptus trees, all magically hidden from the traffic and exhaust and stray gunfire of Oakland. It was a beautiful place to be, quiet and small, and safe enough for me to let down my guard and explore who I really was.

Halfway through my senior year, I finally had the courage to come out. As a knitter.

Please believe me when I say this was not a popular stance. The previous year, the college board of trustees had announced it would make Mills coed—prompting the students to strike, occupy the administrative offices, and effectively shut down the college for two weeks. Eventually, trustee Warren Hellman held a press conference and unfurled a banner: “Mills, for women, again.” This replaced the earlier banner, which read, “Warren Go-to-Hell-man,” which he kept until he died.

We were there to break free from the patriarchy, to experience the possibility of a world in which traditional gender roles played no part. We were unleashing our inner CEOs, Tony Award–winning playwrights, confident scientists seeking a cure for AIDS. We marched on campus, we held vigils, we studied angry books by powerful women. We learned to speak up, to question. While we weren't openly discouraged from following the path of our foremothers, the message was there.

In the midst of this amazing environment, I held on to a deep dark secret. Rolled up in a clear plastic bag under my bed was a sweater. Robin's-egg blue, with dolman sleeves, made from an exquisitely crunchy, lanolin-rich yarn from Sweden. The secret was that this sweater was only half finished, and I was the one knitting it.