Yarn Harlot (15 page)

I gathered up the ten balls, told him that I’d knit it for him, and set him up with an easier color project so he could improve his skills. I was feeling pretty cocky.

I cast on, feeling rather full of myself for (a) rescuing him, (b) being hailed as an all-powerful knitter who can manage the accursed Bird Jacket, and (c) promising him he could have it by his deadline, in two weeks …

Which brings us to today.

During the last two weeks I have been brought to my knees by this itty-bitty, ten-color, cotton, intarsia Bird Jacket. Disclaimer: This is not Debbie Bliss’s fault. Her pattern is lovely, error-free, and clear. The yarn is great and I still think that Debbie is a wonderful designer.

I do harbor a secret belief that she is somewhere in the world, drinking tea, knitting something in wool, Fair Isle, with two colors to a row, while laughing about the Bird Jacket, because she never intended for anyone actually to try to knit the thing.

I tried to strand parts of it, but there would be long floats along its back, and any attempt to catch the yarn not in use along the back resulted in its peeking through. This meant that there is no way out of the intarsia trap. I had to knit each little section with a separate tiny ball of yarn, resulting in lots of hanging lengths along the row—in one particularly demented row, more than twenty. I only managed to keep the number as low as twenty because I stranded the background color. There are long floats of yarn on the wrong side, but they run along the bottom edge of the
sweater, and in a particularly successful fit of denial, I managed to convince myself that little fingers won’t get caught in them there.

Now it’s finished. Well, the knitting part is finished. Now I have to weave in the ends. All by itself, this is a huge job. No, huge is too simple a word, this in an enormous job, a staggering job. It is almost insurmountable. There are ten colors, all these little motifs (freakin’ birds … I hate their little two-stitch yellow beaks) and all of these billions of tiny birds with fancy tails are surrounded with four-color stars and interspersed with many, many two-row stripes. Guess how many ends to weave in?

No, I mean it…. Guess.

Now double your guess … heck, just for fun, triple it.

Now read this number. (Again, you faint of heart might want to take a couple of deep breaths or sit down or something.)

Two hundred and eighty-eight.

That’s right, 288 ends. Remember, it’s only a tiny thing, size one year, so 288 ends means that the wrong side resembles a shag carpet.

I don’t know if I can do it. I really don’t. Each end needs to be woven in such a way that the right side isn’t disrupted (remember that this is cotton, not lovely forgiving wool), and secured in a way that it will neither peek through the (you may insert the expletive of your choice here) cotton, nor work its way free, as it’s slippery to boot.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that I should have knit them in as I went, and I thought of that, but when I tried it, the end peeked through the damned cotton on the right side, and I just couldn’t live with the look.

All I keep thinking is that Debbie Bliss is mean, or crazy, or both.

I suppose that there is also the possibility that she is a far more skilled knitter than I am, and expects a higher level of competence and commitment than a mere mortal such as myself possesses, but it doesn’t seem likely.

I am sitting here (frankly, I’m typing to avoid weaving in ends) when I decided to read through to the end of the pattern. Maybe the last line is something like “When you are finished you will have 288 ends. Sorry about that.” Or, “See page 67 for instructions on how to avoid having 288 ends.” Or, “Whatever you do … don’t try to weave in these ends … it’s sheer folly and nobody does it.” Or, “Trim the 288 ends to an even length, as the “shag” interior is part of the sweater’s charm.” Or, “Invoke the spell on page 45 to have your ends woven in magically as you sleep.”

But no, nothing. In fact, just to add insult to injury, the last line actually reads …

“Work 1 round of dc around outside edge, working 2 dc together in each corner, ss in first dc. Do not turn. Work 1 round or backward dc (dc worked from left to right).”

After a moment of nauseating shock, I have no choice but to accept the truth.

These are not knitting instructions. This is CROCHET.

I hereby admit publicly that I’ve been beaten.

Freakin’ birds.

A
ttention, knitters! The time is almost at hand. There are now fifty million knitters in North America with more joining us every day. The popularity of knitting is increasing moment by moment. If we are to succeed in our plan to take over the world, we must not let our guard down.

Remember that there are those who do not understand our vision. They care nothing for “Wool Access” and they are unmoved by the words “Yarn Subsidy.” Some of these people may live in your neighborhood or even in your home. Watch out for those individuals who would attempt to thwart our cause by limiting your stash or time to knit. Do not let them distract you with their tricks. Most often they try schemes like
jobs, marriage,
and
romance.
Resist.

I have devised a series of tests to allow us to quietly identify each other, even outside our headquarters (code name: yarn store). These tests can also be used to spot “potential knitters,” thus reducing the amount of time wasted on trying to convert
those who are not yet ready to join their brothers and sisters in yarn. These tests are simple and reasonably conclusive.

1. Give the suspected knitter a handknit sweater. Those who knit, or are destined to become knitters, will turn the garment inside out to look at the making up and the weaving in of ends. They will do this instinctively. Those who lack the knitting gene will admire only the outside of the sweater.
   

2. Surreptitiously place several skeins of wool in a variety of colors on an accessible surface. Observe the response of the subject to the yarn stimuli. Those who knit will be unable to walk past the yarn. They will fondle, stroke, and possibly smell the skeins before continuing on their way. Should you encounter a subject who arranges the skeins by colorway or who attempts to steal the wool, quickly make contact, as this is likely to be a plan supervisor or “master knitter.”
   

3. Hide some yarn in the location to be tested. Those who are knit-sympathetic will be inexplicably drawn to the area of the hidden yarn. To confirm their tendencies, approach the subjects and invite them into another room. Those called to the fiber arts will resist leaving the room with the secreted yarn, even if promised cake to do so.
   

If you believe that you have identified a member of our cause, use the password “circular needle.” If the person is indeed a member of the revolution, he or she will reflexively voice an
extremely strong opinion on this knitting tool. It does not matter if the person adores or utterly detests circular needles; what matters is the passion.

Those who are predisposed toward knitting but have not yet been indoctrinated need to be taught the ways of the needle. Agents in the field have found that “novelty scarves” are inexplicably persuasive. Many young targets can be persuaded to knit if given these trendy yarns.

Catch them, get them going, and suddenly eyelash will no longer be enough. They will need more. They will advance quickly through the ranks of intarsia, Fair Isle, and cable. Those who are not yet ready to accept our cause will simply look at you as though you are out of your mind. Ignore them. Our day will come.

S
itting in the hospital, waiting for my appointment for a test or two, I knit on my sock to kill the time and anxiety. I’m knitting around on double-pointed needles and I’m working on my plain-vanilla sock pattern. No lace, no cabling, no fancy-pants carrying on at all. I’m not even purling, just working a simple knit stitch round and round and round. It’s a complete no-brainer, something I’d expect even brand-new knitters to be able to execute without screeching too much about their lack of skills. A woman approaches me as I sit there, and she watches for a moment before she comments on my work.

“Wow,” she says. “That looks complicated. I could never do that. I just don’t have the patience for it.”

People tell me this all the time. They are simply not cut out for knitting. It’s too hard for them. They aren’t the type. I’ve prepared a speech for moments like this. It begins with a statement about the simplicity of knitting, and ends with a two-minute tutorial. I’m about to launch into this speech when I happen to
glance at the woman’s name tag:
DR. SUSAN P. ROGERS, SURGEON, NEUROLOGY DEPARTMENT
.

I’m so stunned that it’s all I can do to smile in her general direction. In fact, I may not be smiling; I may just be staring at her in quiet stupefaction. She doesn’t think she can knit? She’s a brain surgeon! A freakin’ brain surgeon who doesn’t think she has the skills or patience to knit? I was speechless. I’m a writer, I’m basically unemployable, and I can knit. How can someone who has one of the most complicated, tedious, and scary jobs in the world think that knitting would be beyond her? The woman uses microscopic instruments to play around with human brains for a job, but she thinks that my tinkering with two sticks and some string is something she doesn’t have the patience for? I find myself hit by a second wave of shock: For the sake of every single one of her patients, I hope she is wrong.

This brain surgeon gets me thinking. I’ve long believed that anyone can learn to knit. Anyone who wants to, that is. I have not yet formulated a plan to
force
people to knit that is likely to be successful, but the one where I locked resistant people in a freezer filled with yarn and needles has promise, if I can work out the ethical issues.

Still, why does this idea persist that knitters are people with a special aptitude? Sure, there are some knitters who take what’s really a mundane act to an art form, and we can’t all expect to be like them. But simple knitting? Five-year-old Danish children can manage it. Illiterate people all over the world can knit brilliantly. But not a Canadian brain surgeon?

Knitting is way less complicated than, say, reading and writing,
but we expect everybody to be able to do that. Reading is a serious undertaking. A person must be ready to learn, remember, and adeptly use a code of twenty-six symbols (and that’s just English) along with the mysterious sounds that each of these symbols represent, and the relationships they have with one another that change the way you decode them. They must be able to manage these symbols in complex strings, putting the code together first into words, then into phrases and sentences. Compared to English, knitting has only two pieces of code, the knit stitch and the purl stitch, and all the knitting in the world is varying these two actions. If you only ever learned these two pieces of knitting code, you could make a really fine blanket.

English also has all these crazy rules, and we inflict the need to know them on mere children. Why, you need to know about words such as “which” and “witch” and that you can “while away” your time “while” knitting. In English, you park in a driveway, drive on a parkway, and “double parking” is really just stopping in the street and doesn’t involve parking at all, unless you mean that stopping is parking and that parking is never the verb that means “going to the park” even if you are going to sit down when you get there, thus parking yourself to knit for a spell. It’s complicated. Really complicated. And yet the world is full of people who read and write English proficiently, perhaps even know a couple of other languages. But they will still look you in the eye and tell you that even though they have a Ph.D. in philosophy, have learned Chinese for a trip to the Orient, or are a freakin’
brain surgeon
that they simply couldn’t learn to knit.

I think it’s all about attitude. Knitting is only complex if you have already made up your mind that it is. Historically speaking, there wasn’t any room for “It’s too hard” in knitting. Virtually every child was expected to knit in medieval England, turning out stockings that would have impressed the heck out of the brain surgeon. In Latvia, a girl needed to knit a multitude of pairs of mittens for her dowry, and the history of Latvia isn’t filled with tales of women who remained spinsters to their sad and lonely deaths, all because they weren’t the knitting sort of girl. You knit. Period. It was assumed, just as we assume with reading and writing now, that just about everyone is capable of the act.

A while ago I was knitting a sock on the subway when a lady got on and stood next to me. She was wearing a brightly colored dress, and had bags and bags full of shopping. When she spoke to me she had a thick Jamaican accent. She was the very picture of competent powerful womanhood.

“Look at you! Is that knittin’ or crochetin’?”
she demanded in a big loud voice, and she reached over fearlessly to feel the wool dangling from my work.

“It’s knitting,” I replied, “It’s a sock.”

“Well, I’ll be damned! How come you got so many needles?
Oh, never mind. … You are goin’ in a circle, you are
makin’ a tube!
Slow down now … How does that go? Are you just movin’
dat loop?
No, I see now, you are
wrappin’
the wool around.”

She was very interested, and her voice was booming. Her voice was, in fact, loud enough that everyone in the subway car was straining to look at what was going on. If I were less polite, I might even say that she was yelling.

“Look at this!”
she bellowed, tugging on the sleeve of the man standing near her. “It’s a sock!
She’s knittin’ it!
” The man smiled politely at me and then at the sock and looked desperately out of the window at the dark wall rushing by. This woman was clearly ignoring the code of the Toronto rush-hour traveler. You aren’t supposed even to speak to other people on the subway, and you certainly don’t yell at them about socks and knitting. If she grabbed him again, the man looked like he might get off at the next stop, whether or not it was his right one.