Yarn Harlot (6 page)

This is the only entrelac I’ve done, and it could be possible (as you imply, my dear designer) that it’s more fun than sliding around naked in hand-painted merino (not that I would know) if you have the right project or perhaps the right instructions. It’s not even that that I think entrelac is too time consuming or too hard. It’s like this …

I’m not sure it’s worth it. I’ve got no problem with “hard” knitting, designer darling, no problem at all. But if I’m going to spend a lot of time on something (read forty-seven hours of my life that that I will never get back), I want the damned payoff. These socks should be incredible. They are fussy and clever; the pattern must have taken hours and a degree in calculus to work out; and they should look like a million bucks. For the amount of time that they are taking, they should be so breathtaking that people would consider dedicating their lives to the pursuit of poetry, world peace, and a life of entrelac knitting worship when they see them.

Instead, I’ve managed to knit a dorky mess of freaky crooked squares that are no more beautiful than a five-year-old’s first finger painting
—
and I’m not sure it’s
all
my fault. I am now of the opinion that, having knit one half of one entrelac sock, I am the Entrelac Sock World Record holder. I know that your book has a shiny photo of a pair of finished entrelac socks, but with computer editing being what it is, I’m not convinced. Forgive me for not believing that anyone has ever successfully finished a pair, at least not using your pattern. No
offense intended, it’s just that after my intense descent into knitting hell last night, I don’t trust you as far as I could throw you.

Therefore, my stalwart leader, my shining star, I have unceremoniously yanked the damn socks off the needles, (sorry for that crack about your mother), reclaimed the yarn, and moved on with my life. Furthermore, dear designer, I have forgiven you and once again must offer you my sincere apology for giving voice, however briefly, to the idea that you were “out of your everloving mind” when the inspiration for these socks came to you. The world needs visionaries, even ones who are clearly deeply delusional.

Thank you, and again, my deepest apologies
—
Stephanie

Twenty Thousand Skeins Under the Bed:
Or, Stash and Why You Want It

H
eart pounding, pulse racing, fear coursing through my veins, I ran to the back door as fast as my legs would carry me. I reached for the knob, fearing that I’d be caught by the toothy beast in hot pursuit of me. I could hear its sharp claws on the pavement behind me as I opened the screen door and flung myself through it. I turned, stumbling, and slammed the door shut behind me. At last I was safe. Standing there, breathing hard, I was almost too afraid to turn and see if the thing had followed me. Nerving myself, drawing a shuddering breath, I made myself look out into my yard.

The squirrel was indeed there. Chittering angrily, it glared at me with beady little eyes and slowly backtracked to the patio table, where it stationed itself once again atop my freshly washed prize gray Shetland fleece. Again it started to stuff chunks of my beautiful fleece into its obscenely fat cheeks.

I’d had it with this squirrel. I’d been having trouble with it for two years. I try to be animal-friendly and environmentally
cuddly, but I was starting to think thoughts about this squirrel that were anything but kind and gentle. I am a pacifist, a vegetarian, a tree-hugging ecofreak, but it’s hard to maintain that gentle, responsible position when you’re up against a predatory rodent with a spectacular attraction to your stash.

It started early in the previous summer on a lovely warm day. I had joyously hung a skein of finished homespun on the backyard fence to dry. Returning later that afternoon, I found my skein had vanished. Could a bird have carried it off? Not likely; it was a
big
skein. Considering that turkey vultures and albatross are virtually unheard of here in Toronto, there had to be another answer.

Maybe it had fallen over on my neighbor’s side of the fence. No such luck. The skein was simply gone, vanished, disappeared. On one hand, I was deeply pissed off that my 190 yards of hard-won yarn—all those hours at my spinning wheel—had been taken from me. On the other hand, I found it rather charming that some furry city critter had so loved my wool that it had pilfered it to soften its home and prepare for winter.

I didn’t know then what I knew now. Otherwise, charm wouldn’t have come into it.

Over the course of that summer and the one that followed, said city critter stole, by skein and by handful, the equivalent of two full fleeces and about twenty skeins of yarn that I put out in the yard to dry. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering, as any reasonable person would, why on earth I would have continued to put fleece and yarn into the yard once it had become obvious that the squirrel in question had both a wool fetish and an obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have no real
answer, but several ideas. First, wool and fleece take several days to dry in the house but only a few hours in the bright sunshine. Toronto has a brief but cherished wool-drying season (some call it “summer”) and the joy of sun-warmed, clean, dry fleece and wool is irresistible. Second, I am apparently just as determined as the squirrel. Many skeins and chunks of fleece were lost in failed attempts to safeguard the stuff. I tried boxes and tents and screens, hanging it on the clothesline—you name it, I gave it a whirl. I tried innumerable strategies to thwart the little stash rapist, each resulting in another missing treasure.

But now the squirrel had decided to take the question of wool ownership to the next level. I had carefully washed a treasured gray Shetland fleece and put it into the backyard to dry using several bungee cords and an abandoned screen door as squirrel proofing. Because I love this fleece (and because you have to draw the line somewhere) I was also willing to employ surveillance. I had a cup of coffee, a nice chair, my knitting, and a pleasant day and I was going to sit in the late summer sunshine and watch fleece dry. The little fluffy-tailed rat wouldn’t try anything with this sort of security. I was sure of it. The afternoon passed, the fleece dried, and all went well until sunset approached, and over the fence came the beady-eyed burglar.

I stomped my foot, banged my coffee cup, and scolded him with generally effective and helpful things like “shoo,” “scat,” and “git off with ya.” He stared me down and I held my ground. I held it, that was, until the bastard (I have it on good authority that he was born out of wedlock) leapt from the fence onto the fleece, not more than a yard away from me, and screamed squirrel
obscenities in my face. This scared the daylights out of me. I ran. I’m not proud of that.

Inside the house I pulled myself together and tried to figure out what to do. I laughed a little—imagine being frightened of a tiny little beast like that! Fortified, I opened the door to take another stab at fleece recovery, but the vicious little mammal advanced on me like I was out to defur him. For my own safety. I was forced to jump back into the house. There was no doubt in my mind that he had every intention of killing and eating me. He had the fleece, my beautiful fleece, and I was trapped in my own mudroom. I needed help.

My husband is useless at times like this. Yes, he can tell you at least one funny moose-hunting story and I have heard him give very solid advice on how to defend one’s family from a bear, but smaller mammals are not his forte.

“Is it a gray one?” Joe asked, when I explained my plight. “God, I hate the gray ones.” He barely suppressed a shudder. Joe is from Newfoundland, home of largish creatures, and he has made a poor adjustment to the smaller mammals Ontario is filthy with. Once when we were camping in Sandbanks Provincial Park (or as we like to call it “Sandbanks Provincial Raccoon Reserve”), Joe and I had, at four o’clock in the morning under the light of the moon, what is now politely referred to in our marital shorthand as “The Raccoon Fight.” The raccoons were ripping our campsite up, stealing every scrap of food that we had, and Joe (despite my stern urgings) would not go and defend us from the bandits. The raccoon raid and our argument had ended with the now infamous line, “Get out of this tent and fight like a man.”

If Joe won’t defend food—our only food, I assure you—he certainly isn’t going to do battle for a Shetland fleece. No, I was on my own.

I returned to the backyard to try again, only to discover that lifty lightfingers had evacuated, presumably to stash as much fleece as he could carry before returning for more. Quickly, I snatched up the damp fleece and brought it inside. Victory! He’d only gotten a pound or so.

The next morning, I couldn’t let it go. My squirrel tolerance was at an all-time low. After complaining to anyone who would listen, and being referred by a friend of a friend, I found myself on the phone with one Frederick W. Schueler, Ph.D., curator of the Bishops Mills Natural History Centre and a heavy-duty wildlife dude. Fred had a couple of theories and a lot of information. I learned, for example, that squirrels subjected to overfeeding (as our antagonist surely was) become (and I quote Fred here) “deranged.” Overfed squirrels apparently get cocky, overly brave, and develop a grotesquely inflated sense of self-esteem. Their inflated egos make them believe that they can take over an entire backyard, terrorize a family of five, and outwit a wily knitter determined to keep her fleece. (I am paraphrasing Fred here.) Furthermore, squirrels tend to be aggressive (no kidding, Fred—you don’t say!) and the urban overfeeding only makes them more so. Overfed squirrels, Fred says, are insolent. I can confirm that, having been chased into my own mudroom by a furious wad of fantastically fast fur with murder in its eyes.

I pointed out to Fred that this whole wool fetish thing hadn’t really come to a head with my hoarding small-pawed stash-stealer
until I had put out the gray fleece. While he had stolen other things, and I’d learned a thing or two about his preferences (he doesn’t take acrylic, likes wool, and is fond of alpaca but will not take qiviut … perhaps sensing that the arctic musk ox is too big for even him to take on), he has never actively defended a conquest before. Why now? Why scurry from the backyard when I pop out to retrieve a skein of white Corriedale or brown Romney, but go right to the wall for a gray Shetland?

“Gray?” asked Fred. Now there’s something I hadn’t thought of. Gray Shetland, gray squirrel. Perhaps his fascination was some instinct, some primitive urge to defend his like kind. Perhaps I had misread him. Perhaps his behavior was instead noble. Our little squirrel out there defending his young or a poor fallen fellow gray squirrel. Or perhaps (as Fred suggested) perhaps it is simpler. Perhaps the squirrel was responding to the most primitive of all calls to arms.

Perhaps … it’s love.

Now that I could get behind. I could almost feel sympathetic. Imagine my furry foe, out there in the backyard, wracked with passion for his gray furry beloved while I try to drive them apart. Naturally he would fight me. (Let’s forget for a moment that the romance of this beautiful interlude is totally wrecked by the part where he takes pawsful of his beloved and stuffs them into his cheeks. It spoils the mood.)

This brought us to the next point, however. What the hell was he doing with all this wool? “Nests,” Fred assured me. I wasn’t so sure. I reminded Fred that our little freakin’ friend had two full fleeces (stolen a little at a time) and about twenty skeins of
yarn in every color of the rainbow. Squirrels build nests in trees (Fred concurs) and that seems like a lot of fiber to take up a tree. Fred had told me that the home range or stomping ground of an urban gray squirrel is about an acre. I thought about that. If we used my home as the epicenter for the squirrel’s turf, then there were thirteen trees close enough that they could house his nest. None of them was hollow, so if our wool-stealing buddy was … er … squirreling his stash up a tree, I would have seen it. Hell, my neighbors would have seen it. People would be talking about it. I would hear things on the street like “Hey, did you see that colossal multicolored squirrel nest down the street? I swear it’s got pink mohair in it.” It seemed unlikely. We needed another theory.

Fred, of course, had it. Sometimes squirrels will make use of holes or gaps in houses, building nests in the walls and attics of buildings. This made sense. I would expect that sort of good judgment from a beastie with the taste to get defensive about Shetland wool. He was clearly not a stupid animal. I looked out the window and gave it a thought. One acre: That’s seven houses. Somewhere, likely all in one pile in one of these seven houses is all my wool and fleece. I wondered how I could find out which one. I toyed with the idea of knocking on the doors and quizzing my neighbors about surprising energy savings. Given wool’s insulating qualities, it was entirely possible that in some nearby house, a husband was turning to his wife and saying, “Honey, doesn’t the kitchen seem warmer this winter?”

There are, of course, ways to deal with animals that you don’t get along with, but I’m an animal too, so I try to live with the local fauna. I understand that the reward for my tolerance may be to
get ripped off by a deranged squirrel with megalomania, an urge to stash (which I can understand), and a torrid love affair with his kindred gray fleece. And so I asked Fred my last question.