All Wound Up (12 page)

Let’s start with gauge. Gauge is the problem child of knitting mathematics. In its simplest form gauge should work, which is to say that if a knitter reads that she needs six stitches to the inch, knits swatches with assorted needle sizes until she bloody well gets six stitches to the inch, and then uses that needle size and that yarn to make a sweater, then that sweater should (possessing the required gauge) be exactly, precisely the size that the pattern predicts. This is, in mathematics, called a deterministic system. That’s a system where if you do the same thing with the same stuff under the same circumstances, you always get the same result, because there’s no randomness in it. Multiplication works that way. If you take seven groups of seven and put them together, then you are always, always, cross my heart and hope to die, sell my best merino, going to get the same answer. (That dare on the stash might be going too far. I’ve already said my math isn’t good enough to risk it on my skills. There will be some knitter with a PhD in multiplication who takes it from me on some technicality.) Gauge should, since it’s only a version of multiplication, work exactly the same way, but here’s where it falls apart.

Any knitter, even without the help of a single day in a mathematics classroom, can tell you that gauge lies. Lies like a rug. Lies like a four-year-old just caught alone in the bathroom with the family cat. (Hint: Look for the scissors.) We have all had the experience of carefully and precisely getting six stitches to the inch, just like the pattern said, then casting on exactly as many stitches as the pattern said to and then promptly getting a sweater that is either so surprisingly small that you wouldn’t put it on a streetwalker and think her appropriately covered, or so large that right after you put it out on the line to dry a family pulled up in a minivan, stuck a tent pole under the right shoulder, tossed four sleeping bags under the belly of it, and started a campfire. What happened? You added six to six as many times as you were told, and the answer should always be the same, right?

I should be very fond of math. I like control, I like predictability, I like knowing what is going to happen and when, and most math is like that. In mathematics, 2 + 2 is always going to be 4. The Pythagorean theorem never changes; it is always a
²
+ b
²
= c
²
, no matter how many times you do it. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t know what it means; it’s still the same. Most math rules are so hard and fast that if you get another answer, then you know that you’ve made a mistake. It took me four years of grade ten math (I had some trouble with success on that one) to learn that math at all levels is about trying to figure out what the general rules are. I find this idea really comforting. As difficult as I find computational math to be, at least there aren’t an infinite number of answers. If you are a mathematician, there are some things in the world that you just know are true. They are unchangeable, unshakable truths—unlike a philosopher’s theories, or an artist’s imagination, or a minister’s faith, mathematicians get to deal in what they can prove.

Despite being sold to us as a purely deterministic system, gauge, it turns out, isn’t. If a philosopher finds something that doesn’t work the way it should, they wonder if it is another idea, a theory. They acknowledge that there is much in this world that they do not know yet, and they begin the process of examining the mystery to unravel what might lie behind it. They can resign their misunderstanding and trust in their faith that it makes sense somewhere else. If an artist sees something that doesn’t work the way they expect it to, it opens up a world of possibility, where any answer can work if you can draw, sculpt, or paint it. If a minister encounters something that they aren’t expecting, like a busload of nuns going over a cliff, they can say it is an act of God, something that has a purpose that is only understood by a higher, more complex power. In math, it turns out that if a mathematician encounters a deterministic system that isn’t being deterministic they know that they are now dealing in chaos math.

Chaos math, my friends, is when a system is extremely sensitive to the conditions around it, and that sensitivity has an influence that is so profound that it becomes pretty much impossible to predict what might happen anymore. The Butterfly Effect is like this. Ray Bradbury wrote a short story (“A Sound of Thunder”) in 1952 in which a group of time travelers accidentally killed a prehistoric butterfly, and that one tiny change was enough to ripple through time and mean that they returned to a very, very different place from the one they left. One little change in the initial conditions, one tiny thing that you can’t see, hear, or imagine influencing the rest of the system, and even though technically that system is deterministic, now there’s no way to know how it will all end. It’s no longer predictable. It has become chaos. (For the record, to my way of thinking, it seems that once a system is chaotic, it can’t be deterministic anymore, but mathematicians now call this deterministic chaos, which only goes to show you how much I have yet to learn, and how likely I am to get a lot of letters from mathematicians about this essay.)

Knowing what we know now, gauge starts to make sense, doesn’t it? In a deterministic system, the answer is only predictable if you can repeat the identical system. A billiard ball will only land in the same pocket of the table if it is hit in the same way, precisely, every time. If there’s a wind, if a drunk bumps the table, if the ball has dirt on it… voilà! Chaos. The system is still predictable, sort of, but only if you know about the dirt, the wind, or the drunk, and can precisely predict their behavior too. This, my darling and clever knitters, is exactly what’s happening with gauge. Sure, ten stitches make an inch. That should mean, if the system was purely deterministic, that thirty stitches would be three inches, and one hundred stitches ten. You and I, though, we know that whether or not that actually happens is a total crap shoot, and now we can be comforted by knowing that gauge is actually deterministic chaos. You are human. You cannot possibly do things precisely the same way every time. Occasionally, some stitches are going to be imperceptibly looser than the others, because you relaxed a little, or had a glass of wine. A few others are going to be tighter, because you were on the bus or your spouse tried to tell you again that they are absolutely cleaning the cat box every day, when you know that absolutely isn’t true and are considering getting nanny-cam footage to prove it.

How about the fact that the tens of thousands of stitches in a sweater are heavier than the few in the swatch? What impact does that have on a sweater as a whole? I measure all my swatches on the table, horizontally, but when I wear them I’m almost always vertical. Will there be stretch? How much? Are there seams? The swatch didn’t have seams, and that could change everything. Did you wash the swatch? You’re going to wash the sweater, and the yarn might relax, tighten up, bloom, explode—anything could happen.

All of this, all of these little, tiny things seem so trivial when you’re holding a swatch. They seem like they won’t matter at all, but something like mis-measuring your gauge by one eighth of a stitch, for knitters… That right there is the flap of the butterfly’s wings. That tiny moment, where you missed a fraction of a stitch, that inconsequential thing that, really, you couldn’t even have known you were doing, that right there is magnified, rippling ever outward until all you’re left with is a broken shadow of a knitter weeping softly in a corner holding a couple hundred dollars’ worth of cashmere that’s supposed to be a snappy little twin set, yet is something closer to elephant lingerie.

You know what this means to knitting? To have insidious influences creeping into your deterministic system? It means you don’t have a deterministic system anymore. You have deterministic chaos, and the important word there is chaos. The only reasonable thing to do with a chaotic system is to realize that it’s no longer predictive. You can’t know the outcome. Not completely. Doing a gauge swatch will give you valuable information (probably), but it also might lie like a rug, and now you can stop feeling angry or incompetent when that happens. This math thing takes you entirely off the hook. You can’t predict all of the factors that will come into play—it’s just not possible. It’s like expecting to know what a two-year-old might put up her nose or what a teenager sees in that pierced guy. You’ll never know, and trying to know will just make you insane. It is better, much better, to acknowledge that now you understand what’s going on with gauge. It isn’t a purely deterministic system, and any knitting teacher who tells you otherwise is just shining you on, or she’s encountered one of the possibilities in a chaotic system, which for her, just once, when everything was exactly in her favor and she didn’t know it, worked, and that one time has convinced her it’s possible for it to happen again. What we do know is that there is no chance that people like her haven’t been burned by this. They’re either in denial because of the pain, or they’re keeping it a secret to appear superior. You know the truth. You know in your heart that gauge is simply an irresponsible multiplier. There are forces at work when you knit that are mysterious, deep, and mathematical.

Is 7 x 7 always 49, as Mr. Franco told me in grade seven? Nope. Not even close, and I have a hat so small it won’t cover a baseball to prove it. Seven times seven is usually forty-nine, but, in knitting, it could be forty-eight, fifty-two, or six. Accept it, and know that knitting would have made Mr. Franco crazier than a one-needled knitter at a yarn sale.

here is an unfinished sweater in my closet. Actually, that statement is sort of untrue. There are several unfinished sweaters in there, but most of them have a fate that’s sealed. They will never be finished sweaters. It has been my experience that every once in a while a particular yarn and pattern combination has an effect that culminates in the project equivalent of a terminal illness, and, despite the best of intentions and through no fault of the knitter, it can’t work. The sweater has the wrong gauge, it doesn’t look right, the yarn obscured the cables, you realized that you must have been drunk when you bought that shade of green because even knitting it makes you look like you’ve contracted a tropical disease with permanent consequences… something happens and it tips the project over into that abyss where you know it won’t ever be finished, but it won’t be ripped back either. Those projects sit in the closet, marinating with the other yarn and stash, and it doesn’t bother me at all. Every now and then I go into the stash for something else and I see those projects, and there is no pang of guilt, no feelings of loss or failure, no negative feelings at all. I mean, I wish they were finished sweaters; It would be great if they were finished sweaters, especially if they could be finished sweaters without the problems that consigned them to the closet in the first place, but it all just sort of feels like having those sweaters is impossible. It’s like seeing a woman in her forties who has perky breasts, is a steady size zero, and struggles not to be “too thin.” It’s just not something that’s ever going to be in my life and I don’t even expect it. The unfinished sweaters and I are pretty reconciled to each other.

Right now, though, there’s one in there that’s lurking at me. I don’t know any other way to explain it. I know it’s there, because it’s practically oozing out a frequency of guilt and abandonment that I can feel all the bloody time. I walk by the closet, and I don’t even have to see it; I just know that it’s in there, and I feel terrible about it. See, the sweater in the closet isn’t terminal. It was going pretty well when I put it in there, and it turns out that it is one thing to put a sweater that you know is never going to make it onto a metaphoric ice floe and watch it drift out to sea, but to wander off from a sweater that’s got nothing wrong with it… it’s not a mercy killing. It’s just murder, and that makes me feel guilty.

I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks what happened between me and that sweater. What snapped in me that made me take the thing, bundle it up with its needles, and shove it into the back of the closet. I know I can be a pretty unfaithful knitter, but really, a project has to at least give me a reason before I go. I don’t usually dump a good sweater like yesterday’s coffee grounds unless there’s at least a better sweater on the horizon, but this time it was very cold and calculating. I just put it in a jumbo Ziploc and walked away. Didn’t see a better yarn that made this one look ratty, didn’t find a new pattern that looked like a thrill a minute, didn’t have a buttonhole come out too big and give me an excuse. The yarn didn’t bug me, the pattern didn’t have an error, it wasn’t time to do the buttonbands. (I hate buttonbands. A truly civilized world would have found a way past them. That’s all I’m saying.) Nothing happened, I was knitting along, everything was going well, and then I just snapped, stuffed it in a bag, and consigned it to the closet as if it was where the thing was born to be.

In the beginning, the relationship between that sweater and me was so charmed that if there were sweater knitting romance movies, we would have gotten the leads. I got gauge perfectly, bang on, the first time I tried. I took my wee swatch and washed it to see if the gauge stayed the same, and it did. The yarn didn’t change at all—didn’t bloom and get bigger, didn’t have the body wash out of it and suddenly turn up flaccid. There was no change at all, except that the yarn was wet and then it dried. Then I started knitting and the yarn was plain and good, worked perfectly well, was comfortable in my hands and made a nice fabric. It was neither too flimsy nor too bulky. It was exactly as I had hoped it would be. As I continued, the pattern was accurate and clear, and the pattern writer had thoughtfully put any difficult or unexpected directions in the proper order so that there wasn’t even a chance I would miss an instruction and screw up. I carried on, and as I did I measured, and I’ll be damned if the thing wasn’t coming out exactly the right size. I even, and I cannot stress enough how unlikely and unbelievable this is, I even got both row and stitch gauge. That never happens. Until that moment I actually thought that achieving row gauge was an urban legend, like alligators in the sewers, or cats sucking the breath out of babies. I have heard of it, people talk about it, but nobody can ever show me an example, and stories of people getting both kinds of gauge always seem to happen to a friend of a friend. I’ve simply never seen it, and here it was, effortlessly turning up on this perfect sweater that was going wonderfully well. I can’t stress this enough. There were no problems with that sweater, not a one, and unlike its deformed, unlucky, and misadventured brethren already in the closet, I think maybe that’s why it got the chop. It was going so well, so wonderfully well, so completely without incident, so painfully undistinguished in its ordinariness, that frankly, the whole thing just about makes me weep casual tears of tepid boredom to think of it.