Yarn Harlot

I
am a person who works well under pressure. In fact, I work so well under pressure that at times, I will procrastinate in order to create this pressure. Naturally, as with all human failings, this system of procrastination occasionally backfires and creates more pressure than I had really intended. Such was the case a week before the manuscript for this book was due. I had accidentally created a little bit more pressure than was really wise, and as a result had been reduced to writing day and night, only stopping to complain to my family (who were pleased as punch that it had come down to this again) about having to write a book day and night.

At about the time that I had started to order pizza for several meals in a row and the family began to ask me ever so delicately if I ever intended to do a load of laundry again, I took my laptop (and a glass of decent merlot—though perhaps we should forget that) up to my bedroom. After a hot bath, I ensconced myself, delirious and exhausted, in my bed to write the introduction to this book.

I began to type then—it was something completely trite, I’m sure, though I’ve now forgotten. The next thing I remember was my lovely husband gently waking me up by pulling my sleeping face off the laptop. The next morning, when I returned to the screen, I discovered that somehow, as I slept with my face on the keyboard, my nose had typed seventeen pages of the letter Y.

Initially I didn’t see the poetry in that. Perhaps if I had somehow managed to fill seventeen pages with J, I would still be stuck. But now, I see the gift my slumbering nose presented. There is Meaning here. There is Significance.

“Why” indeed? Why was I killing myself over a book about the joy of knitting? Why have I had, over the course of decades, a love affair with knitting that consumes me so completely? Why would any sane person give up so much closet space and money to a craft that seems simple and silly?

The answer: Because knitting is more than it seems. Knitting is a complex and joyful act of creation in my everyday life.

It really does seem so simple. Knitting is only two stitches, knit and purl, yet with those two ordinary acts we knitters can take a ball of yarn and a couple of pointy sticks and create something useful and beautiful. An average sweater takes God-only-knows-how-many stitches to make, each one of them a simple act. Wrapping yarn around needles over and over and over again disconnects me from my cares. Knitting makes something from nothing, and it’s usually such an
interesting
something.

Even when it isn’t going well, knitting can be deeply spiritual. Knitting sets goals that you can meet. Sometimes when I work on something complicated or difficult—ripping out my
work and starting over, poring over tomes of knitting expertise, screeching “I don’t get it!” while practically weeping with frustration—my husband looks at me and says, “I don’t know why you think you like knitting.” I just stare at him. I don’t
like
knitting. I
love
knitting. I don’t know what could have possibly led him to think that I’m not enjoying myself. The cursing? The crying? The fourteen sheets of shredded graph paper? Knitting is like a marriage (I tell him) and you don’t just trash the whole thing because there are bad moments.

I love knitting because it’s something that can be accomplished no matter how poorly it’s going at any given moment. It’s a triumph of dexterity over string. I can’t make my kids turn out the way I want; I have no control over my editor; world peace remains elusive despite my very best efforts; but all of that be damned—I can put a heel in a sock and it will go exactly the way I want it to go. Eventually, at least.

Knitting is magic. Knitting is an act of creation and a simple transformation each and every time. Each knitted gift holds hours of my life. I know it looks just like a hat, but really, it’s four hours at the hospital, six hours on the bus, two hours alone at four in the morning when I couldn’t sleep because I tend to worry. It is all those hours when I chose to spend time warming another person. It’s giving them my time—time that I could have spent on anything, or anyone, else. Knitting is love, looped and warm.

So—why this book? Because there are fifty million knitters in North America. I can’t be the only one who feels this way.

Raise your needles (straight or circular) if you’re with me.

The Red Wool of Courage:
Or; Projects I Have Known and Loved

I
am, by most accounts, a normal woman. It’s possible that I have a little more yarn than is really the national average, but lots of people have an obsession. I like deadlines, I work well under pressure, and procrastination runs in my family the way that tone deafness runs in others. I have an aunt or two a little on the odd side and an uncle who played the ukulele, but as far as I know, there is no family history of insanity. We are, however, really big dreamers, and I wonder if that is what started this whole thing.

You’ve heard of the Red Scourge? the Black Death? the Yellow Plague? Meet my nemesis, the Green Afghan.

My brother Ian proposed to a woman I adored and set a date for the first wedding in our family for years. I was completely thrilled. The woman in question, Alison, is not only kind, gentle, and clever, but had demonstrated one of the finest qualities in a potential sister-in-law: an appreciation for handknits. In fact (not that I was snooping around or anything, that would be wrong), I had noticed that there were handknit pillows on her
couch. This, together with my brother’s love of all things woolly and warm and my natural knitterly inclination to demonstrate my love with yarn, made my path clear. I would knit them a wedding present.

I started thinking about the possibilities. The wedding was five months away and I felt pretty darned sure that I could finish just about anything in five months. I mulled it over: 150 days, 3,600 hours. I started thinking big. I thought about “His and Hers” sweaters. I thought about knitting lace edges for pillow cases. I thought about a hundred things. I considered matching socks, really beautiful ones, but rejected that idea when I thought about it further. Socks wear out. What sort of omen would it be if they walked huge honkin’ holes in their wedding socks by their third anniversary? I imagined them looking at the holes, then looking at each other, and wondering if it was a sign. Whatever I knit, it had to be enduring. Something they would use, something that would be cozy for both of them, something that would last a long time. Something that would last long enough that they’d still treasure it on their fiftieth anniversary (or at least something they’d both fight for in divorce court).

I started to think about an afghan. You can’t outgrow a blanket; it can’t be the wrong size, and it would last a whole marriage if I used good wool and gave them a stern lecture on how to wash it. They could still be using it a long time from now if I picked a classic color.

Everybody’s got a lime, gold, and orange granny-square afghan that Aunt Shirley crocheted for you in 1973. It’s the afghan that you never throw over yourself when you have a hangover,
since it turns the headache into a pounding so violent that you can actually feel your hair grow. Instead you’ve got it jammed in the hall closet on the top shelf. You take it out twice a year: Once when you’ve got a friend staying on the couch and you are desperate for an extra blanket, and once when your aunt Shirley’s daughter Enid comes over and you artfully drape it over the couch so she can’t catch you out.