The Yarn Whisperer Read online

  In knitting, just as in, say, piloting that nuclear submarine, faking it is really not such a good idea. “I’ll just keep going and see what happens” rarely bears tasty fruit. That is how you end up with a turtleneck through which your head cannot pass, a sock with no heel, or a submarine grounded off Antarctica when you expected to be somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.

  How ironic, then, that I’m back at a job where people ask me questions all the time. My inbox has become its own virtual knitting customer service desk filled with endless inquiries about yarns, fibers, patterns, breeds, shops, and places around the world. I try to answer each one, but they just keep coming, and sometimes, like those slips of paper, I have to admit defeat and hit the “delete” button. Some things I know; some things I don’t. I try to help whenever I can.

  Questions are a curious thing. Have you noticed that we often ask questions to which we’ve already decided the answer? We’re just fishing to see if you choose the same answer we did. We don’t really want to know what you think about the difference between Merino and alpaca, just like we don’t really want to know what you think about our lousy boyfriend. No, we just want to see if you think that yellow skein would make as pretty a scarf as we do.

  No matter how I answer, you’ll either buy it or you won’t. You’ll either stay with Gary or break up with him. In fact, unless the yarn poses an immediate physical threat to you, my answer is almost irrelevant. I hope so, because the burden of making other people’s decisions is too weighty for my shoulders.

  When I started baking at my local café, a side gig to help me work through my apparent butter fixation, I found myself right back at the Bayfair Mall. I am not a trained chef. I’m a passionate, self-taught home baker. But all the customers saw was a person behind the counter. From day one, those old Macy’s questions returned. “What’s a ‘milky way’?” they asked. How many shots go into a macchiato? What kind of soy milk do we use? They’ve handed me résumés, they’ve asked me to sign delivery slips, they’ve alerted me to a running toilet or an empty soap dispenser.

  I marvel at how little a clue I have about any of it. How refreshingly terrifying. But I do remember the old routine: Stand up straight and project my ignorance in a way that instills complete confidence. People don’t want to hear someone wallow in all the ways she can’t help them—they want someone to nod, perhaps tell them who can help.

  When I toggle between my days as an impostor-baker and the more comfortable ones as a knitting expert, the confidence part doesn’t seem to be going away. What I’d assumed was total fakery on my part might actually be rooted in something, dare I say, genuine? Maybe the original lesson I learned at Macy’s wasn’t to fake it, like the giant fraud I felt I was, but simply to present whoever and whatever I am with confidence.

  After all, did Elizabeth Zimmermann encourage us to knit on with fear and uncertainty? No. Her exact words were, “Knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crises.” And so I shall.

  THE THING ABOUT BOBBLES

  MY MATERNAL GRANDMA always wore turtlenecks. Not until late in life, after dementia took its toll, her long braids were lopped off, and her Icelandic sweaters replaced by wash-and-wear polyester gowns, did I discover the reason why: Her upper chest and neck were peppered with a faint, fleshy constellation of skin tags. According to my mother, my ever-tactful grandfather felt compelled to snort at some point in the summer of 1957, “Ruth, put on a turtleneck; those things are disgusting.”

  From that moment on, she never left the house uncovered again. I can find no photos of her ever sporting a bathing suit, shorts, or even a short-sleeved shirt. When she came to visit us in Arizona and the temperatures hovered around 100 degrees, the turtleneck was still firmly in place, sleeves marching defensively to her tiny wrists. It was her version of a burka, protecting a Victorian modesty that concealed a painfully fragile ego. According to family lore, she even changed into her pajamas in the closet.

  How funny, then, that at the same time my grandma was so carefully covering up her neck, she was furiously adding bobbles to everything she knit, like a chef gone wild with a pastry bag. Using a seemingly endless supply of off-white, worsted-weight wool procured who knows where, she adorned pillow cover after pillow cover with complex Aran patterning that featured, always, a proliferation of bobbles.

  Bobbles are the skin tags of knitted fabric, wobbly nubbins that protrude and dangle, make babies hungry, invite fiddling, distract the eye, and consume acres of yarn. While skin tags may appear suddenly and when least expected, bobbles exist only when we want them to exist.

  A bobble is formed by adding several stitches onto an unsuspecting stitch, working them back and forth independently from the rest of the fabric, and then binding off all but that original stitch—which then rejoins the party as if nothing had happened, only now sporting a giant hump on its back. “Who, me? Oh, must’ve been that second piece of cake, ha ha,” it laughs nervously as it inches into the crowd. A bobble is a whispered conversation that everyone overhears, a prominent sidebar, a weekend in Las Vegas caught on tape.

  As with any protruding three-dimensional object, we’ve developed all sorts of techniques to make a better, firmer, tighter bobble. We’ve learned that if you add and bind off the extra stitches in stages, row by row, you create a rounder, more robust bobble. We’ve discovered that if we wrap the neighboring stitches as we go along, we can give greater support to full-figured bobbles. We’ve found that if we work our bobbles too close together, we’ll end up with an unattractive unibobble, that it’s far wiser to lift and separate our bobbles with plenty of stockinette stitches. Saggy bobbles? Try twisting the stitch in the row directly above the one in which you added the bobble.

  As much as I’d like to say that bobble beauty is in the eye of the creator, it’s also in the eye of the beholder. And nothing beats the awkwardness of two ill-placed bobbles on a grown-up woman’s sweater. No, far better to space them evenly throughout your work.

  But be careful. Adding bobbles with reckless abandon can be dangerous because there’s no getting rid of a bobble once it’s there. You can add new ones after the fact, no problem. But you can’t freeze one off a sweater, cover it with a Band-Aid, and expect it to heal. Slice a bobble off your fabric, and the surrounding stitches will quickly open into an ever-widening yawn. A bobble is there to stay, till death do you part.

  Many knitters scorn bobbles with the same disdain reserved for a neighbor’s barking dog or the lumbering Winnebago that refuses to pull out of the passing lane. They are fiddly and tedious to work, always hitting the “pause” button when you’ve just begun to gain momentum. To knit a sweater with bobbles is to tour a museum with a friend—you know the one—who insists on stopping at each painting and reading the information card, word by word. There you stand in the doorway, eager to move into the Impressionist room while she lingers among the Pre-Raphaelites, still reading the second paragraph of the third card on the fourth painting.

  Even the word bobble doesn’t bode well. It means to make a mess of something, to mishandle it. When a horse makes a misstep before a race, it’s called a bobble. Likewise, an athlete bobbles when fumbling the ball. To bobble is to lose one’s grip, which is what many people think you’ve done when you start adding bobbles to everything. I certainly thought so.

  I suspect bobble mania is especially likely to afflict those people made uncomfortable by bare walls and unadorned space. For them, a sea of stockinette is like an empty windowsill with nary a seashell or figurine to keep it company. Their immediate instinct is to put something on it, and bobbles are the knitter’s favorite figurine. They adorn and punctuate the three-dimensional language of stitches, they are the smack of a dot at the bottom of an exclamation point or a wad of chewing gum on the sidewalk, a fibery tumor.

  I was rather indifferent to bobbles, until the day I spotted The Jacket. Knit in bulky yarn, it had a shockingly deep collar of bobbles matched by an equally substantial swath along both cuffs in a charmingly 1
960s Jackie O style. I was mesmerized. These bobbles were not discreet or subtle, they were loud, proud Dolly Parton bobbles stomping their feet on every available inch of fabric. They created a honeycomb of stitches filled with a plush, fibery sweetness I found simply irresistible.

  Suddenly, and against all my better judgment, I felt a desire stir deep within my knitting loins: a desire to cast on and create this coat for my very own self. Could I, in knitting this veritable bobblepalooza, transform an eyesore into an attraction? Could I make peace with bobbles? I had to try.

  The recommended yardage alone told me I was in for a long trip. You’d normally need about 840 yards to complete a comparably sized and shaped coat—and that’s using a thick, bulky yarn. But this baby was asking for 1,200 yards, maybe even more. I ordered 1,400 yards of a plush, full-bodied wool yarn, figuring I could always use the extra for a matching bobbled hat and mitts. (When in Rome …)

  I cast on at the bottom and worked my way up. The pattern has you add raglan-style sleeve shaping and then—only at the very end—top it all off with a heaping helping of bobbles. Progress on the body was fast as my needles cranked out sheets of bulky stockinette.

  Just as I caught myself thinking, “I should have this done by the end of the weekend,” I hit the bobbles. They say that driving in Africa has two extremes—one minute you’re speeding along on smooth, new tarmac, and the next minute the pavement ends and you’re dodging potholes big enough to swallow a Jeep. After cruising along in my smooth stockinette, I was now in first gear wondering if I’d make it to the next town by sunset.

  Then something happened. A switch in my impatient brain clicked off. I stopped focusing on time and speed; I stopped anticipating the next row and the row after that. I settled into the deeper, slower pleasure of the moment and of each stitch. I savored the experience of watching that rounded shape begin and grow and finally mature into a full-bodied bobble. I became excited when it was time to bring each new bobble home to meet the family. I loved watching how the other stitches adjusted to the newcomer, and I felt almost giddy as the slow, steady body of bobbles unfolded on my needles.

  I felt a sense of solidarity with my grandma, with all those bobble knitters who’d come before me. They’d stumbled upon this secret and guarded it so well. They’d endured the sneers and eye rolls of anti-bobblers, blithely continuing on their merry way. Now I understood.

  I love my bobble coat more than just about anything else I’ve ever knit. I’m not sure it’s the most flattering of garments. But when I wear it, I can quickly spot the bobble haters in the crowd and connect with the bobble sisterhood and brotherhood, those who know the secret. I love how the collar feels, and I love how it adorns and protects a neck that is beginning to sprout its own, far smaller constellation of skin tags.

  Speaking of which, last week I went to the dermatologist for my annual checkup. She looked at my freckles, she measured the creepy mole on my back, and then she glanced at my neck.

  “We can freeze these off if they ever start to bother you,” she said.

  I considered it for a moment. I thought of my grandma and her turtlenecks, and of how readily she could’ve had her own skin tags removed. Yet she didn’t.

  “You know what?” I replied, “I’m good, thanks.”

  A GOOD STEEK

  WHEN I WAS eight years old, I came home from school one day to discover everything in my house on Bittersweet Road in Rochester, New York, had been packed and taken away, and that I was to be trundled into a car pointed west—far, far west—with only one parent coming along for the journey.

  If this story had a soundtrack, here’s where you’d hear a needle being yanked off a record. We met my father at a park, and my brothers and I said goodbye while my mother sat in the car. Then we drove away. Simple as that.

  For my mother, it was the beginning of a glorious new life of sunshine and self-discovery. For me, propped in the back of an un-air-conditioned car with a spider plant, a Sony TV, and sullen brothers for company, this was my first real exposure to emotions beyond the realm of dropped ice cream cones or a broken toy. My heart hadn’t grown a callus nearly thick enough to protect it from what was happening.

  As the car continued to pull us farther and farther away from home, I couldn’t help but also be curious about what I saw out my window. New things. An indoor/outdoor pool at a Holiday Inn in Illinois, the Mississippi River, a real palm tree, a hotel lounge with a live band playing “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” where I was allowed to order ginger ale for the first time.

  Onward we went through the sweltering heat and increasingly barren landscape. With each state we crossed, my mother grew more jubilant, my brothers and I more impatient. I remember being hot and uncomfortable. The Instamatic camera I left in the back window melted by the time we reached Texas. Tucson was our final destination.

  This was not the Tucson of today, with its multistoried resort homes, splendid golf courses, and outdoor shopping malls with fire pits, air-conditioning, gelato, and Tiffany’s. It was a dry, flat place best remembered with the silence and faded colors of a Super 8 home movie.

  We arrived at dusk and checked into a Howard Johnson off Interstate 10. The air smelled sweet, and a green, spiked thing was growing in a pile of rocks by the parking lot. It fascinated me. The soft fuzz between the thorns felt just like the surface of a peach. That evening I learned my first lesson of the desert: Never pet a cactus, no matter how soft it looks. It took days to pick all the tiny thorns out of my fingers. Welcome to Arizona.

  Of course, my mother reminds me that we all knew about the move for months, that I even helped with some of the packing. She also points out that we left on an August morning, not suddenly one day after school. Rationally, I know this to be true. But my eight-year-old brain still remembers the whole experience quite differently; no amount of preparation would’ve changed this.

  Cut something apart, and there’s always a momentary shock to the system. What was once whole is now sundered. Slice through the veins of your knitted fabric, and the newly exposed stitches may easily unravel as they scramble back toward a home that no longer exists. At the same time, there’s no doubting the sense of possibility that accompanies this opening, a curiosity about what the new fabric may hold.

  There’s a way to do it right, without pain. We work a series of steps called a steek, so that the stitches are prepared for what’s coming and can absorb the shock, heal without any scars, and even thrive in their new environment. According to Alice Starmore, steek is an Old Scots word for hardening a heart or closing a gate—a fitting way to describe what you’re doing to get those stitches ready for what could be a traumatic experience. Even now, I keep discovering stray loose ends from that shocking cut when I was eight years old. A favorite cup will get broken, a pen thrown away by accident, some unexpected change is foisted upon me, and I am overcome with a powerful panic I know is not rooted in the present.

  A good steek is much more than just going at it with scissors. It begins at the cast-on, when you add several extra “waste” stitches to buffer each side of the cut and prevent deeper fabric erosion. Right before cutting, you’ll use a sewing machine or crochet stitches to reinforce either side of the waste stitches. Secure those edges well enough, and the floodwaters will never breach. In fact, once those first steps have been taken, the cutting is almost anticlimactic. Instead of grieving the cut, your fabric can enjoy the new scenery.

  We like steeks because they let us make colorful, intricate Fair Isle garments in the round without ever having to fuss with a purl row. We can just set the engine on “knit” and speed on down the road, going around and around until we’re done. Then, simply pop the steek, sprout the armhole, and you’re nearing the finish line before you know it. Forget to add a steek, and your sweater remains, at best, a fancy pillowcase.

  Steeks represent a necessary part of life, almost a coming-of-age for fabric. As roses need pruning and seedlings need thinning, steeks require cutting if your fabric h
as any hope to grow into something else. Eventually, we all need to cut open our stitches to leave home and become independent human beings.

  By my late twenties, I became aware that my life was calling for a steek. I’d been going around and around at a job in San Francisco. I had a cool title on an impressive-looking business card. I’d made a snazzy fabric, but it wasn’t very well tailored to me. Either I would stay in that tube forever, my movement slowly shrinking and changing to fit the confines of the fabric, or I would do the scary thing and cut open those stitches to see what could grow.

  My steek required a cross-country move back East to the scene of my childhood summers in Maine. There were two of us now. My partner, Clare, and I were knitting this new fabric together. It took us three years to build up a wide enough band of metaphorical “waste” stitches to absorb that cut and buffer us from its impact. Unlike the last time I’d gotten into a car and headed to a new home on the other coast, this time I was in the driver’s seat.

  On the morning of April 30, 1998, we locked the door of our apartment and handed the keys to our landlord. We got into the car—its windows sparkling clean, oil freshly changed, tires rotated, and tank full of gas—and I put the key in the ignition, took a deep breath, and squeezed the scissors.

  The cut itself took almost a month to complete. We took time along the way to visit people and places that had been instrumental in the stitches of our lives. Each had a turn at the scissors. We arrived in Maine on the eve of my twenty-ninth birthday, steek fully cut, feeling exhilarated and exhausted. The heat had been turned off for the summer and our apartment was freezing—or maybe it was my own exposed inner fabric that brought the chill.

  It took several months before all the ends were darned. Over the years, my colorway and pattern have changed some. I’ve frogged a few things and sprouted a few more openings, but the fundamental fabric holds strong—and it continues to evolve as I do. Who knows? One day we may load up the car again and head west, back to the land of palm trees, melted cameras, and abundant sunshine. Or perhaps we’ll point our jalopy in an entirely new direction, carefully cut a new steek, and see what comes next. The important thing is that, now, the scissors are in my hands.