The Yarn Whisperer Read online

  CHOREOGRAPHY OF STITCHES

  THREE THINGS SUM up my first few years in Tucson: the ramada, the rodeo, and square dancing. On my first day at Peter E. Howell Elementary School, we were told to gather under the ramada after recess. The what? I came from a place with seasons, where you had to play indoors roughly half of the school year. Here in the land of eternal sunshine, on a playground that resembled the moon, they had put a flat roof on metal posts over a rectangular slab of concrete. This was the only place you could go to escape the sun—and it was, as I learned that first day, called a ramada.

  Tucson also brought me the rodeo. Until then, the only rodeo I knew was the ballet scored by Aaron Copland and choreographed by Agnes de Mille, which I’d seen performed by the American Ballet Theatre the year we left New York. While my father played in the orchestra pit, my best friend, Carol, and I watched from front-row seats. At intermission, I led her out a secret door—the Eastman Theatre was my playground back then—but it locked behind us. We were stuck in a small vestibule with two other locked doors. We pounded on all of them until one opened, revealing the magical world of backstage.

  The stage manager—who knew my father—ushered us inside. The only way back into the theater was through a door on the other side of the stage, he explained, and we couldn’t walk behind the stage because intermission was almost over. He offered us something even better: We got to stand in the eaves, just out of view of the audience, and watch the rest of the ballet from there. I remember stunningly beautiful dancers standing in what looked like adult-sized litter boxes rubbing their toes in the sand, staring fixedly at the stage, then suddenly sprinting out of their boxes and back on the stage, their mouths flashing into toothy smiles. That’s what I thought of when I heard the word rodeo.

  But Tucson’s version was nothing like the world of Copland and de Mille. It was hot, loud, and dusty. We sat in crowded bleachers that were sticky and smelled of beer. A man’s voice droned over the loudspeakers like a buzzing fly, incomprehensible. Somewhere in the middle of the dust and clouds, people were doing things on horses. I think I saw a cow or two, or was that what they called a bull? I didn’t know.

  The clown was unlike any of the happy, Technicolor Ronald McDonald circus clowns I’d ever seen. This one was dusty. He’d fallen on hard times. I imagined he lived on freight trains and ate bits of rattlesnake he’d roasted on a stick over the campfire. He did crazy things and was constantly ducking into a barrel to avoid being trampled, and people applauded it.

  Arizona had only been a state for sixty-four years at this point, and the Wild West spirit still reigned. We even had a formal school holiday—“rodeo vacation”—so that we could all hitch our wagons and head out to the fairgrounds for some roping and cattle rustling.

  How I longed for my gorgeous dancers trotting in their sandboxes, for the creaky wood floors of the Botsford School of Dance and the piano player who accompanied us as we flailed around, dreaming we were prima ballerinas. I missed being able to run around barefoot on the grass. I longed for tall, leafy trees and soft snow and my father in his blue cashmere sweater.

  Then came square dancing, which I soon discovered was as important a school ritual as math, science, or the daily recital of the Pledge of Allegiance. Every week we’d file down to the cafeteria, line up, and march to the yammering orders and old-timey jingle-jangle coming from a small portable record player by the stage. “Hemmina hemmina hemmina,” the man would babble, occasionally calling us to “allemande left, chase yer neighbor, do-si-do” before resuming the random “hemmina hemmina hemmina …”. We’d march to and fro in clunky synchronization like awkward little Maoist soldiers.

  After the initial affront, something strange clicked inside of me. The pleasant mathematical order of things overtook any of my angst about boys, breasts, or body odor. I liked how all our movements fit together like clockwork. There was nothing personal about this. I wasn’t waiting for a boy to ask me to dance—we all had to do-si-do, no matter what, or the engine would come to a stop. Each person played a vital role in keeping the machine running smoothly.

  This may be part of why I like knitting so much. All knitting is choreography. Some moves are more graceful than others, but they all fit together and create one cohesive piece of fabric. Whether it’s an allemande left or a simple pirouette, each move dictates the dance as each stitch dictates the knitting. Both rely on discrete elements that are arranged and repeated in a certain fashion, whether through the movement of body alone or that of yarn, needles, and hands. Break out into the Charleston in the middle of a tango, or feather and fan in the midst of a heavy cabled sweater, and the public will take notice.

  I’ve always thought that ribbing was the perfect knitted embodiment of tap dance. Knit a front-facing stitch and purl a back-facing stitch, and you’re performing a perfect shuffle ball-change. Vary the order of your knits and purls from row to row, and the shuffle ball-change becomes a more nuanced time-step.

  Cables add the sideways shuffling of Bob Fosse, with his telltale one-leg-behind-the-other stance and jazz hands flashing midair. Elaborate lace motifs, those are as close as we’ll ever get to classic ballet, to knitting Swan Lake on our needles. Feather and fan is the ballerina seated on stage, legs straight ahead, who opens her arms to the sky and then gracefully collapses forward until she and her legs are one, the breathing motion of yarn overs collapsing into the condensed silence of knit two togethers.

  And the truly expressive, Martha Graham–style modern dance? That likely gets you Kaffe Fassett colorwork or a particularly vibrant piece of freeform knitting, the unexpected geometry of Norah Gaughan’s designs, a Cat Bordhi moebius.

  In the world of knitted choreography, one stitch makes me particularly happy: the three-needle bind-off. You do this when you have two rows of live stitches you want to join conspicuously—say, you’d like to attach the front and back shoulders of a sweater and want the prominent look of a raised seam.

  It begins with a lining up of the two needles, the rows of stitches facing one another. One by one, a stitch from each needle marches forward to join its partner. The two are knit together into a stitch on the right needle. Another pair joins hands and moves to the right needle, at which point the first joined pair leapfrogs over that second pair and off the fabric. On and on they go, forming an orderly line of bound-off stitches.

  Every time I do this, I’m taken back to the cafeteria of Peter E. Howell. I’m wearing white painter pants, blue Adidas shoes, and my favorite blue plaid shirt with gold threads woven in and faux-pearl snaps for buttons. I’ve adjusted to my strange new life. My father hasn’t remarried, both sets of grandparents are still alive, and I don’t yet know how the story will unfold. I’m simply standing in a row eagerly waiting my turn to walk to the center, grab hands with my partner, and sashay down the line.

  NOBODY’S FOOL

  RIGHT AFTER I was born, my father called my Great-Aunt Kay from the hospital to tell her the news. He called collect, and she was so insulted that she refused the charges.

  So heavy was the burden of her guilt that, for my sixth birthday, she made amends by shipping her mother’s entire bedroom set to me. Which is just what every six-year-old girl wants, isn’t it? A heavy, carved-walnut seven-piece Victorian bedroom set?

  My room wasn’t nearly big enough to contain it all. I was entrusted instead with just the bed, the shorter of the two dressers, and the dressing table—a real-live dressing table at which I sat, throughout my entire adolescence, and stared at myself. I looked nothing like the girls in Seventeen magazine. My room was nothing like their rooms, and my life, well, I might as well have been on a different planet.

  But still I sat at that dressing table with my Maybelline mascara and my little tub of purple eye shadow—it had fine silver sparkles in it—carefully applying them and wishing they could somehow magically make me fit in.

  By the end of college, I’d abandoned makeup entirely, dismissing it as the oppressive mantle of the patriarchy.r />
  Then, in 2009, I got an email. Interweave was filming segments for its TV show during the National Needlework Association conference in Ohio. They wanted to do a “wild about wool” show, and would I like to host it? Sure, I said. I can prattle about wool for hours, cameras or no cameras.

  Everything was fine until the producer emailed me the guidelines for being on the show. There in black and white, right below “get a professional manicure,” were the dreaded words “apply your own camera-ready makeup.”

  The notion of talking to a potential audience of millions didn’t scare me a bit. But the prospect of applying my own makeup? Terrifying. That tub of sparkly purple eye shadow had been gone for easily twenty years. I had nothing. They might as well have been asking me to hang drywall or remove an appendix.

  I picked the fanciest hair salon in town, a hoity-toity place that offered sparkling water in wineglasses and advertised massages on the third floor, Botox on the fourth. I scheduled a makeup class. “Can I also schedule a manicure?” I found myself asking. How foreign were these words. Who are you, mouth, and what have you done with Clara?

  Soon I was at the reception desk giving my name to a slender woman with perfect teeth and impossibly tall shoes. She tottered us to an area that resembled a giant church organ, only instead of keys and buttons and knobs it had tier upon tier of tubes and jars and bottles of color, color, and more color, stacked as high as the eye could see. (Which wasn’t that high considering I’m only five foot two, but still.) A young woman swung around and smiled. I immediately forgot her name, but it ended with an “eeee” sound. We said our hellos and she glanced around me expectantly. I realized she was looking for the gawky preteen daughter I’d presumably brought for the lesson.

  “Uh, no,” I explained, “this is for me.”

  And we were off. She pulled my hair back and started rubbing my face with a cool gel that tingled. “I’m just applying a toner to make sure we get rid of any residual makeup.”

  “No worries there,” I mumbled.

  For almost an hour, I sat while she slathered, smeared, dotted, brushed, and blotted my face with layer upon layer of cream, paste, powder, and gel. She played a cruel trick of applying things on just one side of my face, then making me apply them on the other side. Soon I looked like a Raggedy Ann doll that had suffered a stroke. She kept notes of what she’d done, marking swirls and slashes on a drawing of a face and then adding product names and colors. The eyes alone had twelve different notations.

  While I gazed at the weird face in the mirror, she asked if I felt confident enough to do this on my own.

  “I think so,” I lied.

  “Should I start setting you up with some product?” she asked.

  “Uh … sure.”

  The initial tab came in at $600. We slowly whittled away at her masterpiece until I left with just an etching of a face. It was still wildly over budget, but what could I do? This was television, after all.

  The morning of the shoot, I met a friend at the hotel elevator. She studied my face for a good long time. “You look,” she said finally, “like someone who got a very good night’s rest.” I decided she meant it as a compliment, but as soon as the taping was over, I returned to my room and used a hot towel to remove the well-rested face and let the puffy, jet-lagged one back out. On the washcloth was a clear outline of my face, like the Shroud of Turin.

  The closest thing we have to cosmetology in the knitting world would have to be duplicate stitch. While the rest of what we do involves building our foundation from scratch, block by block, stitch by stitch, duplicate stitch is about etching new colors and fibers directly on top of existing ones. You may know it by its raised-pinkie name, Swiss darning. The goal is to trace the exact outline of the existing stitch with new yarn so that it is, in fact, a duplicate. But just like my TV-ready face, everybody knows that something is different.

  The knitting show wasn’t actually my first time on TV. In the 1980s, around the same time that duplicate stitch was being used on sweaters with giant shoulder pads, I appeared in a local-access TV show called Back Alley’s. High school friends and I wrote, acted, directed, produced, filmed, and edited this path-breaking drama whose only real claim to fame was a guest appearance by the late Michael Landon. I played Alley, the wisecracking owner of the bar where all the characters hung out—when they weren’t being hit on the head by watermelons and feigning amnesia in the hospital.

  This led to an equally brief but illustrious career in television voice-overs that lasted, if my memory serves me right, exactly one commercial. I went into the dark, padded sound room of a Tucson studio and donned my headphones, each the size of a sweet roll. I gazed at my on-screen subject: a woman handing a bag to a customer and saying the words “thank you.” That was my canvas.

  I wanted this to be utterly seamless, so I got to work. What was her motivation? Did she like her job? Was this at the beginning or end of her shift? Had she eaten lunch yet? I looked closer. There was something in her expression … perhaps she and this man had been lovers years ago, and she was hoping he wouldn’t remember—yet was secretly hurt that he didn’t.

  We recorded about thirty takes before the job was done. I tried to make my addition as smooth as possible, but I’m sure my voice, like even the most expertly worked duplicate stitch, still formed a slight bump on the scene’s otherwise smooth surface.

  That’s how duplicate stitch works. It’s the voice-over of the knitting world, a kind of lipstick or wig, press-on nails, a fresh coat of paint. Anything bigger and you’re asking for trouble.

  Not too long after we moved to Tucson, my brothers and I witnessed a failed duplicate stitch attempt. Both my parents had begun sowing their wild oats after the divorce was declared final. My mother dated an assortment of fellows, musicians and astronomers and waiters alike. My father soon fell in love with one of his college students. They made plans to marry, but there was a slight problem. She belonged to a church that didn’t believe in divorce.

  For the new marriage to take place at the church, my parents’ marriage had to be declared null and void—not just from that day forward, but as in “never legitimately happened.” So everyone filled out a heap of paperwork, answered a lot of nosy questions, and mailed in their checks. In return, the church pulled out its giant magic darning needle, threaded it with a particularly bright white acrylic, and proceeded to cover my legitmate childhood with shiny new pretend stitches.

  Of course, the new stitches were perfectly obvious to everyone, like the clumsy detective wearing dark glasses and a false mustache and hiding behind a potted palm. I was unimpressed. But it was enough for the Powers that Be. History annulled, the marriage was allowed to proceed.

  Today I live in my Great-Aunt Kay’s old farmhouse, and I still have that bedroom set. Now instead of pimples and adolescent angst, the mirror reflects fading hair pigment and strange creases where once my skin was smooth. I can see the temptation to start dubbing, spreading thick coats of spackling compound over the cracks.

  But it never works. I consider the lovely women at my hoity-toity salon, with their biologically implausible hair colors and faces stapled open in expressions of perpetual surprise. Or my TV-ready face, or even that white acrylic lump of duplicate stitches on my childhood fabric. We’re not fooling anyone.

  HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

  GARDENING IS THE ultimate act of optimism. We plant, tend, weed, water, and wait, hoping that something beautiful will grow. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. The gardener learns to be philosophical.

  So it is with yarn. Knitters are avid yarn gardeners, one and all. We have the formal French style of gardening, in which our yarns are neatly organized into shapely bins and boxes. Tidiness and order reign supreme. We might even have our entire stash in a database for easy reference.

  The more rumpled British style of gardening has its mossy overgrown paths, the jumbled hedgerow heaps of balls and hanks, the weathered baskets that look as if they’ve been there
forever.

  And then we have the Japanese “natural farming” system of Masanobu Fukuoka, which espouses no plowing or tilling, no fertilizers, no weeding, no pesticides, no herbicides, not even any pruning. He preferred to let the vegetables find their own way—the yarn equivalent would be a skein taking up residence under the couch cushions, behind the muffin tins, or inside the piano.

  A healthy yarn garden contains a broad spectrum of plants—annuals and perennials, deciduous and coniferous, rootstock and tubers alike. Most of us get our yarn as seedlings from the yarn-garden store, preferring ready-to-plant skeins, hanks, and balls. But some, the hearty back-to-the-lamb hand-spinners among us, prefer to raise their yarn from seed. They love the parental feeling of overseeing each moment of the yarn’s growth, from its beginnings as wee fibers to its maturity as a fully grown skein and, ultimately, a finished garment.

  Annuals are a thrill, those short-run, limited-availability skeins that only last one season and then are gone forever. Stock up! Get extra! You never know if you’ll see this variety again. Such yarns give us a chance to replant, replenish, and re-envision our yarn gardens from year to year.

  But others take a more practical approach, basing their yarn gardens on a foundation of hearty perennials that have the potential to bloom year after year. They pack their stashes with the stalwart tried-and-true yarns, the Brown Sheeps and Cascade 220s that we hope will be available, in some form, forever.