The Yarn Whisperer Page 4

  Stashes, like gardens, can hold surprises. My grandma’s certainly did. As the resident knitter of the family, I inherited all her yarn, which she’d stored in a steamer trunk bearing her maiden initials, RL, painted in red on the side.

  You could track her life through these yarns. There were inexpensive baby yarns used to clothe my mother. A bundle of light-blue cashmere dumplings bought in London after the war was over and things were looking up. A paper bag of rustic, deep blue wool labeled in pencil scrawl, “Brooksville wool,” bought in my very town years ago when it had a yarn store. There are several cakes of lopi procured in Iceland during an early trip that marked a pivotal change in her knitting output, and after which she clothed me and my brothers in lopi sweaters. Finally, there were the annuals, several nameless, label-less, utterly extraordinary skeins of loosely twisted three-ply yarn in varying shades of browns and tans. I’m guessing it’s some kind of alpaca blend purchased on a trip with my grandfather to South America in the 1950s to see a solar eclipse, during which their airplane lost its engine while flying over the Amazon.

  So, too, can gardens tell stories and hold secrets that lay dormant for years, popping up when we least expect them. Some vigorous pruning to the family farmhouse rugosas this spring revealed not one but two peonies and a shocking red poppy, none of which I, my brothers, or even my mother remembers seeing before. They were likely planted by my great-grandmother more than seventy years ago. She died soon after I was born, but her garden still gives me gifts and surprises.

  As hard as it is to say, I should point out that a healthy stash requires frequent and prudent weeding. It can easily get overrun before we notice what’s happening—like the hearty white phlox that suddenly overtook my bright purple physostesia and, eventually, the entire garden path. One trip to Northampton, Massachusetts, to the back room of WEBS, where overstocks and closeouts are piled high on warehouse shelves, and suddenly my stash is off-kilter with far too much dark purple angora, two bags of which I was morally obligated to buy because each skein had been marked down from $18 to $4. (Good, I see you agree.)

  Weeding is not easy. How agonizing to yank a healthy seedling from its home and toss it on a compost pile to die a slow and painful death. I’m a bad weeder, and my garden suffers for it. As I try to find homes for the seedlings I cannot host anymore, so too do I try to find homes for the yarns that have overstayed their welcome. One person’s excess is another’s treasure, and we all take part in the game. We have stash swaps, we list our extra yarns online, the electronic version of setting them out in the proverbial wheelbarrows by the road, filled with daylilies marked “Free.” We’ll do anything rather than throw them away. Nature’s improbable (and unpredictable) survival rate encourages us to buy more plants than we need, knowing that some will not make it. The same goes for yarn. In order for us to have what we need, we must stock more than we can actually use.

  And then, when we least expect it, disaster strikes. We harvest a skein and notice the crumbly translucent shell of an emergent larva. Moths. Like aphids in a greenhouse, once the moths arrive, the prudent yarn gardener will spring into action. Each skein must be pulled out into the sunshine, aired, and inspected for damage.

  Yarn gardens can also be plagued by bigger pests, like my toddler niece who discovered scissors and yarn at the same time. She had the same effect on that Noro Kureyon as the groundhog I once watched rear up on its hind legs, grab a tall echinacea spike, and shove the entire bloom in his mouth. Crunch crunch crunch.

  I found his hole and guiltily flooded it with water, but still he came. I poured two bottles of cayenne pepper around the perimeter of his hole, but still he came. The only way to get rid of these pests is to bodily remove them—lifting the child from the yarn and placing her safely on the porch with a firm scolding, snaring the groundhog in a Havahart trap and taking him on an unexpected road trip.

  Plants are a responsibility. The temptation to overcommit is great. In the summer months, Clare and I go into town on Saturday morning to get our sweet rolls and visit the local garden store—conveniently at the same place. Each and every Saturday, we tell ourselves, “We’re not going to get more than we can plant.” We look at each other. “Right?” Yes, I nod. She nods. Off we go.

  An hour later, we’re pulling back into the driveway with a trunk full of plants. Just this little six-pack of petunias, I say. Just a few more basil plants, she mumbles, you know, for the pesto. I’m no better at yarn stores. Just these two balls of Kidsilk Haze for a last-minute scarf. See how pretty their colors look next to one another?

  After we bring them home, plants need to be put in the ground pretty quickly. Yarn, on the other hand, can remain in limbo almost indefinitely. The deeper it is shelved, the less visible its impatience. There it sits, silent, bitterly resentful that the best years of its life are being wasted in some dark, abandoned corner, or, worse yet, in a plastic tub. “I’m cashmere, for God’s sake,” it grumbles. “I deserve better than Rubbermaid.”

  Bulbs hold a particular poignancy. I remember E. B. White writing about his wife—the esteemed editor Katharine White—choosing and planting bulbs each fall. It was a yearly ritual, and neither of them could fathom not doing it, but when her health began to fail, he didn’t know if she would live to see the bulbs bloom. Yet she still dreamed, ordered, and planted, because that is what we do. We tuck bulbs away into the darkness for a long winter’s nap. We forget about them until spring, then we glance out at that bare patch of soil and wonder … did they survive? Will there be life? Like bulbs, we bury balls of yarn deep in our stashes, knowing that some day we’ll wander through our garden with an empty basket and pluck them from the soil. Better yet, maybe they’ll take on a life of their own, sprout little arms from which hands will grow, grab needles, and knit themselves when we aren’t looking.

  But they don’t, and therein lies the problem with yarn stashing that does not exist in gardening. Whereas plants take care of things with minimal interference from us, yarn needs us for each stitch of its growth. Yarn won’t knit itself.

  Sometimes it may take a while, like the dogwood in my backyard. It was a tiny stick of a seedling in my Aunt Judy’s Michigan yard when she dug it up, plopped it in a blueberry container, and gave it to me for good luck as Clare and I made our journey east to Maine from California so many years ago.

  How I nurtured that little seedling, first on an apartment windowsill, then in temporary soil, and finally planted, three years later, outside my kitchen window, where it grows now. For years I surrounded it with stakes and red tape to keep anyone from stepping on it or mowing over it accidentally. I went out and watered it, sat next to it, talked to it, for years and years—like the Alice Starmore sweater I pick up every few months and lovingly add a row or two to before tucking it away again. I began to notice the branches getting bigger. More branches grew, and one year a bird alighted on one. Then another. And last year—thirteen years to the month when Aunt Judy dug it from her garden—my little dogwood bloomed for the first time.

  Seeds lose their potency after a year or two and need to be thrown away, but yarn never does. It remains tucked away right where we put it, still holding every ounce of the allure and potential that inspired us to bring it home in the first place. We owe it to our yarn to do right by it. To acquire prudently, to tend lovingly. To weed and prune judiciously, and every day, to visit it and tell it just how much we love it.

  That Alice Starmore project still isn’t finished, but my dogwood tells me to be patient. “Love it like you loved me,” it says, “and one day it will be a sweater.” When that moment comes, each stitch of the journey will have been worth it.

  PUBLIC/PRIVATE

  I LOVE TO travel by train. On the Amtrak Downeaster from Portland to Boston, the tracks take you through all sorts of unexpected places. They run behind warehouses, salt marshes, and abandoned amusement parks, snaking through neighborhoods and an intimate backyard world of clotheslines, lonely bicycles, swimming pools, and tree
houses. If you’re lucky, you might even catch a child’s birthday party in progress. We all have our public side, the tidy exterior where everything’s properly brushed, ironed, waxed, polished, tucked in, and silky smooth with a bright white smile. And then we have our private side, usually concealed behind walls and gates. There we reveal a more vulnerable and intimate part of ourselves.

  In the beginning, everything is equal. Most of us start out knitting with garter stitch, working the same knit stitch over and over again to create a fabric that looks the same on all sides. The minute we advance from garter stitch to stockinette, our knitting takes on a strange new notion of “public” and “private.” What was once totally reversible fabric now has two distinctly different sides. Patterns refer to the smooth side that normally faces the world as the “right” side; the bumpy, inward-facing side is more ominously called the “wrong” side. We try to soften the blow by abbreviating these as RS and WS, but the words are still right there under the surface. What constitutes the public side and the private one? Sometimes it’s in the eye of the beholder. Witness reverse stockinette stitch, which is nothing more than stockinette turned inside out.

  I know some people whose private side is always exposed to the world. They’re a walking vulnerability, weeping at the drop of a hat, revealing far more than is appropriate for the person or occasion. “How are you?” is usually met with a litany of problems and complaints and awkwardly personal details. I’ve been there myself a few times. It’s as if we wandered out into the world with our sweaters on inside out by mistake.

  Then there are those whose smooth public-facing side is all you or I—or maybe even they—ever see. So orderly are their stitches, so tightly held in place is their spotless, wrinkle-less, pill-free perfection, I sometimes worry that one wrong glance, one false turn, one dropped stitch and their very fabric will unravel. That’s when neighbors find themselves suddenly on the evening news saying, “He seemed like such a nice guy.”

  Most of us learn how to knit first, so knitting becomes our native stitch, and purling, alas, feels awkward and foreign, like trying to write with your nondominant hand. By the time I was ready to purl and make legitimate stockinette fabric, my knitting grandma had forgotten how to do it, so she couldn’t teach me. I looked at pictures and figured it out for myself, but I was never entirely confident of my technique.

  By comparison, the knit rows were so comfortable. I loved seeing all those happy Vs, like a row of sunbathers, a chorus line midkick, knowing that I had nothing but a smooth, easy row ahead. But the purl side? With those big purly butts and the needle tips pointing menacingly inward toward my heart? No. I always dreaded my purl rows. They were something to be rushed through, a dark forest at night, in order to reach the comforting safety of the next knit row.

  Purling is the introvert stitch. It requires that you focus on you, looking inward instead of outward. The smooth face is gone and you see the lumps, the underbelly of your fabric, that noisy fluorescent kitchen of your favorite restaurant instead of the quiet dining room with its gently glowing candles.

  Technically speaking, I have no excuse for disliking purling. I hold the yarn in my left hand, which makes my purls speedy and graceful. The yarn is already where it needs to be; I just flick my finger and up it goes onto the needle. If I were to hold the yarn with my right hand, I’d have to cross two lanes of busy stitch traffic every time I wanted to get the yarn onto that needle.

  When we switch from purls to knits, our tension can change ever so slightly. If you’ve ever looked at a big stockinette garment and noticed it has almost a striped look to it, one row of thick stitches and one row of thin, that’s what you’re seeing—the difference in tension. I’ve heard people call this phenomenon “rowing out.”

  The only way to avoid rowing out, says knitting writer and humorist Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, is to knit in the lever style, which happens to be her technique. With the right needle tucked under your armpit for support, your left hand maneuvers all the stitches into place so that your right hand can flip over and back, over and back, forming each new loop like an efficient factory machine. Lever knitting remains the preferred style for production knitters who need to churn out garment after garment as quickly as possible.

  If I really concentrate, I can keep my stitches even on purl and knit rows alike. But where’s the fun in that? Why not relax and just knit the knit rows and purl the purl rows as your hands want to express them? The faint difference in row height appears to me like a pulse, the tick-tock of time, breathing out and breathing in—the essence of what it means to be a hand-knit fabric versus one made entirely by machine.

  Over the years, my relationship with the purl stitch has evolved. What was once an inevitable means to a stockinette end isn’t all that bad now. I rather like holding the yarn close to my heart. And I like how those purl ridges look, like hard-won battle scars, proof of the many rows I’ve knit in this life.

  These are the lines, cracks, and ridges we display with pride. But what about those we prefer to keep hidden. It used to be considered unspeakably rude to snoop around in people’s private lives without their permission. Flip over a teacup at someone’s house to see what brand of china it is, yank the label from your host’s sweater to see where he got it, sniff the milk in the creamer before pouring it, and you probably wouldn’t be invited back. Polite society required you to leave the cup unturned, admire the sweater from afar, pour the milk and say “thank you,” even if it’s past its expiration date and beginning to smell like cheese.

  But lately, social norms are changing. The Internet has given rise to a culture in which our private-facing side is our public-facing side. Perpetual self-revelation is not only appropriate, it’s expected. It’s getting hard to tell if we’re viewing someone’s smooth stockinette facade, a genuinely vulnerable bumpy backside, or a new kind of reverse-stockinette-stitch fabric that’s a highly edited, fictionalized version of our true selves. Each reveal is designed to give you the feeling of being intimate friends with someone who is, in fact, a complete stranger. You know how they say you can be in a crowded room and feel completely alone? Nowadays you don’t even need to leave home to feel alone among the crowd.

  And so we each become characters in our own movie, shoving clutter just out of the camera’s view before taking that artsy picture of our breakfast. But where does our true self go? Is it really there for the whole world to see, or has it gone deeper into hiding?

  I stare at the edge of that door and peer in, both curious and wary. Many parts of it please me—the camaraderie, the encouragement, the connections with all sorts of people I’d never otherwise meet. I like sharing beautiful or funny or poignant moments, offering an entertaining narrative for others and engaging in theirs.

  But it’s one thing to show a picture of the pretty heart someone drew in the foam of my cappuccino that morning, quite another to inform people that I’m headed to the drugstore or getting my annual gynecological exam. No, that degree of stitchery does not a prettier fabric make. Which is why—for now, anyway—I’ll take my stockinette straight up with an old-school private side, thank you very much.

  STITCH TRAFFIC

  AT SOME POINT in my father’s childhood, the city planners of Battle Creek, Michigan, embarked upon an ambitious road project designed to fix the town’s growing traffic problems. After months of planning, the day arrived for the new changes to take effect. With much fanfare, road crews spread throughout the city ripping up old signs, planting new ones, and rerouting traffic in ways that guaranteed greater efficiency and speed. Everyone was excited.

  Everyone, that is, except for the man who left work promptly at 5 p.m., as usual, only to discover there was no way for him to get home. The new traffic patterns had made it technically impossible for him to get back onto his street. Around and around he drove until finally he gave up, parked on a side street, and walked the rest of the way home.

  This is one of my father’s favorite stories. It usually comes to min
d when I’m driving and stuck in my own maze of uncooperative one-way streets. But I also think about it when I start a new stitch pattern. They’re mostly pretty straightforward. A sea of stockinette. Easy ribbing, the straight and endless roads that cross the Australian Outback.

  But some patterns do wild things. When you move those stacked stitches around, split them up and swap them over and under one another, force sudden merges and yields, driving becomes much more interesting. Your roads sprout new lanes, fork off in different directions, pass through busy rotaries. They can be detoured by giant bobble boulders, blasted with yarn-over potholes, or forced into sudden dead ends.

  Some of the most beautiful and intricate knitted city planning comes in the form of cables and traveling stitches. They produce smooth streets that slither back and forth, soaring and diving across the fabric surface. Cables are created by intentionally reversing the chronological order of stitches, like skipping ahead in a novel. Instead of working what’s next on the needles, you put those stitches aside and work the ones that follow—only then coming back to complete the stitches you left behind.

  Cables are the knitter’s version of highway overpasses and tunnels guiding lanes of stitches on their merry way. Usually they’re worked in even pairs—one over one, two over two—for symmetry, but you can work as many or as few stitches in a cable as your imagination permits. The more stitches you overlap, the bigger the cable will be, the higher its overpass will need to be, and the deeper its tunnels must dive. Wide cables are like L.A. freeways, their beautiful maze of overpasses and off-ramps leading every stitch home. Occasionally traffic will snarl from a jackknifed big-rig, a mis-twisted cable. You’ll send in a wrecker to unravel the whole thing—or maybe use the Jaws of Life to cut an outside strand and reknit your way back in.