Free-Range Knitter

Introduction

I have been in the definitely odd and sometimes enviable position of having been on a knitting book tour (sometimes I call it a yarn crawl) for more or less the last two years. Obviously, I'm not on tour every minute of every day, but I do spend a completely unreasonable amount of time wandering from city to city all over North America talking to knitters. Since I'm not a teacher, just a knitting philosopher of sorts, I don't necessarily have a reason for being there. I have no agenda, I don't promote one sort of knitting or some particular patterns, I don't sell yarn. I'm just there to sign humor books about knitting, meet knitters, drink beer with them, observe them in their natural habitat (the local yarn shop), scrutinize them as they vacation at fiber festivals and conferences, and talk to them as I discover them in the wild.

Book tours (even knitting book tours) move really fast. So fast that a typical day involves getting up at an ungodly hour, going to the airport of whatever city I'm in, knitting while I wait to be flown to another city, knitting while I fly to another city, knitting on the way to the hotel, unpacking and showering in the hotel, knitting in the cab on the way to the speaking engagement (about knitting, and usually in a yarn shop), meeting all the knitters, and then sleeping (briefly) before I do it again in another city the next day. If you wanted to meet as many knitters as possible there would be no better way to do it, though I'm sure you can imagine, what city you are in starts to be irrelevant after a couple of days, enough so that you forget to find out where you are. Doing the same thing every day while being constantly surrounded by only yarn, knitters, and knitting for days on end gives me an odd perspective. Since I often have lost track of what city (state or province) I am in, it removes the idea that geography matters and leaves me with the odd impression that I am traveling a world where only knitting matters, all the people are knitters, and all the stores sell yarn.

Following the logic here, visiting more than fifty yarn stores and guilds a year means that I meet a lot of knitters, I get a lot of material about knitting, I see knitters without the boundaries of politics and geography (mostly because I am completely freaking lost) . . . and I buy a lot of yarn, which is another problem and another story for another day, but for the record, totally not my fault. I'm only human. (Who among you can throw the first stone? Even if you only fell down and bought yarn at half of the yarn stores . . . wouldn't you still have a really big problem?) This constant exposure to yarn, patterns, needles, and yarn shops of all kinds lends another set of insights about our stuff and what we do with it.

I have then, as a passionate knitter, a knitting book writer, a knitting traveler, and a compatriot of the knitting masses, spent a lot of time thinking about knitting and knitters. I definitely think about knitting and knitters more than most people for sure, which I guess isn't that hard, since I have recently confirmed an ugly truth that explains a great deal. Most people aren't thinking about knitting or knitters–at all. This book then, is what I think knitters are thinking. Some of these stories are true. Some are mostly true. Some have names changed to protect the innocent, and in some cases, names have been written down perfectly to glorify the clever. This book contains stories of knitting triumph and failure, knitting success and defeat, and lessons missed and lessons learned. This book is about the things we knitters have in common no matter where we live, whom we love, or what we are knitting. This book is what I'm using to prove to my family that I may be completely out of my mind with this knitting thing . . . but I have a lot of friends just like me. This book is about yarn. This book is about needles. This book is about the truth about the way things are.

This book, though it appears to be about knitting, is actually about knitters.

Off the List

A list of people who are not getting a knitted gift from me and the reasons why. (I know that's sort of a long title, but I think it is justified. Something must be done.)

My Aunt Christine, removed from the list for telling me that the scarf that I knit her looked "almost as good" as the one that my cousin got her from Wal-Mart. It was all I could do to contain myself. Seriously. What sort of world are we living in where one woman could spend hours and hours and hours of her time making something by hand for another human, essentially creating something out of hours of her own life, and someone could think that it's OK to compare the result of those hours of human effort to a stinking machine-knit commercial thing purchased from an uberconglomerate with no soul? Seriously. No knits for you.
My husband Joe, for not trimming his toenails to a length that I feel is safe or appropriate for hand-knit socks. I am tired of the argument that the holes that develop right over his big toenails are a coincidence or a consequence of his shoes. It happens in boots, it happens in shoes, it happens in sneakers, and it happens when he is shoeless. Dude, it is your toenails. Kindly cut them to a length I consider secure for hand-knit socks or I'm pulling your supply. (Ok. I'm not pulling the supply. I am thinking about being a little slow with the next pair though. Better watch your step.)
My friend Ken, for telling me that the last pair of socks I knit him was "too purple" and perhaps "not manly" or "not for real men." The last time I checked, my notorious friend, you were lucky to be getting hand-knit socks at all and what you should be feeling, even, my good buddy, if your socks are pink and frilly with big honking ruffles over the heels is nothing but gratefulness that I have been so good as to knit you a pair. Too purple indeed. Real men suck it up. The next lace pair I make are going to be in your size.
That lady on the bus who explained to her friend that knitting was simple and fast and didn't take hardly a minute. I got nothing against you, lady, but there's no way I'm ever knitting you something if you think that all this stuff falls off me while I'm walking. No way.
My ex-boyfriend Stewart from the eleventh grade. He knows why.
The baby next door who doubled his birth weight in forty-five days and had the audacity to outgrow the sweater I made him having only worn it once. (He is not off the list permanently . . . just until he stops growing faster than I can knit or his parents stop feeding him so well.)
My cat, since I have discovered that it is important to my happiness that I do not knit for beings that do not say thank you, may not use what you knit at all, and, in fact, may not even admit that the beautifully knitted gift is in the room with them. Now that I think about it, there's a cousin I'm taking off the list for the same reasons.
Anyone, ever, who has, when I asked them if they would like a hand-knit, replied with "Ummm . . ."
Anyone with a foot size greater than men's 13, or a chest (of either gender) that measures greater than 52 inches. I want to be able to continue to like you when I'm done knitting for you and not hold you in contempt for your size and its attendant effect on my sanity (or lack thereof). Would you like a scarf?
Margaret, or so her name tag read, an employee of my local grocery store who, noticing me knitting as I stood in the exceedingly long line for the checkout, said to the employee she was walking with, "Wow. How lame does your life have to get before you're reduced to knitting at the grocery store?" She does not respect the knit-force, and knits will not be bestowed upon her. I hope she's chilly.

Dear Designer #2

Dear Designer:

How are you? I am very well, though somewhat disappointed that I haven't heard from you about that brief letter that I sent addressing what I felt were the somewhat inadequate instructions regarding the neck decreases on your most recent pattern. I know that I was probably ever so slightly over the line when I claimed that you were not knitting with all of your needles, and I'm very sorry for any insinuation I may have made about your academic record in mathematics, but I still stand by my conviction that it would take you less time to write clear instructions than it would for me to reknit a neckline, but you would know better than me.

I'm writing to you today because although I have tried to forget that this happened between us, I can't let go. I do not fancy myself your conscience, dear designer, but when I find examples of your poor behavior I feel that I must speak up. You have been elevated to the status of a role model in the knitting community, and your designs are everywhere waiting to assault delight and enlighten knitters worldwide, and I feel that in exchange for this honor, you have a certain responsibility to us, the humble knitters gathered round your feet. I feel that even though you never answer any of these letters, you must bind each of them to your heart and deeply contemplate all that I write to you.

It is because we have this close (albeit somewhat one-sided) relationship that I was among the many knitters gathered around you at the bookstore where you gave a talk last week, and I was listening carefully to everything you had to say about your work and your calling, and it just so happened that I was sitting right next to the girl who asked you about the difficulties she had encountered with one of your fanciest color-work sweaters. Her problems, not to put to fine a point on it, involved having so many different colors operating in one row that the number of yarns she had to carry along the rear of her work resembled a rope that would have been entirely at home along the bow of a transatlantic ship. As I hope you recall, she had asked you for some sort of direction about how she should accomplish this task. Nay, dear designer, she had asked what you, the matron of all knitters, the lighthouse by which we guide our yarny journeys, she had asked how you yourself managed carrying the seven (or was it eight?) strands of yarn that needed to be transported along that section of Fair Isle knitting.

I leaned forward then, for as you may recall from my fourteen-page letter of last October, I had tried to knit that sweater, and it was that exact row that she was talking about that had resulted in the incident that I sent you all of the full-color photos of. Since your answer to me had certainly been lost in the mail, I waited to hear what you would say. How had you handled it?

Imagine my shock then, imagine how completely stupefied I was when you looked this woman in the eye, this woman who had (as we all do, I am sure you are aware) put all of her knitterly time and faith (as well as a fair bit of her yarn money–not that we think of the insignificance of mere cash when we are knitting one of your patterns) into working this sweater pattern of yours and supporting your career, and you told her (and this is an exact quote, since this moment is burned into my memory forever) that you "had heard the test knitter say there were some real challenges" but that you had "never actually knit that pattern."

Never knit it? Never? You turned that row with the eight colors (because it was eight, you lunatic, I just went and looked) loose on the world without any sort of warning at all? Further to that, you (without having strangled six of your ten fingers trying to follow your chart) had the audacity to have the caption beneath the photo read, "This charming summer pop-over, just bursting with the colors of the season, works up quickly thanks to sport weight yarn and flirty cap sleeves."

Flirty cap sleeves? Works up quickly? Your test knitter told you that there were "some challenges." (She must be a saint among women; would you mind sharing her address? I'd like to send her a ~~sympathy card~~ box of chocolates.) You knew full well that you had eight colors to a row in your "flirty cap sleeves" and you still felt that it was honorable to ~~inflict this~~ share this with the world without having tried to knit it yourself?

Now, I am not a naïve woman, my dearest designer, and deep in the seat of my intellect (which surely pales to your own) I was aware that you could not be knitting each and every one of these patterns. I know that it is impossible for designers to make a full-time living out of creating knitwear if they knit each and every masterpiece themselves. Knitting is too slow for any knitter, even a wonder such as you, to produce enough patterns in one year that they wouldn't have to moonlight as a waitress at a local diner for the privilege. That part of me should not have been surprised. The rest of me sure was though, as I sat there in that audience realizing not ony could you not give this woman, this fellow knitter, any help at all, but you also could not offer any real sympathy, not even a shred. Suddenly, I was so shocked that I could scarcely breathe and the world swirled blackly around me.

When I regained consciousness (having thankfully been caught by a loop of my circular needle so as not to fall into the aisle; can you imagine how mortified I would have been if I had disrupted your talk with the sound of my body hitting the floor?), I had clarity of thought. As I tried to explain it to you right then (seriously, does a knitwear designer need "security forces"?), it is not that you didn't knit these things that stunned me. It was not lying awake wondering if you could knit these at all that perplexed me. It was the realization that you and I are not in the same boat after all, that when I knit your patterns it doesn't link my work to yours in a beautiful chain of continuous art. We don't share high moments and low points together; we are not having a shared experience in the slightest. I can no longer take solace in the idea that if it was possible for you, it must be possible for me.

As my fellow knitters and I await the latest inspired manipulation of wool and genius to fall from your pen and in our general direction . . . perhaps you could do us the humble and profound honor of at least knitting a freaking swatch of the damned thing before you inflict it upon us.

It is only fair, dear designer, because if we do not stand together as knitters then we do not stand at all. (Or sit, actually, because it is sort of less comfortable to knit standing up, but you know what I mean.)

Thank you.

Your humble servant,
Stephanie

My Daughters Knit

The lady on the phone seems to have no idea that she has said something completely insane, so I wonder if I heard her right. "Can you repeat that?" I ask, trying to keep the fear out of my voice and to ignore the sound of blood rushing rapidly out of my head, which seems to be interfering with my hearing.

"I'd like you to teach a knitting class at my toy store," she repeats, "there will be about eight kids between five and nine years old. Can you do it?"

Now, that's what I thought she said, and she doesn't seem to think that it's fundamentally crazy. So for reasons that I still can't explain and are completely against my better judgment, I agree.

The minute I hang up the phone I regret the decision, which was not really a decision but a crappy defense against a precise surgical strike. I am one of those people who will agree to just about anything if you ask me directly, and I have a feeling that this woman knew it. Not only do I know that I meant to say no when I actually said yes, I also know that this toy shop owner has burned through three decent upstanding knitting teachers before me, including a friend of mine who is such a good teacher that it's likely that she could teach your cat to not just use the toilet, but to use toilet paper, wash her paws and flush afterward. Knowing this, I should have said no.

I imagined what it would be like to teach knitting to that many kids. In truth, I wondered a whole bunch of things, and since I had never taught even one kid to knit, I wondered if my imaginings of total chaos were going to be that far off the mark. I phoned a friend and told her what I had agreed to do, and hung up when she still hadn't stopped giggling helplessly through an entire cup of coffee. This cemented my belief that if I escaped from this experience (Eight kids? In one room?) without being tied to a chair with my own yarn and needles, I was going to think I had done pretty well.

I think that this toy store owner, the one who had roped me into this, had gathered some empirical evidence and decided I was a good mark because all my children knit. (I also think she was running out of knitting teachers who were not wise to her scheme, but I digress.) On the surface, I know that would make it seem like I was a good person to teach kids to knit. After all, I managed to produce three knitters out of three ordinary children . . . but the truth is, I didn't teach my kids to knit. Nobody did, they were the product of a complicated multiyear knitting learning experiment.

In the 1980s the whole language approach to learning to read became popular. In essence, proponents of whole language believed (and I am oversimplifying here) that you didn't need to teach kids to read at all. They believed that reading and writing would occur naturally in children when they were ready, simply by involving them adequately with language. Reading to them, showing them writing and generating learning opportunities from a rich literate world around them was supposed to grow readers and writers out of kids, and for the most part those proponents were right. Exposed to enough language sources, kids did learn to read and write . . . although opting out of traditional language rules meant they were weaker in some areas than in others. Whole language kids tend to be crappy spellers, for instance.

If immersing your kids in language could make them readers, then, I wondered, what would happen if you immersed your kids in knitting? Would they learn? Would they accept it as "something mom did" or would they think it was something everyone did and therefore take it up themselves? Would they come to accept that knitting was just what people did while they watched TV and feel empty and sort of itchy if they had come of knitting age and their hands weren't busy? I devised a plan. Step one was to have some kids. That was pretty easy. I was able to make them from materials found around the home, although it did take some time. Once I had procured the children, I began my endeavor, immersing them in knitting during their formative years.

I knit without cease during this crucial time. I knit them blankets while I was pregnant. I knit while I was in labor. (Useful tip: It is time to call the midwife if you can no longer knit two together without arsing it up.) I knit while they lay nursing on my lap; I knit while they were in the bath. I knit in the park; I knit at playgroups. I knit while they sat on my lap and told me stories and I knit through temper tantrums (theirs and mine). I even sacrificed fun and empowering experiences like vacuuming and scrubbing the toilet to free up more knitting time. In as much as it was possible, I only put down the knitting to administer first aid and hugs, as well as to read to them. (It was insurance for that other whole language thing. I didn't want to raise a whack of illiterate knitters, even if they were very good knitters. If nothing else, they would need communication skills to search for patterns and yarn on the Internet.)

I swathed my children in knitwear. (Luckily, we are Canadian. This program would have been a little harder to pull off–as well as bordering on cruel–if we had lived in Mexico City.) I made them hats and mittens; they wore wool soakers over their cloth diapers. I wrapped them in woolen blankets and knit cotton sun hats (that was my concession to our brief summer). I, in the immortal words of Elizabeth Zimmermann, "immunized them" against the itchiness of wool by starting with the softest buttery baby yarns and working up to coarser Aran wool. I strategically placed significant knitting books and patterns around the house and I made sure they understood the importance of handmade things . . . not just knitted, but crafted in any way. To help them understand the value of human time and effort, I implemented "Find Your Own Food Fridays" as soon as they were old enough to make a cheese sandwich. (Feel free to take any of these ideas for your very own. We parents have to stick together.) I put small but beautiful baskets of yarn and needles in their rooms in case they were inspired. I let them use yarn for anything they wanted. Sure, the other moms thought I was odd. Sure, they thought I was a slacker with a messy house who took her kids to the park for hours just so she could sit and knit . . . but they didn't understand the grand plan. They didn't know about the experiment. (They were still finding value in housework. I had evolved.)

I knit. I made more babies (three in total) at respectable intervals . . . and I waited, and I waited.

Now, as with all gradual processes, there was not a eureka moment. I do not recall the moment that any of them learned to knit . . . in fact, there is a very good chance I wasn't present at the time. One morning, when my eldest daughter was about five, she asked me for some wool. I supplied it (you cannot withhold the building blocks of a wooly education) and inquired about what she was going to do with it. "Knit another dolly blanket," she replied. "I used up my bedroom wool." And off she went. I staggered. I was agog. Another dolly blanket? Another?

I followed the miss into her room and sure enough, there was a piece of knitting. It was not a good piece of knitting; I can't say that. I know that this would be just the most perfect story ever if the blanket she had knit was even and beautiful, but it wasn't. It was lumpy. It had stitches that came and went. It appeared that she had cast on by simply winding her yarn around the needle (turns out that works, by the way), and she had cast off by simply pulling the yarn through the stitches at the top in a straight line. None of this, of course, was the point at all. She had knit. This first, charming, clever girl of mine, only five years old and with no help from anyone . . . had knit.

It was a triumphant moment for me. Truly great. I had created a knitter, and an intuitive and clever one at that. It was as though, in that moment, I had reached some sort of a zenith, as a mother and as a knitter, and I was genuinely happy. (It took awhile before it hit me that making a bunch of people who wanted my yarn was not going to be a good move for me . . . but I digress again.)

Years went by and my other two children spontaneously learned to knit as well. All three of my children suddenly became knitters around the same time that they learned to read. While this sounds remarkable, that children could learn something without being taught, remember that this is how children learn almost everything. Talking, singing, walking, and running—children learn these things, mostly, even if their parents are raving incompetents. (I don't know about other mothers, but I find that very reassuring.)

My children did, after careful, direct exposure, learn to knit. They learned it the way that most of us have a pretty good idea of how to drive before we sit down at the wheel. They learned it the way that we know what a waltz looks like, even if ours is sloppy. They learned it because they had lived it, and they just knew how. It was the way the children of fishermen know (mostly) how to fish. It was the way that farmers' children know how to plant. It was just in them, somehow, through the process of osmosis. They were smart, resourceful children and after all, knitting is not exactly rocket science. There are only two stitches, knit and purl, only two movements to learn to make. All of my kids had names they could write by then, and all of them were longer than two letters. If they had the coordination to write their names, the intelligence to read, and the patience to bug me to give them a cookie for twenty minutes straight . . . why was I surprised they could knit?

I thought then about what my kids had learned and how easily they had learned it. I thought about the natural gifts of human beings: dexterity, cleverness, being good with code and symbols. I thought about how hard it is for children to learn even to write their name and I began to think that maybe I had been wrong about this knitting class. That maybe all I needed was to go down there and facilitate knitting, not ever really teach them to knit, you know? Just . . . lead them to it and watch the magic happen. Maybe I needed a little faith in these children, in knitting and in myself. I gathered up some yarn and needles, I straightened myself out, threw back my hair and damn it, I went down to the toy store. What kind of a woman is afraid to teach some little kids to knit?

A smart one. That's what sort, let me tell you. Three hours later I was home with a cold compress on my head, shattered nerves, lessons learned and an agreement between the toy store owner and myself that perhaps I was not cut out for this work . . . at all. Nothing about my experiment with my kids had prepared me for the experience of trying to teach knitting to a bunch of kids who have not been raised since birth to be ready for it. Here is what I learned in my brief journey as a children's knitting teacher:

Knitting is easy.
Knitting is hard. (I know it seems contrary to have learned those two things at the same time, but it's all about who is doing what when. I can promise you that the kid who finds it easy will inevitably be seated beside the kid who finds it hard, just to guarantee a little bonus conflict. There's only so much an eight-year-old who is trying to knit can take from the cocky seven-year-old next to him . . . purling away.)
I used the knitting poem "In through the front door, dance around the back, down through the window and off jumps Jack" and it made all the difference in the world to help the kids remember the steps in a knit stitch.
While that poem (and others like it) really does help kids remember how to maneuver a stitch, it leads to hard-hitting nonknitting questions like, "Who is Jack?," "Where does he live?," "Is it the same Jack as the beanstalk?," and, in the case of one charming little girl who leaned forward when I got to the end of the poem and excitedly exclaimed, "What happened to Jack after that?!"
Kids get yarn for free. I don't know why this is, but it seems to be something I can't duplicate in my own life. It may be because they are cute, or may be because they are tricky (or may be because they use their cuteness to trick you), but if you are six years old someone will give you all the yarn you want. (It may also be because fellow knitters see the opportunity to bring a child over to the dark side and if all it takes is a couple of balls of yarn, then that's a small price to pay for the creation of a full-blown lifelong knitter.)
A seven-year-old boy in a class with his nine-year-old sister will find it impossible to resist the urge to poke her with a knitting needle. She will likely retaliate by snatching his remaining needle out of his knitting and dropping all of his stitches. It is probable that he (having been infuriated and provoked by knitting insult) will respond by throwing the ball of yarn attached to the knitting of the child next to him at his sister, thus invoking the wrath of his wee harpy neighbor . . . and in mere moments the whole knitting class will degenerate into a some kind of a scene that makes Lord of the Flies look like a tea party for princesses. Separate siblings. Stay on your toes. Put down revolts swiftly and with surety. Don't ask me how I know. I'm still not over it.
Consider plastic vs. metal needles. (See number six above and consider that the metal needles can conduct electricity. You know . . . in a worst-case scenario.)
If children knit it themselves, no matter how terrible the yarn is, they will never, ever think it is scratchy.
If your child knits it for you, it will be extra warm.
I still believe every child is capable of knitting. I, however, may only be capable of teaching them one at a time, and only in my natural habitat. Please don't make me go back there.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — Contact: Kathy Hilliard, (800) 851-8923, khilliard@amuniversal.com