The Yarn Whisperer (4 page)

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 has 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.

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.

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.”