The Yarn Whisperer (5 page)

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.

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.