The Yarn Whisperer (9 page)

The outfit was promptly wrapped and shipped to Jeanne, who offered suitably enthusiastic praise. She slipped Nadiya into it for a picture, and I suspect that was the only time she ever wore it. That's okay. Only you and I know what
really
went into that outfit, and why I have not knit another one since.

The final nail in Lord Kitchener's coffin came several years later. I was at the Interweave offices in Loveland, Colorado, putting the finishing touches on a magazine I'd been hired to edit.
(I only edited one issue, which is all I'll say about how well
that
went.) Across the room from me sat Ann Budd, formerly managing editor of
Interweave Knits
magazine, creator of several
Knitter's Handy Book of
… books, knitwear designer, and one of my personal heroes.

She was rushing to finish a sock for a photo shoot that afternoon, and I apologized for distracting her (which I was). “Oh no, I'm almost done,” she said. “I just have to finish the toe.”

I gave an agonized groan, knowing just how hard the last few hundred feet of Mt. Everest can be.

“Oh, toes are eeeeeasy,” she said.

I groaned again, and this time her head popped, groundhog-style, over her cubicle wall.

A minute later she was by my side, needles and yarn in hand, showing me how Kitchener was done—on a real sock that was just hours away from being immortalized on the glossy pages of a book. More than that, she explained the
why
of Kitchener. She showed me how all that convoluted threading nonsense boils down to a simple concept. You thread each stitch first in the opposite direction of how you'd go into it, and then you come back and thread it in the same direction as you'd go into it—at which point it's safe to drop off the needle. Once you get that idea, the rest falls into place.

Just imagine Mario Andretti showing you how to down-shift on a curve, or Julia Child in your kitchen demonstrating the proper technique for flipping an omelet. When a hero teaches you how to do something you've struggled with for a long time, and you really
get
it, you feel fantastic.

Ever since, I've embraced every opportunity to use Kitchener for toes or anything else that requires the same level of seamless connectivity. Every time I work it, I feel clever and strong. Kitchener serves as my gentle reminder not to give up on things quite so easily. I used up far more energy finding ways to avoid this stitch than I did finally facing it head-on. Kitchener has shown me that when life unravels you, when things don't work out quite right, there's usually a good stitch waiting to put you back together again.

BRIOCHE

I LOVE TO BAKE.
Depending on the day, I might even love it more than knitting.
Feeding and clothing people go hand in hand, two primal human needs that were once the purview of families and communities. Today, faraway factories and machines spit out thousands of loaves of bread and up to a million articles of clothing in a single week. Those of us who still choose to make these things by hand? We've been relegated to the “artisanal” domain, creating now from choice rather than need.

Maybe it's the dough that attracts me to baking, as yarn attracts me to knitting. We manipulate both raw materials—we wrap, twist, pull, tug, tap, fold, and stir—to form something greater than the sum of its parts. Considering how symbolically similar yarn and dough are, I find it surprising that only one knitted stitch has been named after a baked good: the brioche.

Brioche is a sweet, buttery, yeasted dough that's tinted gold from eggs. It is perhaps the single most tempting dough to eat raw, its complex sweet and savory flavors balanced by a satisfying caramel-like chew. Yet when baked, it puffs up, up, up into an airy crumb of a pastry.

The traditional brioche is baked in a small round pan, slightly deeper and more angled than that of a cupcake. It emerges golden brown with its center puffed up like a giant nipple. But the dough also makes a bread that, when sliced, dredged in egg, fried crisp, and then slathered in maple syrup, has been known to make even the most discerning adults moan with pleasure.

Brioche
stitch,
on the other hand, is based on a trio of increases, slipped stitches, and decreases. Combined and repeated at regular intervals, they form both the yeast and the kneading action for your fibery dough. The resulting fabric is dense yet springy, with deep furrows that have a look of ribbed corrugation. No nipples to be found.

I think everything should be named after a baked good. People were always calling me Éclair when I was growing up. I know a parakeet in Oakland named Baguette. And if I had a child, no matter if it were a boy or a girl, I'd be sorely tempted to name it Croissant.

The croissant is the perfect knitted pastry. It is a product of slow, steady patience—and yet undeniable simplicity—involving nothing more than flour, yeast, sugar, salt, butter, and milk. These ingredients are the culinary equivalent of hearty wool fibers, perfectly willing to be all sorts of things.

As in knitting, the magic of croissants lies in the process, in what your hands
do
with the dough. After an initial mixing, kneading, and resting—the casting-on of your materials—you add the magic amalgamating ingredient: butter.

Then, it's simply a matter of rolling, folding, and chilling. You roll, fold, and chill again. The chilling and resting are perhaps the most essential parts of the process. Dough needs time to rest. Let those buttery stitches settle into their new fabric, perhaps stockinette?

A few years ago, Clare and I were stuck at home for Christmas, just the two of us in our farmhouse on the hill, while everybody else lounged by the pool with my mother in Arizona. I decided I needed a capital-P Project, something big that would keep me from feeling lonely. I looked through Julia Child's
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
to find the longest, most involved recipe—and the answer was croissants.

Her masterful recipe documents the process better than any other I've seen since. It's written clearly, helpfully, and without a hint of intimidation. I followed it, step by step, and on the third day we feasted on the most flaky, succulent, and flavorful croissants I've ever had—up there with the ones I consumed fresh daily when I lived in France. So astonished and smitten was I that I forgot to feel gloomy about being away from family over the holidays. If anything, we were both happy not to have to share our bounty with anyone else.

If the croissant is your ideal stockinette, the mille-feuille—with its “thousand” alternating layers of flaky pastry and rich cream filling—would have to be stockinette into which you've
added alternating rows of frothy high-calorie cashmere, or perhaps a brushed mohair that wafts from a silky core.

Cupcakes and muffins would be the honest bobble, puffing proudly and invitingly from the fabric surface. Feather and fan is the freshly baked cannoli, its slender middle tube forming a tunnel through which the sweet mascarpone filling passes before billowing out from each end.

Garter stitch, rest its soul, would be the oft-misunderstood whole-grain bread. It's packed with body and bounce, with robust nutrition and substance. Yet it often plays second fiddle to its nemesis, the baguette. How she taunts with her perpetually skinny, perfectly tanned form. The baguette is the homecoming queen, the head of the cheerleading squad, and if you were to knit her, she'd have to be the slender, perky I-cord.

The madeleine,
my
madeleine anyway, is knitting itself. When Proust dipped one of these simple bite-sized, shell-shaped cakes in tea, the taste triggered a flood of childhood memories. It's called “involuntary memory” when a seemingly unrelated sensory experience triggers a memory. For me, a mere glance at yarn and needles—whether in our hands or someone else's—can unleash powerful recollections.

Sometimes when I'm knitting, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a window. The mirror image of my hands alters them just enough so that they don't appear to be mine. Clear as day, they are my grandma's hands. Just one brief look, and I'm transported to a whole other dimension between past and present, a never-never land of in between.

I'm watching my grandma expertly maneuver her needle
tips and yarn in graceful, elegant arcs. I'm so young that I may not even know how to verbalize what I'm seeing, but the impression is right there, infused into my cells.

From there, I fast-forward. I'm sitting in the backseat of the car, my grandma by my side. Her hands are folded over her small brown leather purse. They're beautiful hands, small and shapely, and they do not stand still. They are in a constant state of motion, thumbs quickly orbiting one another, fingertips fidgeting, then both sets of fingers rubbing the bag's frayed leather handles. She'd stopped knitting, her mind having forgotten how—but her hands couldn't stop moving.

As time passed, she began to narrate everything she saw around her in a whispered mumble. We strained to listen, curious what her world looked like. Usually she was simply trying to remind herself what everything was. “That's the youngest boy, standing by the window …”

The narration grew more random, “Get the … yes, yes … that goes there … Good, good …” until we could not see her world at all.

My brothers and I decided that she must have engaged in top-secret government plots when we weren't around. “We bomb the embassy at midnight,” she'd mumble into a secret microphone in her collar before changing quickly back to jibber-jabber when we returned to the room.

Other people have knitting memory recalls, too. “I haven't seen someone do that in ages,” a stranger will smile, eyes already getting that faraway look. “My mother used to …” or “My grandmother always made us …” or “I used to do that.” I'm
especially fond of the men who tell me
their
knitting stories, relieved to have found a confidante who understands.

I have another memory, too: that of being a child lured by those guilty-pleasure, plastic-wrapped confections at the convenience store, products that purists might not even deign to call “pastries.” I'm talking about the Little Debbie, the Ding Dong, or the ever-perky Hostess Sno Ball filled with cream, coated in marshmallow, and then rolled in bright pink coconut flakes. All were off-limits. We gazed at them longingly, assuming they tasted far better than they actually do (which I didn't discover until recently).

These blasphemous “baked” goods are the edible versions of those easy, bulky knits that deliver swift instant gratification, the sugar-high of the bind-off, while lacking any enduring nutritional value. I doubt Elizabeth Zimmermann would have admitted to knitting a “Fun Fur” scarf … but then again, who knows what pleasures she snuck secretly when nobody else was looking?

CASTING ON

BEGINNINGS ARE BEAUTIFUL
things. They're the tank full of gas and the open road, a brand new notebook and a freshly filled pen.
Reality hasn't had time to intrude. All you see is the vast and exciting opportunity that lies ahead.

In my knitting, I'm a starter. I go great guns at the beginning, sprinting several laps before suddenly losing my steam. It's the ongoing maintenance that I struggle with, like weeding the garden and keeping my desk clean.

Ours is a rather quiet start. While the painter stares at his blank canvas and the baker at a freshly wiped marble slab, a knitter's beginning involves an empty pair of needles and a strand of yarn. Our mission is to transform that inanimate strand of material into a luxurious three-dimensional object.

The first note in knitting—at least the simplest,
most common kind—is made with just our fingers as we wrap, pull, and tug the yarn into a slipknot. That first slipknot is the yeast of our knitted fabric, the mother stitch from which all future stitches are born. Without it, our yarn remains mute and inanimate.

Not all fabric works like this. Woven material has the benefit of two parts, the warp and the weft. Each runs perpendicular to the other. The entire length of warp is measured and tied to the loom long before the weft ever snakes its way in. Their eventual intersection locks the fabric into place, creating a firm, fluid, durable material.