Things I Learned From Knitting (15 page)

Knitting is still trying to teach me …

THAT JUST BECAUSE IT'S DEEPLY

DISCOUNTED OR ON SALE
,

IT ISN'T AUTOMATICALLY GOOD YARN.

I THINK THAT WE, AS KNITTERS
, often diminish our skills. You make something beautiful, you sweat, you curse, you use a calculator and maim reams of graph paper, you rip back, you redo, you cultivate a skill … you hang tough and churn out something remarkable, something that's the result of hours and hours of your life and effort, and you feel pretty darned proud of yourself. Then someone walks up and says, “Wow! Did you make that? That's fantastic” or maybe “You're very talented,” and then something comes over us and many of us knitters will turn, look the person dead in the eye and say, “No, no. It was easy.”

Knitters so often complain that we aren't taken seriously as artisans and that knitting remains undervalued. This desire to make everything we do seem easy, our discomfort with the recognition
of our talents, is not the way other people behave about their skills. Do lawyers say, “It was nothing”? Nope. They say, “That's $250 per hour. It took me a long time to learn how to do this.” Artists don't say, “It was easy.” They tell you how they learned to do what they do, or that this painting or sculpture is the result of a lifetime of experience and knowledge, and then because they have demonstrated respect for their efforts, so do we.

Knitting is a skill. The stuff we make is a fine reflection of the time we put into developing our skills. From now on, I am going to try to hold myself to a higher standard. I'm going to acknowledge that knitting is hard when it is. I'm not going to pretend a fancy lace shawl of my own fashioning just fell off my needles the way sweat falls off wrestlers and then go blushing myself off demurely into a corner.

The next time someone comes up to me and tells me my knitting is awesome, I'm going to look them in the eye and tell them the truth. When they say, “That's really beautiful” I'm going to take a deep breath, and I'm going to say, “Thank you. It was a challenge, but I did it.”

RECENTLY, I BOUGHT YARN
. I preceded this rather unremarkable event by checking my bank account, thinking over what I could afford to spend. I then forked over the cash. Then I read something from the World Bank that shook me up pretty badly. The population of the world at the time of this writing is apparently about 6.7 billion. According to the World Bank, 3 billion of those people are living on less than $2 a day. Of these, 1.3 billion are making a go of it on less than $1 per day. These facts stayed with me as I squirreled my new yarn away among its compatriots in my stash.

I have a stash. It's a good one too, and I don't feel bad or guilty about it. In fact, to be entirely honest … I love it. There's yarn in there that I would totally take with me in a house fire. Knitting has taught me that there is a deep and
grand satisfaction in having the means around me to occupy myself and to make things for the people I love that keep them warm, both literally and spiritually. I think that knitting is profoundly satisfying and worthy and it's enriched my life tremendously. I wouldn't want to be without it even as it takes up most of my extra cash and closet space.

I admit that my love for yarn means that I'm occasionally frustrated when I run out of space for my yarn collection in my tiny house — and I'm way more than occasionally frustrated when I can't afford to buy something like the worsted-weight cashmere from my favorite hand-dyer. I have to be reasonable, though, because like just about every knitter, I have a yarn budget. I have to make choices about paying the rent, buying food. I must remember that when the bills for my daughters' educations start rolling in, the fact that I have a well-appointed yarn closet and they have very beautiful mittens won't mean a thing if Mamma blew the whole household savings on stash enhancement.

The World Bank indicates that most North Americans fall into the 1 percent of the world's
population that has about 80 percent of the world's money. Even though that gives me a pang of guilt, I don't think the World Bank is out to make me feel horrible about how much I have. In fact, I don't think they were considering knitters at all when they came up with that statistic. The goal is simply to point out inequity, and I'm sure they hope that reading their statistics results in at least a small shift in the way people like us think sometimes.

It turns out that knitting is a luxury, and buying yarn (even cheap yarn) or having time to knit (even five minutes) or simply sitting in my house (even my very small house) with that warm, soft yarn in my hands is a sign that I am extraordinarily rich and fortunate. Knowing this means that I'm going to try to remember the very best things knitting has taught me so far. Sitting here screwing up this sweater means something. It means I lead a very good life. I am lucky. I am fortunate.

I am a knitter.

With thanks to:

My husband, Joe, who tries so hard to stay out of my office.

My daughters, Amanda, Megan, and Samantha, who don't try to stay out of my office, but I love anyway.

My mum, Bonnie, who loaned me the use of her kitchen floor during the last phase of this book when I used up all the space in my office.

My brother, Ian, who helped me build my office.

My sister, Erin, my nephew, Hank, and my sister-in-law, Ali, for having nothing to do with my office.

My agent, Linda Roghaar, for having (thank goodness) an office that runs more efficiently than mine.

My dear friends Lene, Rachel, Denny, Tina, Cassandra, and Ken … who all somehow know when it's time I should leave my office, and how to encourage me to stay in there until my work is done.

Molly Wolf, for perspective on the work that came out of the office.

Pam Art, Deborah Balmuth, Jayme Hummer, and everyone else at Storey Publishing who gave me a reason to have an office at all …

and finally, many, many heartfelt thanks to all the knitters I meet, both “live” and “virtual.” You make the time that I sit in my office totally worth it, and not many people can say that.