Things I Learned From Knitting (4 page)

There is no “what if,” I told it, I have ten hours of knitting with me, and I am going to a Knitter's Fair, where, if I've changed my mind an hour and a half from now, I will be able to buy more yarn — lots more. There is no reason to make Rachel wait while I wind yarn I don't need and can't possibly knit up in the span of today. I do not knit that quickly. I do not need the other skein. Firmly, then, with emphasis and real confidence, I opened the door, stepped through … and shouted, “Hey Rachel, gimmee a minute!” and returned to the ball winder.

There's no point in arguing with my inner knitter. Besides, it's sort of flattering how fast she thinks I knit.

• Knitting has only two stitches: knit and purl. All knitting is completed using these two lowly stitches and some instructions. I know both of those stitches, so there is simply no reason why I shouldn't be able to take whatever challenges knitting can dish out.

• I am a grown-up. Knitting is not the boss of me.

• My knitting patterns are in English. I read English. Despite their more than occasionally cryptic nature, the instructions for this project are actually written in a language I allegedly speak fluently. It just can't be that hard, especially since my pattern book is called
Easy Knitting Patterns in English That Anyone Can Do.

• I have an army of knitting friends who have battled their own knitting demons and who will be more than willing to help me in a bitter
duel with any given project. They have fought and been burned by knitting in the past and they have endured staggering knitting frustration and failure. Far from beaten, they have prevailed against the minions of knit that strive to have us all insane and sweaterless. Knowing my pain, they will be on my side. Whatever their struggles, they have conquered knitting (some days) … and one of them has just got to know how to do a damned buttonhole.

• Knitting is a time-honored and mystical pursuit. Turning string into wearable, three-dimensional objects is something that's been done by millions — no, hundreds of millions or even billions of human beings who have knit before me. Shepherds in the sixteenth century knit while they tended flocks. The samurai soldiers of Japan knit their own socks and gloves. Seventeenth-century nuns, Victorian ladies, soldiers recovering from injury in both world wars, even little children in sweatshops: All of these knitters came before me, and they knit with less instruction,
fewer references, very little in the way of yarn shops, and absolutely no high-speed Internet access. They did it because they had to, because there was no other way to stay warm or get the things they needed — and darn it all, none of them quit. Quitting your knitting just wasn't an option unless you had another plan for fending off frostbite and darn it all…. If they could do it, I can too.

A LONG TIME AGO
, when I was a very young mother, someone gave me a gourmet cookbook that contained a recipe I'd enjoyed at a dinner at her house. The recipe was for a fantastic mushroom stroganoff that I thought was one of the yummiest things I'd ever eaten. I hurried to the grocery store to buy all the ingredients, but there was one problem: I couldn't afford them. I decided to make do. I bought substitutes that wouldn't blow my whole week's grocery budget on a single meal. It called for cream; I used milk. It called for portabella and shiitake mushrooms; I used regular button mushrooms. It called for butter; I used margarine. The wine? I substituted water. I painstakingly put together my version of the stroganoff, and was absolutely devastated when it was a pale (and sort of gross) imitation of the glorious dinner I had eaten at my friend's.
I explained the outcome to my mum, telling her that I must not have the skill at cooking that my friend had. I proposed that I just needed practice making the dish. My mother looked at me, poked dully at the puddle of milk and margarine on her plate, and proclaimed, “Darling, practice all you want, but you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.”

What she meant — and she was right — is that your end product can be only as good as the materials you start with. Despite learning this when it comes to cooking, I've had the hardest time learning it with knitting. I'm forever admiring a beautiful sweater in a magazine, gasping at the price of the suggested yarn, and then being absolutely flabbergasted when, after I substitute a less beautiful yarn to save money, I get a sweater that's less beautiful too. (“Less beautiful” is actually too kind. Some experiments have been downright unwearable.)

Not to be taken for a yarn snob, I know that there are exceptions. Certainly, all of us have seen a knitting project that was deadly good despite being knit with dollar-store acrylic (some
of us are even fortunate enough to be the knitters who pulled it off). I myself made a jacket for my mum out of dishcloth cotton that has turned out to be her very favorite of all time. Being a knitter who knit through her student years (and her one-income, three-baby years), I also have a pretty good grasp of the concept that all of us are going to have times when we really can't afford something better and have to knit the crap because it's a lot better than not knitting at all. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. I don't have a problem with cheap yarn, and as a matter of fact, I'm glad it's there so that I'm not reduced to knitting my own old pantyhose cut into strips or making the most of an old roll of kitchen string I found in the back of a drawer — though in the right hands (just not mine) I bet those have potential too.

I am just glad to have finally learned that I didn't get the sweater or the stroganoff I expected not because I am an incompetent and everyone else is more skilled than I am, but because sometimes, if you start with crap, that is what you will end up with.

I FLY A LOT. I KNIT A LOT
. As you can imagine, because flying is a sitting-down, boring sort of activity, I try to combine flying and knitting as much as possible. For the most part, I knit happily on flights from here to there, but I'm always aware that I am not the one in charge, that if someone in a uniform tells me that I can't knit (even if I checked the airline's guidelines not less than three hours earlier and printed out the rules to show the staff, rather desperately, the part that says that knitting needles are absolutely fine) — that if they aren't comfortable — I will have to give up, and worse … I'll have to give up without a fight. The airlines make the rules, and there is nothing we can do about it. If we want to use the service they provide, we're going to have to do it their way and learn to roll with the punches a little bit.

Once you do get your needles on board, you may face other challenges. I've had flight attendants ask me to put away my needles for fear I'll impale someone in the event of turbulence. (I've given this a lot of thought, by the way, and I think that if there was enough turbulence that people were at risk from my knitting needles, the flight would have much bigger worries than little old me and my sock-in-progress.) I've had flight attendants worry that there may be a bump and I'll put my own eye out. I've had other passengers tell me they're uncomfortable with anything pointy on a flight. I've even had one or two ask me if security let me on board with my needles. (I have always been unclear as to how they think I would have managed to avoid security.) I even had one flight attendant tell me she worried that there would be some rough air, that this rough air would surprise me … and that during this moment of extreme surprise, I would let go of my knitting needles, which would then fly knifelike through the air and impale one of my fellow passengers in a tremendous and gory episode which I would certainly regret.

At this, I thought hard. My needles were bamboo circulars and very light and fragile. I thought about what sort of “surprise” would be required for me to hurl them with that sort of force, and I thought about explaining all of this to the attendant.

Then I remembered that on her airplane, she makes the rules, and I have to attempt to roll with the punches. I put away the knitting, but I couldn't help but notice that the guy next to me had a very pointy metal pen that he was using to fill in the Sudoku game in the in-flight magazine, and I considered that if he were “surprised,” that pen could have gone flying too — and being about 100 percent heavier and sharper than my needles, it was a far more dangerous thing. If my small pointy sticks had to go, then I wanted the other small pointy sticks tucked away too.

I didn't say this though. I didn't say a thing. I rolled with the punches. I got some airline wine from the cart, and I thought of a solution: I hope I get that flight attendant again, because I'll be the lady knitting with pens, and there'll be nothing she can say about it.