Things I Learned From Knitting (5 page)

I FEEL TERRIBLE POINTING OUT
this simple truth that knitting has taught me, but I've seen so many knitters burned by it that I can hardly not. I thought it was obvious, but when I see knitters (myself included), acting like they have no idea of the cruel realities of baby expansion, I feel I would be remiss if I did not write it here. The considerable charm and diminutive size of babies makes them frequent targets for our knitted love — but babies don't just grow, they grow fast. To add insult to knitterly injury, the smaller they are, the faster they grow. Therefore, please consider these significant points before casting on a wee layette to bestow on the next eight-pound human who crosses your path.

• A human baby generally doubles its birth weight by six months and triples it by a year. This means that any sweater knit for a new
baby has a brief lifespan of usefulness. Babies grow fastest in their early months so the smaller the object, the less time it will be used. This may be discouraging to some knitters. Conduct your knitting accordingly.

• Many babies, being non-knitters, feel strongly that hats, booties, and tiny mittens are a vile encumbrance. A baby seldom enjoys these garments as much as the adult who provides them. If you are the sort of knitter who really needs to see the recipient of your work enjoying your creations, you may be knitting up the wrong tree with babies. Most of them are willing to strangle themselves to remove an adorable bonnet or are willing to make a life goal of whipping booties off their feet and onto the floor.

• Babies are, to put it as delicately as possible, leaky … If you're going to be offended if someone leaks something smelly and staining onto your work, you may want to wait a little while before presenting your knitting to parents. The incidence of leaks in human young diminishes after a few years.

• Even with the best warning available to humanity and all its experience and science, you will have no more than nine months notice to knit your gift. If you're a slow knitter, you may want to knit something in a bigger size. Despite all attempts by billions of pregnant women, due dates remain nonnegotiable.

If none of this bothers you, then you are one of us: the brave, the true, the knitters who in the face of all adversity, know their hard-won knits will be outgrown, flung, dirtied, and possibly underappreciated, but still look fondly upon these tiny people and think only that one item, so carefully handmade, deserves another … even if the recipient is going to puke on it.

Knitting is still trying to teach me …

THAT THE KNITTING MUSES

HAVE AN EXCELLENT, IF CRUEL,

SENSE OF HUMOR.

LIKE MOST ARTISTS
, I support my work with an extensive and varied collection of the materials I use to create. Picasso had paint; Michelangelo had marble; Mozart had piano, pen, and paper. As a knitter, I have yarn.

Now, I'm way past feeling bad about how much yarn I have. I used to think I had “too much.” For a while, I even tried going on a yarn diet to try to lose a few pounds of fiber, but the truth is that my heart was never truly in it. Really, I was just saying all the things I think non-knitters want to hear. We've all been there. They want us to acknowledge that we have too much yarn, to admit that we're out of control and that we should have less. They talk to us about
obsession
and
hoarding.
They fail to see the big picture.

The way I see it, the big picture is that painters have paint and canvas, gardeners have plants
and acreage, carpenters have wood and tools — and even if you want to think of knitting as a hobby rather than an art form, golfers have clubs, golf balls, carts, green fees, memberships, and entire golf weekends for their hobby.

Once I put my collection of yarn into perspective, I realized I didn't care what people thought. I really didn't. I cared whether or not I had room for yarn (spiritually and literally), I cared about whether or not I could afford it, and when I ordered that big box of fancy wool from Germany, I even went so far as to consider my daughter's possible feelings about my intention to store it in her closet. (I admit I would have considered it for a longer time or more in her favor if she'd ever cleaned a closet, but I digress.) I took a good look at the stash, and I realized that I wasn't hurting anyone, that I wasn't spending money I didn't have, and that I certainly wasn't spending more on yarn than the golfer down the street was spending on his golf trips, and I stopped feeling bad about it. Not only did I stop feeling bad, I started buying yarn whenever I took a fancy to.

I must admit that removing the element of guilt about having so much of the thing I love has increased the influx of it somewhat, but I don't mind. This is the stuff my art, my hobby, and my life is made of, and I'm just not going to support the idea that having a lot of wool is a crushing, world-important issue worth discussing with non-knitters. This is the yarn I'll have for the rest of my life. It turns out that knitting has taught me that good things come in all sizes, and the size doesn't matter, as long as you're happy with what you've got.

Now, where I'm going to put it all — that's certainly open for debate.

IT IS A WELL-KNOWN FACT
that there are some secrets that are just too juicy for anybody to keep. For example, there's no chance that your neighbor and her husband can take up nude bathing in their backyard pool and reasonably expect that the neighbors with a clear view are going to be able to keep it to themselves at the next community barbecue. It's just too good not to tell. Similarly, you simply never can tell two knitting friends about a huge yarn sale and expect they won't pass along the good news to two more (or twelve) of their favorite knitters. It's not reasonable. go to the sale and get what you want before you spill the beans.

Secrecy is a delicate thing, and while friendships are a sacred trust … half price merino is going to be a deal breaker.

UPSTAIRS IN MY HOUSE
, in the very back of the linen closet, behind the sheets and towels, are several pieces of my old knitting. They are in the back, packed up tight where people (including me) are unlikely to see them. They are terrible — absolutely, viciously, breathtakingly terrible. Truly, they're embarrassingly bad. In fact, they're so bad in so many ways that it is impossible to narrow down exactly which offenses of knitting make them so bad.

It could be that I chose the very worst of all possible materials, selecting for only economy rather than quality, since I was young and poor and I didn't understand that unless you're a miracle worker, if you start with crap you end up with crap, no matter how expertly you knit the crap. Speaking of things that are expertly knit, these are definitely not. They have bizarre and random
increases mid-row that somehow involve an extra stitch (or ten) and rows in which I decreased away those extra stitches, thinking that this was a brilliant way to deal with them and restore order. (It isn't.) One of the sweaters is so poorly knit that it has a neckline I executed with all the skill of a clutch of drunken emus. Worst of all, every single one of these errors is compounded brilliantly by the fact that when I knit these monstrosities, I seem to have had all the color sense and good taste of a blind showgirl on an acid trip.