Things I Learned From Knitting (8 page)

These cows are being bred for their teeniness, and now this rancher has cows that stand only a miniscule 23 to 28 inches tall. These dog-sized cows eat grass and weeds, and theoretically, you could keep one on your patio or in your backyard and it will produce about 4 quarts of milk a day, depending on the patio cow in question. That's a lovely supply of milk for a family. Raul
was talking about how they could supply fresh, organic dairy to families who don't have access to a store and don't necessarily have the resources or the desire to manage cattle.

My mind reeled. Patio cows? This was brilliant. I turned to my husband and said so. He smiled at me and asked me if I wanted to go to Cuba and get myself a little wee cow. I stared at him. There are moments in this marriage when I would have to say that he doesn't know me at all. I've got no use for a patio cow. I can get milk at the corner store, for crying out loud. I'm thinking outside of the box. I'm taking the fine work of Raul Hernandez to its next logical step. The man is a genius at the beginning of a beautiful arc of an idea.

I wonder if I could call him. I don't know about this little cow idea, but just imagine … patio sheep — not those miniature sheep that are bred without knitters in mind, but real fleece sheep, like, say, patio Shetlands or patio merinos. Wait … patio llamas! Patio alpacas! Patio cashmere goats!

This is brilliant. I've got to call Raul Hernandez, because together (since I don't know
anything about sheep breeding, and I'm not sure I want to learn) we are going to make a million dollars.

Raul and I are going to be a great team.
Oveja
is Spanish for sheep, right? Somebody look up “llama.” This is going to be fantastic.

Famous lies:

• The check is in the mail.

• I didn't inhale.

• It's not you, it's me.

Famous knitting lies:

• That sweater pattern is “one size fits all.”

• You will absolutely have enough yarn to finish.

• That yarn is machine-washable.

• The technique is obvious. You'll have no trouble.

• It took two hours to knit.

• I did swatch and I did get gauge.

MY MOTHER AND I DISAGREE ABOUT SHOES.
We agree about a very great many other things, such as politics, that raising teenagers is a challenge equal to climbing Mt. Everest (though at least an Everest ascent doesn't take as long), and that dusting is a despicable chore and a waste of a fine woman's time. But despite being of a common mind about nearly everything else, I cannot see her point about shoes.

My mother owns a lot of shoes. She likes them. She shops for them, spends money on them, knows the difference between a sling-back and an espadrille, and has an opinion on what to wear with any pair. She can fiercely debate toe shape (open, snipped, square, or pointy) and thinks that heel height and type (stiletto, wedge, shaped, or common) is an important decision that a person should make daily. My mum has shoes
that go with only one outfit and says things like, “Look at those strappy sandals! They're divine.” She can no sooner walk by a shoe store without going in than I can pass a yarn shop.

Much to my mother's shame, I own only four pairs of footwear: sandals for summer, short boots for spring and fall, snow boots for the dead of winter, and a pair of neutral-colored dress shoes for weddings or funerals that demand them. I don't care for shoes. In fact, if it was possible to live in a big city barefoot, I would. While my mother's priority is fashion, mine is comfort, and shoes, no matter how strappy or elegant or wedge-heeled, simply aren't comfortable to me.

“You should accept that there may be pain for beauty,” my mother tells me, but I just can't go there. I simply can't agree that we should be more uncomfortable to be more beautiful. I'm willing to be a little less beautiful to be a lot more comfortable … and me and my clunky sandals tramp through life holding this to be true. I maintain that I will not suffer for vanity and that I'm not like my mother in this respect … or at least I thought I wasn't, right up until last Wednesday
night, when I was leaving to meet some knitting friends at our weekly knit night.

It was a hot August evening, the sort we get here in Toronto that practically steam, yet as I headed out the door, I stopped to pick up and put on my heavy wool cardigan. I had just finished it, and heat be damned, I was going to show it off. … It's a beautiful piece of knitting, let me tell you. “Wool?” my mother quipped, a smirk on her lips. “It's a thousand degrees out, silly girl. You'll have heatstroke before you get to the corner. What happened to your position on vanity?”

I thought about it. I was sweating, overdressed, uncomfortable, and … still reluctant to take the thing off. It turns out that I might now understand “pain for beauty” a little bit, but only when it comes to hand-knit sweaters. I still don't get the shoes.

—
Chinese saying

I AM PRETTY SURE
that lace knitting is the best value in the knitting world. If we think of knitting and the money we pay for it as part of our entertainment budget, then lace really is the best bang for your buck. In general (though there are some exceptions that can burn a hole in your wallet faster than a night at a casino with free drinks), yarn is sold by weight. This means that 100 grams of worsted weight wool is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 220 yards. Because it's so much thinner, 100 grams wool laceweight is probably going to run about 1,000 yards or more, while not being much more expensive. Add to your figuring the fact that because of the patterns and general fiddling it requires, lace takes longer to knit and it won't take a rocket scientist to figure out that what you're spending per hour of knitting entertainment
is going to be a lot lower for lace. Toss into the mix the fact that you'll be creating an heirloom that will knock your own socks off, and suddenly, you can understand what so many knitters see in lace.

Now that I've offered this compelling evidence, I feel that in the interest of knitterly honor, I must warn you that there's a downside: While this is one of the best knitter's tricks around, lace knitting has a much higher chance of costing you your sanity and leaving you feeling as though you're a few jalapeños short of a zippy salsa … if you catch my meaning.

Those of us who've fought and won have learned what's important to know about lace knitting. First, because lace is all about not just your stitches, but the way you make them, anything related to your technique that you have always done in your own quirky way is now going to matter a lot. For instance, if you've never been really hung up on whether your decreases lean left or right and you start knitting lace with that attitude, you might be headed for a world of disappointment.

Second, because lace has a pattern that usually “stacks” on top of previous rows, you can't fudge anything. If, like me, you usually just knit two together if you find you have an extra stitch at the end of a row, your lace is going to be out of alignment pretty quickly, and that's going to make you crazier than a bag of wet cats. Lace is a precision game.

Finally, everything I've written about lace up until now — the fineness, the pattern, the precision — ends up meaning that unless you're a lace-knitting machine with no human failings at all, you're going to end up tinking from time to time. This is perhaps the greatest challenge of lace. Those of us who just yank out the needles and rip back until the world makes sense again — that's not always a good option with lace. It's delicate, it's precise, it's an exercise in patience.

Knit lace. Knit lots of lace, but breath deeply, accept the joy of precision and the rewards of forbearance and restraint, and, above all, remember to read the quote at the beginning of this advice. You'll likely need patience in more than one moment of anger.

I WAS HANGING OUT IN A YARN SHOP
, a rather common place to find me, and had set myself up with a cup of coffee and my current project, a particularly beautiful aran sweater with intricate cables. Two ladies came in and started surveying the shop, taking particular note of my knitting. They proceeded to have a conversation about it which I could plainly hear. (We can discuss at another time why on earth two people would have this conversation with me right there, but I suppose they thought I was deaf.) The first knitter looked at my work from across the room and said, “Man, look at that sweater. Cables are so ugly.”

Now, I try to be understanding. Really, I do. To each their own, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that … but to say cables are ugly? I inhaled slowly, then released my breath evenly. I tried to absorb what I'd heard. Cables
are ugly? All cables? Rope cables on ganseys? Tiny cables up the sides of socks? How about the staggering variety of fisherman's sweaters or winter toques with warm and lovely knots knit all around? She didn't like all cables? Every cable ever knit? I was so stunned that I was shaking inside. Hundreds of years of inspiration, cleverness, and thoughtfulness … and she stands there, declaring a whole genre of knitting “ugly”? How could she possibly tar all cables with that one brush? There was a whole world of possibility out there, and while you can say, “I don't like most cables” or “I don't like to knit cables” or “I think cables on most sweaters are a mistake,” how could you think every single one is ugly? Sure, there are cables that are heavy-looking, and in chunky yarn they can be a lot of texture to absorb, but to dislike all cables in every incarnation ever knit? How closed-minded and narrow a knitter was she?

I ranted on like this for a while in my head, imagining a litany of things I'd say to her if only I dared open my mouth. If I was braver, I'd show her the socks I was wearing, with a clever and delicate
cable rib at the cuff. I'd whip a particularly lovely pattern book off the shelf and force her to look at all of the cables within until she admitted that she'd been hasty. I'd tell her that until she had looked at every cable ever devised, she could not, in all fairness, make the sweeping generalization that “cables are ugly.”