Things I Learned From Knitting Read online

  Things I Learned from Knitting

  . . . whether I wanted to or not

  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by publishing practical information that encourages personal independence in harmony with the environment.

  Edited by Deborah Balmuth

  Art direction by Mary Winkelman Velgos

  Text production by Jennifer Jepson Smith

  Cover design by Mary Winkelman Velgos

  Cover illustration by Dan O. Williams

  Hand-lettering and interior illustrations by © Sarah Wilkins

  © 2008 by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other — without written permission from the publisher. For additional information, please contact Storey Publishing, 210 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247.

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  Printed in the United States by R.R. Donnelley

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pearl-McPhee, Stephanie.

  Things I learned from knitting— whether I wanted to or not / Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-60342-062-4 (hardcover w/ jacket : alk. paper)

  1. Knitting. 2. Knitting—Miscellanea. 3. Knitters (Persons)— Miscellanea. I. Title.

  TT820.P3748 2008

  746.43'2—dc22

  2008005462

  This book is for my mum,

  the clever and formidable (but non-knitting)

  Bonnie McPhee.

  I love her.

  Introduction

  Despite the way it makes non-knitters look at me like I’m a few sheep short of a flock — I have often remarked that I think knitting is an excellent metaphor for much of life. Whether we like it or not, becoming knitters changes the way we think, feel, process information, and interact with the world around us. In short, I believe knitters — by simply engaging in knitting, learning what it has to teach us, and looking at how we learn it — somehow become different from other people.

  There is a school of psychology called “cognitive psychology” that concerns itself with how your brain handles mental processes like language, memory, problem solving, and reasoning. To illustrate the concept, these psychologists imagine your brain a little like it’s a computer: Information goes in, is somehow stored, is accessed when you need it, and then is reused. People who research this sort of thing are interested in how you filter what you will focus on, the way you use pattern recognition and object recognition, and the way you experience time sensation — all those things that influence that computer-like processing. Now, I’m no knitting cognitive psychologist, but it struck me right away that if I did happen to be one, I would have instantly recognized these four areas as being all about the knitting.

  Attention and filter theories are the ideas surrounding how you focus your mental energy. In a vivid, busy world, this is about how you will sort the hundreds of pieces of information coming at you at once and decide what you’ll pay attention to, store, recall, and use. In knitting terms, you use this skill when you count out loud to drown out the kids as you’re casting on, struggle with choosing one yarn that you love out of the many in the shop, or show the remarkable ability to consistently ignore the instructions for working a gauge swatch that appears at the top of every pattern. It is the skill you’re using when you can peacefully set aside everything around you — the dog, the kids and the pot burning on the stove — while you knit in the living room, interpreting a chart.

  Knitters use pattern recognition every time we knit. At a higher level, pattern recognition is what’s happening every time you notice that you’re decreasing along a center line and don’t have to count anymore or when, after five hours of struggling with the instructions for a particular stitch, you finally experience that moment when it comes together and you understand where the whole thing is going. You’re also using pattern recognition every time you make a stitch. The simple act of making one stitch after another is a pattern, and internalizing that pattern is what makes knitting easier over time and lets you know when you’ve arsed it up.

  Object recognition sounds simple, and it is: It’s the skill that your brain uses to tell a tree from a face or to recognize your car keys when you need them. You’d have a really hard time getting around without using this skill at its most basic level. In its more complex forms, you’re practicing object recognition when you identify garter stitch, even though this time it’s blue and on a hat instead of last time, when it was green and on a sweater. (That’s way more complicated than it sounds.) It’s how you can tell that your decrease is wrong and how your brain knows that your sweater isn’t working out. It doesn’t look like a sweater.

  All of these cognitive theories are interesting, but none as interesting as time sensation. Even if they don’t know the name for the concept, people talk about this all the time: the idea that the passage of time can feel different according to what you’re doing or what you’re experiencing. It’s the genesis of the phrase “time flies when you’re having fun” or, to put it in a knitterly context, why the plain black, garter-stitch scarf you loathe seems as if it’s taking forever while the much bigger sweater made from a yarn you adore moves like lightning. Knitters play with our brains and time sensation all the time, actually using knitting to change how we feel about time’s passage. I know that I am deliberately altering my sensation of time when I’m knitting while waiting for an appointment, and I know that if you don’t let me knit while I wait, that time will slow down and I’ll just about go raving out of my tree.

  If cognitive psychology is about all these things, and about how these things change how you store, retrieve, and use information, then surely, it must be obvious that engaging in knitting has to shape your brain and how it works. All these years I’ve maintained that knitters are hooked up a little bit differently than everyone else … and maybe I haven’t been wrong or joking. Considering all this psychology stuff, it has to be true that I was right in the first place, and what we have always suspected is true: By virtue of playing around with all these brain functions on a daily basis, knitters are learning lessons and changing all the time. Knitters are actually becoming different from ordinary people.

  When I add all of this up, everything I’ve read about the human brain and everything I know that knitting has beaten into my brain over the years, I am left thinking that there are really only two things I could do with the lessons I’ve learned from all this wool: I could go back to university, bust myself getting a PhD and become a really kick-ass cognitive psychologist or I could write a book about what knitting has taught me.

  I went with the latter … and here it is.

  the 1st thing

  Beginning is easy,

  continuing is hard.

  I THINK IT’S A FEELING every knitter knows. I am unclear why it happens, but I’ve seen it triggered in myself and others by exposure to new yarn or a perfect pattern or even by watching my knitting friends start something I covet. Occasionally, it happens when I’m stash storing or tidying (which we all know can trigger all sorts of maladies caused by a dreadful overdose of wool fumes).

  It’s startitis:
the almost overwhelming urge to start a new project or ten or twenty, regardless of what’s on the needles now and how much you love this current work. There’s an almost itchy feeling when you get it, and a great many knitters are forever pulling themselves back from the brink of being stricken down. Startitis is often misunderstood as some sort of disapproval, a negative response to what you’re currently knitting. People think you must start turning a longing eye afield because you’re bored or because your current project (or projects; a monogamous knitter is a rare thing indeed) isn’t working out, or they think that you’re going through a troubled patch in a project. People assume that if you’re starting something new, you must be trading up due to a short attention span or a sudden urge to engage in a flighty woolen love affair.

  Knitters know how it looks to others, this constant parade of new projects. We know it makes us look as though we lack loyalty, faithfulness, follow-through — or even commitment. It makes us look as though we have no sense of continuance in a relationship, and most of us even feel guilty about it. Most of us, when considering a new project, feel at least a pang of regret for work abandoned. Some of us (even though there are no knitting police and we could start twenty thousand projects a day if we wanted to) try to “do better” or work on being a monogamous, “one project at a time” knitter … as though there was some sort of moral victory in resisting the urge to do more of what we love.

  This needs to be understood: Startitis is not a rejection of the things we are knitting now, although I do understand how a perfectly good half-finished cardigan could take it this way if you toss it in the corner like it is a dirty wash-rag just so you can start a sexy new silk pullover. Instead of a rejection, however, startitis is actually an embracing. It’s all a matter of looking at the big picture.

  Constantly taking up with (and rejecting) a series of projects may look as though the knitter in question is a smidge on the unfaithful side if, by a smidge, we mean that the knitter is making Don Juan look like a paragon of devotion. Yet it’s not faithfulness to an individual project that should matter, but faithfulness to the art of knitting overall. By exposing ourselves to as many projects as we can, we’re actually strengthening our bond with and relationship to knitting, which is, after all, all that matters.

  Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. I’ve just started another three sweaters.

  5 things

  I’D RATHER DO THAN SWATCH FOR MY NEW PROJECT*

  1 Get a spinal tap.

  2 Scrub the bathtub after all three of my daughters have come home from “sandbox day” at the park.

  3 Babysit two-year-old triplets while simultaneously diffusing a bomb.

  4 Bathe a cat.

  5 KNIT MY NEW PROJECT.

  *I will swatch though, and I will even try to enjoy it, because gauge is important, darn it, and it’s the right thing to do … even if it works only half the time because swatches can’t be trusted.

  the 2nd thing

  Patience is a virtue.

  IT IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE that knitting involves patience. A beginner’s plain garter-stitch scarf, to choose a simple example, contains in the neighborhood of twelve thousand stitches. Clearly, at some point, patience is involved. No human can repeat the same action twelve thousand times without some dose of patience, and we haven’t even begun to examine what sort of fortitude it might take to pull off a sweater or an afghan. Most knitters will giggle themselves stupid, however, when a layperson unacquainted with the nature of knitting announces that he doesn’t knit because he lacks the patience for it. This is what I’ve learned from knitting:

  • You don’t knit because you are patient. You are patient because you knit.

  • It isn’t that knitting is only possible for those who are already patient. Patience is granted to those who knit by virtue of knitting’s basic nature.

  If you doubt this to be true, I suggest you try a small scientific experiment. First, take a knitter. Just about any will do (though it’s probably best to get one who is relatively happy with her project right now, because messing with a knitter who’s doing battle with a tricky bit is not only unfair, but can be downright dangerous). When you have one, ask her to wait for a plane. Make the wait at least an hour, and warn the knitter that there will be a period of waiting. Observe her. Left to her own devices, the knitter will pull out a project and amuse herself happily for the full hour, perhaps even expressing some regret when the period of waiting is up. She’ll be the very picture of patience — and for all the world it will appear that patient people knit. After all, we can see knitting and we can see patience.

  Now, take the same knitter and ask her to wait for another half hour. When she pulls out her knitting, take it from her. (Warning: Accomplishing this may require more than one scientist.) When you’ve removed the knitting, observe the knitter. Stripped of her coping tools, the same knitter who just displayed so much forbearance will now display not only painful knitting withdrawal symptoms, but a marked absence of patience. She may pace. She may attempt to read magazines or a book, but it won’t go well. She will express restlessness and discomfort. It’s even possible that a knitter who has no natural patience of her own and was relying entirely on the artificially generated patience granted by the act of knitting may attempt to drink heavily, become a nuisance to others, or even require sedation. (In the case of the truly impatient, it’s best not to approach the knitter; instead, administer the sedative via blowdart from a safe distance away.)

  In short, the knitter will prove my point. Knitting grants the virtue of patience … and without our knitting, knitters are mere impatient mortals like everyone else.

  Knitting is still trying to teach me …

  THAT MAKING BIG MISTAKES WHEN

  YOU’RE LEARNING IS HOW IT GOES.

  IT IS WHY KNITTING CAN UNRAVEL

  (AS MANY TIMES AS YOU NEED IT TO).

  the 3rd thing

  Be careful what you wish for.

  IN MY PRIVATE, HOPEFUL HEART of hearts (and I know I can’t be the only knitter who has thought this) I have a secret wish: to injure a lower limb.

  Now, if this hasn’t occurred to you yet, I know it sounds crazy, but try and imagine it for a minute. I’m not a masochist; I don’t enjoy pain, so I don’t really want the injury to be something permanent or painful, just a mild and slow-to-heal injury to my foot or leg. Imagine going to the doctor with a vague and minor ache in your knee and being told that the only cure, what you simply must do, is sit down and rest for six weeks. Surely, as a knitter, you can see where I’m going with this.

  I want just enough of an injury that no matter how much I want to — because heaven knows I want to — I simply wouldn’t be able to do all of those things that, as much as I love them, eat up knitting time. Things like washing the kitchen floor, going grocery shopping, doing the laundry or scrubbing the toilet. (I’m sure that, like me, you’d feel especially sad about not being able to scrub the toilet.) Imagine six glorious, guilt-free weeks of sitting and knitting (in my best version of this fantasy, it’s the six weeks before Christmas), and now ask yourself if wishing for a sprained ankle is really so wrong?

  A while ago, I met a knitter who, in a terribly unfortunate incident involving her husband, poor judgment, and a car door, had found herself in exactly this place. In early November, she got a cast on her foot and began a knitting marathon of epic proportions. She couldn’t go to work, she couldn’t do the housework…. there was nothing she could do but knit. She knit and watched old movies. She knit and listened to the radio. She knit with her foot up on a pillow in the sunroom and watched birds at the feeder in the morning sunshine. It was wonderful, because she had very little pain, and the fantastic bonus (this really is too much to hope for) of a husband who was responsible for her injury and thus exceedingly guilty, attentive, and kind. He brought her tea in the morning and wine and dinner in the evening, and in between his loving ministrations, she knit.

  It was, I thought, the best thing tha
t could happen to a knitter. I was jealous — very jealous — right up until two weeks into her fortunate and fantastic knitting jag, when she was on her way to her stash for reinforcements. She tripped on her crutches, pitched forward wildly, and in a horrible, terrible moment which she regrets to this day … she instinctively put out her hands to break her fall and …

  She broke her wrist.

  I take it all back. I forgot the Fates have a sense of humor. Be careful what you wish for.

  the 4th thing

  Everything is funny as long as

  it is happening to someone else.

  ONCE YOU’VE BEEN A KNITTER for a little while … like, say, ten minutes … the odds are very good that you will have been screwed over by knitting enough to be able to see that some of the ways it messes with you can be pretty funny. Admittedly, as Mark Twain said, “Humor is tragedy plus time,” so the more time has passed since you got screwed, the more likely it is that you’ve been able to move through the pain and find humor in it.

  Knitting teaches us quickly that our screw-ups aren’t the end of the world. After all, it’s only your time and sanity that are wasted when you make massive mistakes in knitting. As a matter of fact, knitting can help teach us all to manage mistakes better and learn to laugh at ourselves. For most of us, knitting will provide more than ample experience and opportunity for learning how not to take our errors too seriously (no matter how stupid they are).

  The problem, though, is that time. If you have been the victim of your own temporary lack of intelligence, then the amount of time it will take to recover and laugh at your mistake is going to be directly related to the amount of personal pain you endured as a result of that error.