Free-Range Knitter Read online

  I could explain to them about how knitting uses both hemispheres of the brain at once, I could explain that knitting instructions are a code that we decipher, I could even tell them that knitting has reading and math and can be so complex that it would make them weep, but instead, I think I will tell them about Turkish rugs.

  In most early religions, Christianity and Judaism included, women were forbidden to receive religious education. The easiest way to make sure that didn’t happen was to make sure they were illiterate or to discourage literacy. (That way, they couldn’t get an education even if they were sneaky.) Communication though, is a human need, and human nature will always find a way. The knotted rugs woven by Islamic women in Turkey are a wonderful example.

  Each beautiful rug is covered with a series of traditional geometric and repeating motifs, taught from one generation to the next, mother to daughter. As women grow older and their hands become too tired to tie knots and weave the carpets, they become the spinners, helping to provide the yarn needed. As they spin, they teach the younger women and girls the patterns. It seems antiquated, pastoral, and even, much like my knitting, dreadfully simple. All the women take part in the work somehow. Some of them excel, for sure, but the work is so straightforward that few women in the community would be considered too dim to do it. It would be easy to look upon these women and see exactly what some see when I take out my wool and sticks. Women, ordinary women, engaged in an ordinary pastime. The patterns are established. The knots get tied the same way each time. The work appears manual, mundane, and, to our modern eyes, sometimes even a little stupid.

  There are faster and easier ways to get carpets. Sure, they are making very special carpets, just as I may be making very special socks, but generally speaking, it is not considered an intelligent way to get carpet. The intelligent way is the commercial way. Big commercial looms churning out acres of sturdy, serviceable carpet that can be scrubbed and installed. The intelligent way doesn’t make the best carpet. It makes the most efficient carpet. People might acknowledge that hand knotting, like hand knitting, makes beautiful objects; it does not make efficient objects and is therefore a less intelligent operation.

  Here’s what they don’t know about the simple, mundane women knotting the rugs. They are reading and writing. The human will find a way, and no human is truly illiterate. The motifs and patterns are a language, and anyone who knows that language can read the story the weaver tells. A stylized goddess with her hands on her hips is a motherhood symbol and usually shows that the weaver has given birth to a son. An image of a chest or bag may show the weaver is wishing for marriage and a dowry, lines that represent hairbands show the weaver has married, and a figure may represent a person who is being memorialized and is often woven in a carpet that tells the story of the loss of a child. The sort of border put on may indicate the age of the woman or her children. Stars are life, ravens can be death, a dragon sweeping around might mean the rains were good.

  Each carpet bears the story, the wishes, and the hopes that each weaver has, and each motif is passed on in the only written language the women know. Banned from reading and writing the language of their culture, they have written a language of their own. Each carpet is a meaningful, powerful story, each line of knots almost a journal of all that she says and thinks. It is as though these women are writing their lives down, teaching each other their stories, and telling all of us what has happened to them while they were here. These stories persist long after the women are gone, since a well-made carpet can last for many, many, many years. It is a powerful and compelling thing, an incredible and heartening story, and what does it look like?

  It looks like a woman playing with some wool. Making knots and creating an item that could be made more efficiently by a machine or obtained more cheaply at a Wal-Mart.

  As I have said, I am not a stupid woman. I know how I look when I pull out my knitting. I know what they are thinking when I pull out my wool and what will be some very expensive socks when I am done. I don’t care. I’m making a pair of socks that will be on my daughter’s feet when she goes to college. I’m making a hat my brother will wear to work. I’m knitting a sweater to warm my husband and a bonnet for a baby who has just arrived and is much loved. I’m telling my story … and I don’t care if I look stupid or inefficient. I know what I’m doing. It’s not my problem if they don’t.

  A Contradiction of Terms

  Imagine this: You and I are sitting together on a park bench, and we are having a lovely time, knitting and chatting, maybe we have coffee and some chocolate. It’s lovely. I spread my knitting in progress out on my lap to admire it, you know, the way knitters do, and I smooth my hand over it and give it a little pat just like it’s a rare or treasured pet. Then, something catches my eye, and I lean forward to take a better look at the sweater, and suddenly you can see what I see. There’s a massive mistake. You inhale sharply; this is going to be bad. This is one of those ugly mistakes that can shorten a knitter’s lifespan. You slowly look up at me, prepared to help me through this awful moment, and much to your surprise, I break out in an enormous smile of sheer joy and exclaim:

  Wow! Look at that! I made a huge mistake way back at the beginning of this sweater. Oh my gosh, it’s enormous! No wonder the rest of the sweater looks so odd. My goodness, that mistake is as obvious as Cher naked at a convent, isn’t it? How did I not see that? Well now. What a fabulous turn of events. I’ll just have to rip this whole thing out. Yup, every single stitch except for the cast-on edge is entirely unacceptable! Oh, but I’m so lucky! I’m glad that I got a chance to knit almost the whole thing before I noticed this. If I’d seen that mistake right away, then I wouldn’t get the pleasure of knitting this practically twice! Oh happy, happy day.

  Having been the knitter who has made a mistake of that magnitude, I think that if I ever heard a knitter say that, I’d either get up and move, consider talking about her in unflattering terms after she left, or, even though I’m a nonviolent person, I think I’d momentarily consider knocking her off the bench in an attempt to smack the stupid right off the poor unfortunate. I can’t see any way that anyone sane would talk that way about a knitting mistake and having to reknit something, but if you think about it, that’s sort of a contradiction.

  I like knitting. I like it a lot. I like it so much that really, if you’re going to apply pure objective logic to the thing, I should be absolutely thrilled to have anything happen that creates the opportunity to do more of it. Even better, considering the cost of yarn and the way once it’s used up, its knitting value is gone, I should practically dance at the thought of gleaning more pleasure from it by using it twice before it’s through. I should feel that way. As an intelligent, thinking person, I really shouldn’t think that the idea of “happily reknitting” is as oxymoronic as “smart bomb,” “alone together,” or the classic “government organization,” but I do.

  Swatching is another rampaging contradiction for a knitter. I should, if you look at the purpose of the thing, embrace this tender first date between knitter and yarn. Even though it is often inaccurate for the purposes of gauge, swatching still marks the beginning of a knitting project. Since I love knitting and love beginning projects, this first delightful overture between it and me should be a grand harbinger of great things to come. When I sit down to swatch for a new project, I should enjoy every minute of it; after all, it’s not as if to prepare for a knitting project, one has to clean the toilet or scrub all the floors in the house. It’s knitting. More knitting. Not only am I getting to know the yarn, learning how it feels and behaves, but I am getting an opportunity to experiment with it on a scale that could prevent the reknitting that makes me so unhappy. Despite all of this, I avoid it like the plague. I know that if I skip it, I’ll often make things harder for myself; I know that wimping out on the swatch can mean that I don’t discover that this piece of knitting stretches to four times its size when it hits water or other disasters that I can’t even speak about, they’ve left me s
o scarred. Intellectually, I know that not knitting a wee square because I don’t want to waste the time could mean that I’ll have to reknit a huge square, and I still skip it, and even have the audacity to be angry and frustrated later when there’s a problem that could have been entirely prevented had I not taken a long swim in the deep end of the knitterly contradiction pool.

  It gets worse. I tell myself that one of the reasons I don’t swatch is that swatches lie, and not just a little bit. Swatches have been known to lie at the Olympic level. They can be reliable and useful in one instance, and the next time they can be as honest as a politician caught in a hotel room with his three “nieces” who just happened to be named Candy, Cherry, and Carma, which is pretty darned dishonest. Still, if I do happen to catch myself in the contradiction of non-swatching, despite wanting predictable knits, and do overcome it all and knit one, then even though I knew in my heart that there was only a 50/50 chance that it would be helpful to me, when the swatch does let me down, I will be filled with fury and stomp about the house brandishing the little deceiver as though I had believed all along that I had a guarantee.

  Usually, when I think too much about these knitting contradictions, I start to wonder if I’m a bit of a contradiction. Here I am, knowing these things full well, and knowing at the same time that there’s little chance that my behavior is going to change. I’m probably going to be this kind of knitter for the rest of my life. Lots of knitters are, and so it can’t just be my odd little nature doing it to me.

  I like to think (though I may just be inventing comfort) that the reason I can’t seem to learn to embrace this whole idea and do away with the contradictions—to take into my heart that knitting, all knitting, is fun, and I could happily grasp any chance to do more of it—is simply because I am human. Human beings like to move forward, even when it makes sense to go backward. Homo sapiens is an ambitious species; we are beings of forward movement, of finishing, accomplishment, and getting things done. We always want bigger and better and more and faster and are forever replacing the good systems we have with better ones. Were we not thus, we wouldn’t be driving cars, we’d be walking, on the premise that if you like walking, why wouldn’t you do more of it?

  It seems to me that in the end I can blame my nonsensical knitter behavior on the fact that my humanity entirely overruns the logic I have about knitting. Knitting, being something a human does, is therefore subject to all the conditions that a human is. I like to think that. I like to think it because the alternative is that I’m not very smart, and that just doesn’t seem right. That I’m smart enough to knit but not smart enough to keep myself out of knitting trouble would be another contradiction.

  It’s all contradictory. Our human nature makes it so that we love knitting, but we don’t want to do it unnecessarily, and our human nature makes it so that we embrace innovation and greater goals while throwing up roadblocks to getting to just that place. Human beings are inherently contradictory because our big brains and intellectual selves are in constant conflict with our hearts and emotional selves. It’s got to be the answer, because it’s that or I’ve gotten myself into a place with knitting that is really, really sneaky.

  All Things Being Equal

  Not too long ago, a group of friends and I trundled off on a knitting weekend. We had rented a minivan, packed up our fiber and spinning wheels, tucked in all of our knitting projects, and iced the cake with yarn for trading and sharing. (We may have also added a case of a decent merlot to the haul, but we shall never reveal the exact nature of our good time.) We rented a couple of hotel rooms near a sheep and wool festival and shipped off. We spent the whole weekend going to the festival during the day and spent the evenings knitting, spinning, and visiting with other knitters who had gathered for the same purpose.

  Now, these were all sorts of women. One is a doctor, one a nurse, one is a mum at home, and the other owns her own business. Me, I’m a writer and perhaps a knitting philosopher; we’re a pretty diverse bunch. One evening, we got to talking about the weekend, and how people responded when we said we were going away for a knitting retreat.

  The response was universal. People thought our weekend immersed in our chosen hobby (or lifestyle, depending on how you feel about our level of involvement) was at best sweet or quirky and at worst stupid. Ridiculously stupid. Although we all tried, there seemed to be no way to convince them that we were doing anything worthwhile. We were thought frivolous, silly women with a funny little plan. Several people confided that they thought a knitting weekend was the strangest thing they had ever heard of. When we told them there were going to be hundreds and hundreds of knitters there, they expressed nothing short of shock.

  When we realized that the reactions we had gotten ranged from giggles to incredulity, we started wondering what it was about it that had people so tripped out. We started to draw parallels between what we were doing and what other people did. We imagined what people would think if our husbands had rented a minivan, filled it up with fishing gear and bait, added a case of beer, and headed up to a cottage to spend the weekend sitting in a boat or on a dock, dangling a string in the water, and sitting by a campfire. We sat and spun or knitted, and a contemplative silence fell over us. We’d realized something compelling. Nobody would have thought that was odd at all. Nobody would have thought it silly or strange, nobody would have openly boggled at how they were choosing to spend their time. What was the difference, we asked ourselves and each other. What, if anything, made it different? What made sitting on a dock playing with string more valid than sitting at a knitting retreat playing with, well, string? It seemed to us that they were the same, and the first whiff of an unfair bias wafted through the air.

  A few days later, when I was back home, my husband and I were in the car listening to a really popular radio show called Ideas. It’s a show about all manner of things. Every week they explore a different topic in contemporary thought. Religion, culture, the humanities—that week, the topic was golf. Now, I don’t give much of a rat’s arse about golf, but I have to tell you that even from the perspective of a nongolfer, who doesn’t know or associate with many golfers, this was really interesting and entertaining. The whole show was poems and stories about golf and interviews with people and their relationship with golf. They spoke compellingly about the role golf had in their lives. The relationships they had formed because of golf, the friendships that existed only because they played golf. They talked about traveling from course to course and the power and personal fulfillment that they found in becoming good at golf. One man spoke beautifully about how golf had taught him that there is always more to learn, that just when he thinks he knows it all, there’s another course, another club, another shot or stroke, and that in playing golf he had discovered a great deal about himself and the sort of person he was. Another gentleman spoke about how a new set of clubs and a trip to Scotland to golf on a historic course had been almost a spiritual journey for him. A poet spoke of his pursuit of the perfect game. Joe and I listened to people talk about the economy of golf, their pride in golfing well. They said that golf had its own culture and language that was unique to them, and it was at that moment that I turned to Joe and said, “Is it just me?”

  “No” replied Joe. “You could substitute ‘knitting’ for ‘golf’ all the way through that.”

  “Then why aren’t there radio shows about knitting?” I asked, and I didn’t get much of an answer. Maybe he didn’t have one, or maybe he just knows when not to get me started. We journeyed in silence for a while then, listening to the show about golf, and when it was over, I asked Joe why he thought golf got so much air time. Not just radio shows, I said; “It’s on TV.”

  “I don’t know why, honey, but for starters, I think a lot more people golf than knit. It’s just more popular, and you can’t fault the media for responding to that.”

  “Fair enough,” I replied, but my heart wasn’t in it, and the wheels kept turning.

  When I got home, I couldn’t let
it go. I had gotten a whiff of bias that matched the one that had wafted through the air at the knitting retreat, and I wanted facts. Pure numbers to support or refute what I was thinking. How much more popular than knitting was golf; were the attention and respect justified? Several hours (and two glasses of wine) later, I was sitting stunned at the computer. It had taken me a while to work it out, but I had my numbers, or at least the most reliable numbers I could glean with a high-speed connection. Combining information from the Professional Golfers’ Association, the National Golf Federation, and the Royal Canadian Golf Association, it seemed about 30 million North Americans golf to any degree, and only about 6 million golf more than twenty-five times a year. Hunting up the knitting statistics was harder. Much harder. (I ignored that whiff again.) When I’d combined media sources and the Craft Yarn Council, several industry magazine statistics, and a couple of other things and averaged them out, the result was enough to knock your merino off your needles.

  Fifty million knitters, or at least people who knew how to knit.

  I had to make a conscious effort to keep my mouth from hanging open. I printed the page of data and stomped back to Joe. “More people knit than golf,” I said, slapping the paper on the table. “Like, twice as many.” I tried to make a facial expression that went with what I was feeling. I failed. I was trying too many emotions at once. Ablaze, bothered, competitive, defensive—I could have come up with one for every letter of the alphabet. I stared at my husband expectantly, like there was something he was supposed to say.

  “Are you sure?” he said, taking the paper from the table and beginning to peruse the data.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I snapped back. I couldn’t believe the whole thing. Even if the numbers weren’t reliable (I had found one source that defined a “golfer” as anyone who had ever golfed, and one of the knitting ones called a knitter “anyone who knew how to knit”), they still showed a trend. More knitters than golfers. I thought the whole thing was bizarre. I thought about how many golf magazines and books there were at the bookstore. Way more than knitting, an obscene number more, and the knitting section was always tucked away somewhere untidy and lumped in with crochet and quilting. I was sitting there, steaming, and Joe tried to offer explanations.