At Knit's End (18 page)

You can feel your heart stall for a second when you see a moth.

When you moved to another city, the lady who owns the yarn shop in your old neighborhood had her car repossessed.

 

For every problem there is a solution
which is simple, clean and wrong.

— H
ENRY
L
OUIS
M
ENCKEN

H
aving discovered that I made a critical error knitting the cap sleeves of a sweater, I sat down and had a little think about it. The answer came to me quickly. (Perhaps too quickly.) Because the problem was that the shoulder parts of the sleeves were now too big, I realized that I could simply add more room to the shoulder area of the front and back. It was beautiful in its simplicity, and I didn't have to reknit the sleeves.

I am working toward accepting that I apparently missed my calling. I should be knitting football uniforms. The thing is perfect for a linebacker.

 

Nothing deters a good man from
doing what is honorable.

— S
ENECA

B
eing a knitting mother leads to certain challenges. It is difficult to find the time to knit, it is hard to keep toddlers from pulling the needles from your knitting, and it is even harder to keep a new baby from spitting up on the new blanket you made. The hardest thing, however, the most certain challenge for a knitting mother, is trying to make your kids be good for two hours in a yarn shop.

I will remember that desperate times call for desperate measures, and that bribing a kid with money or candy can be honorable if you do it right.

 

If we see you smoking
we will assume you are on fire
and take appropriate action.

— D
OUGLAS
A
DAMS

P
eople knit for their own reasons, but some of the most intense knitters I know are the ones who used it to help them quit smoking. It's a perfect plan, really; knitting keeps your hands busy, and it is relaxing and repetitive enough to hold off most of the urges to smoke. You get to spend your cigarette money on yarn, a powerful motivator, and two weeks after you quit you have four sweaters, three hats, and several really big afghans.

Knitting can be a useful tool for self-improvement.

 

I adore simple pleasures.
They are the last refuge of the complex.

— O
SCAR
W
ILDE

L
ots of knitters knit washcloths, and lots of other knitters make fun of them for it. Simple or fancy, these humble little squares of cotton appear by the millions in some knitters' homes, along with patterns for them by the hundreds. Knitters who love them say they are the softest cloths you can get, they can be made to match the bathroom perfectly, and they are a gentle exfoliator … making you a younger-looking knitter. These knitters claim they love trying out different stitches on something small, and that they get a kick out of a cheap, easy project.

Before I mock the simple art of washcloth knitting, I will consider how good it would feel to finish four projects in a day.

 

You know you
knit too much when …

You hear that a friend is
going though a difficult
time, and even though this
friend doesn't knit, you
consider dropping yarn off
at her house to make her
feel better.

 

The art of war is simple enough. Find out
where your enemy is. Get at him as soon
as you can. Strike him as hard as you can,
and keep moving.

— U
LYSSES
S. G
RANT

T
he one time I found a moth in my stash, some thought that I overreacted. I cleaned, vacuumed, froze, baked, or microwaved every skein of yarn that I had; threw away anything I could possibly live without. Then I put all the yarn that had been anywhere near the moth into baggies and placed them in quarantine. My best and most precious yarn was placed in a deep freezer, dedicated solely to wool storage. The rest of the yarn entered a strict surveillance program, which has continued for years. Even though I have never seen another moth, I have not lessened my state of constant vigilance.

There is no way to overreact to a moth.

 

Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.

— J
IM
H
ORNING

I
was teaching a knitting class and had started the group with the most basic scarf project in the world. The pattern is so simple that I will give it to you here. Browse the yarn shop until you find a worsted-weight yarn you adore. On 5mm needles, cast on 40 stitches, then knit every stitch of every row until your yarn is almost gone or you think the scarf is long enough. Cast off.

The class sat diligently, knitting every stitch of every row until the hour was up, then packed up their things and left.

An hour later I got a phone call from one of the scarf knitters in the class. “I'm so glad you are still there,” she said. “I forgot my pattern. Can you fax it to me? I want to keep working on my scarf.”

Everyone learns at her own pace. I can resist the urge to tease the stragglers.

 

The road of excess leads to
the palace of wisdom.

— W
ILLIAM
B
LAKE

5
reasons to hoard yarn:

If you get enough of it, yarn can act as house insulation.

Yarns get discontinued. Think about that, then buy accordingly.

Nobody is ever going to understand how seriously you take knitting if you don't have lots of yarn as proof.

Yarn has absolutely no expiration date.

Hairless cats appeared in Toronto in 1963. What if that happens to sheep? What if it spreads? What if all that is left in the world is what you have?

I will not try to limit my yarn supply any more than an artist tries to limit his paints.

 

I became insane, with long intervals of
horrible sanity!

— E
DGAR
A
LLAN
P
OE

D
ear Designer whose name I shall not mention to be polite, If you think that I need to start seeing a therapist you could have just told me. There was no need to conduct this charade. You knew I would buy this pattern, you knew that the yarn would be discontinued, you knew that there would be no way that I would ever be able to achieve gauge with any other yarn in the world no matter how many I tried, and you knew that this would turn me into a delusional raving maniac. I give up. I am going to make a king-size afghan out of the hundreds of swatches I have knit during the time I spent working on it and forget that I ever saw this sweater.