At Knit's End (6 page)

Normally timid dressers (even male ones) will often wear a wild hat. Your inner artist can be fully released through hat knitting without the fear that it will never be worn.

 

Whoever said money can't buy happiness
simply didn't know where to go shopping.

— B
O
D
EREK

T
here is a segment of my stash that I cannot explain. If you knew me, and you looked at this yarn, you would think that I had gone to the yarn store drunk. There is pink chenille (I wouldn't be caught dead in this pink, and I hate chenille), there is heavy cotton (cotton is my enemy; knitting it makes my hands hurt), and so on. I offer this only by way of explanation. It turns out that I will buy any yarn, even yarn I will never use, if the store discounts it by more than 50 percent.

Do not be tricked. Not all yarn is meant to be yours, no matter how good a deal it is.

 

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

— H
ERBERT
S
PENCER

M
y mother is an avid garage sale shopper. She enjoys finding little treasures and getting good deals. She loves a $2 lamp the way that I love knitting. She called me one weekend after making her neighborhood rounds and described some yarn she had seen at a sale. “It was a lovely green,” she said, “and the label said 100 percent Shetland wool… there were 12 skeins for $4.” The world swirled around me excitedly. “Did you get it?” I asked, suddenly understanding completely what my mother sees in garage sales. “No,” she replied, “I wasn't sure if it was good wool.”

Educate your family and friends. Teach them this: there is no such thing as “bad” $4 wool.

 

You know you
knit too much when …

You find yourself stalking
a man in the grocery store,
not because he's really
good-looking, but because
he is wearing an Aran
sweater with a cable you
are trying to work out.

 

I have long been of the opinion that if
work were such a splendid thing the rich would have
kept more of it for themselves.

— B
RUCE
G
ROCOTT

K
nitting has many rewards. Sometimes it is the joy of wondrous creativity, of taking yarn and needles and making a new and beautiful thing out of nothing. Sometimes it is figuring out something tricky and clever, solving a problem with your wits and your wool. There is even the joy of clothing your loved ones or wrapping a baby in a blanket you made yourself. Sometimes, though, it is the pride of having slogged through 26 inches of plain boring garter stitch, row after mind-numbingly plain row, and coming out the other side with your sanity and desire to remain a knitter intact.

I will pride myself on my stamina as a knitter.

 

He who would travel happily
must travel light.

— A
NTOINE DE
S
AINT
-E
XUPERY

I
t used to be that when I traveled, I packed lightly enough that I would have room left in my suitcase to bring back souvenir yarn purchases. Then I met a brilliant woman who was shopping wholeheartedly at a sheep and wool festival, and I kidded her about needing to buy another suitcase to get it all home. “No way,” she said. “Tomorrow before I get on the plane I'm going to mail it all to myself.”

Respect your fellow travelers. They have much to teach you.

 

They're here for a long, long time.
They'll have to make the best of things,
it's an uphill climb.

— S
HERWOOD
S
CHWARTZ
AND
G
EORGE
W
YLE
,
“Ballad of Gilligan's Island”

I
magine this: You are shipwrecked on an island with only the knitting that you had with you on the boat.

When you are done knitting it, and have nothing more to knit, do you unravel the work and start again, just to have something to knit? If so, you are a process knitter. You knit for the pleasure of knitting.

If you imagine that, upon finishing, you put on the sweater and go look for wild grasses that you could knit into a tent or a hammock, you are a product knitter. You knit for the pleasure of the finished item.

I will respect my type and pack for boat trips accordingly, because you never know.

 

Just say no to drugs.

— N
ANCY
R
EAGAN

N
orth America spends billions of dollars each year giving us the message that some drugs are a slippery slope. One taste of a seemingly harmless substance can lead to wrack and ruin for some people. Yet, no one ever tells a knitter that one taste of the luxury fiber qiviut can lead to an unreasonable desire to stalk the wild musk ox under the Arctic moon, trying to get just a little bit more.

I will be careful to limit my exposure to exotic and fabulous fibers. It's a slippery slope.

 

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

— R
ALPH
N
ADER

I
cannot count the number of times that after using the “long-tail” method to cast on, I have picked up the tail and begun knitting with it instead of the working yarn. Luckily, this is a mistake that you realize pretty quickly. Once, however, after finishing one ball of yarn and intending to begin another, I very, very carefully spliced the working yarn to the long tail. You don't forget that as quickly.

I will remember, while I am undoing my mistake, that the ability to make a really sturdy splice is a double-edged sword.

 

People seem to enjoy things more
when they know a lot of other people
have been left out of the pleasure.

— R
USSELL
B
AKER

A
t my favorite yarn shop there was the best yarn ever. It was soft, it was cheap, and it moved through a range of colors in each skein, providing me with endless entertainment. I made a shawl from it, and the shawl became one of my favorites. I was very proud of it, but I showed it to no other knitters. The yarn had been discontinued and I couldn't afford to buy it all, but I knew that if my knitting friends discovered it, they would buy it and there would be less left for me. I purchased the remaining stock over the course of a few months, then showed off my shawl. I'm not proud of what I did, but the important thing is that I got all the yarn.

I will strive to be a more generous person, but I might not start with this yarn.

 

I have noticed that the people who
are late are often so much jollier than the people
who have to wait for them.

— E.V. L
UCAS

I
f the world were run by knitters, then it would be laid out with bars and libraries next to yarn shops so that your mate would be happy to pop next door and wait for you.

Until knitters run the world, I will accept that asking my mate to drive me to the yarn shop might not be to my advantage.

 

You know you
knit too much when …

You discover that the
airline you booked your
flight with does not allow
knitting needles on board
and you seriously consider
changing carriers, because
you don't know whether
you can sit for seven hours
without knitting.

 

Let us watch well our beginnings,
and results will manage themselves.

— A
LEXANDER
C
LARK

T
here are several methods for ensuring that you cast on the right number of stitches. Some knitters use stitch markers placed every 10 stitches; others make notes on a piece of paper at regular intervals. I cast on the approximate number, then count them as many times as it takes to get the right number twice.

Sometimes this is a long process. I will remember that if I choose to make things difficult for myself I can't complain.

 

The man who goes farthest is generally
the one who is willing to do and dare.
The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.

— D
ALE
C
ARNEGIE

T
he “sure thing” in knitting is a myth. There is no way, none — even if you have knit a thousand things, a million yards, or a billion socks — that your knitting will not find a way to punish you if you dare to get cocky.

Saying out loud things such as “I know this yarn so well, I don't need to do a swatch” or “I never use a pattern” invites disaster. Even if your gauge is perfect or you remember the pattern with total recall, cockiness will not be tolerated by the celestial powers that rule knitting.

If I am foolish enough to be arrogant about my knitting, I will understand when it spontaneously bursts into flames.

 

Truly, to tell lies is not honorable;
But when the truth entails tremendous ruin,
To speak dishonorably is pardonable.

— S
OPHOCLES

T
here is always something redeeming about a knitted piece. Perhaps it is not the color, or pattern, or form … but there must be something. Nothing knitted can be truly horrible. When I am asked my opinion of a piece of knitting that I truly regard as ugly, I do not lie; I find the truths that I can tell without hurting the feelings of the knitter. My favorite is, “Wow, that looks like a lot of work!” Or, “My goodness, that's such a personal work of art.”

There is no such thing as worthless knitting, simply knitting that is really not to your taste.

 

Do not worry about your difficulties
in mathematics. I can assure you
mine are still greater.

— A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

I
failed 10th grade math four times. I hate mathematics so much that the very thought of a return to it in any form is enough to make me want to run away to Belize, screaming all the way. It is a deeply bitter truth that knitting has math in it. Division to place increases, addition to enlarge, subtraction to shrink, even some multiplication to work out how many times a Fair Isle motif will fit across a row. If you want to be a knitter, there is going to be some math. It is incredible to me that the very same computations that made me want to claw my eyes out in math class are completely worthwhile in knitting.

Why couldn't they have used knitting to teach me math in 10th grade?

 

Marriage is a wonderful institution,
but who would want to live
in an institution?

— H. L. M
ENCKEN

T
he best reason for a knitter to marry is that you can't teach the cat to be impressed when you finish a lace scarf.

Even if he doesn't know a cable from a bobble, my mate can be my biggest cheerleader.