Hooked for Life (13 page)

When I get in my more reclusive crafting jags, what I wish for is a yarn store that would deliver. Yeah, I know about Internet shopping and
all, but that takes a few days until the fiber is in my hands. What I really wish for is a place I could call up and say, “I need three skeins of 100 percent wool worsted weight in a dark blue,” and then someone would bring it by the same day. Maybe the delivery person would bring a couple of different choices, and I could take the one I wanted and send the others back. I would tip for that. I might even want that job—can you imagine the look of delight you would receive when you showed up on someone’s doorstep with the yarn she needs? You would be better loved than the ice-cream truck guy on a hot summer day!

The last yarn store idea I think would be cool has actually been attempted in the past, although it seems to me the company I am thinking of disappeared off the face of the earth with barely a splash. Think Mary Kay or Tupperware—home shopping party-plan yarn buying! Instead of a makeover, we party hosts would get the opportunity to swatch with new yarns, and we wouldn’t ever have any problems getting our friends to attend. A couple of yarny party games (Name this fiber! Guess what size hook this is!), some refreshments, some shopping, and a good time would be had by all.

Okay, yarn store owners, discuss among yourselves. They are calling my flight. I hope they have some recent magazines or it’s going to be a long ninety minutes.

A
lthough there is something satisfying about placing a hank of yarn on the umbrella swift and running it through the ball winder until it resembles a slightly fuzzy hockey puck, I am sometimes taken in by the siren song of a yarn that is sold in a center-pull skein. Many manufacturers allege that you can stick your finger into the exact middle of a commercially wound skein of yarn, pull out the end, and start crocheting away—no muss, no fuss. It saves time—you can get right to the crocheting part rather than getting sidetracked by the much less-amusing fiber preparation part. Machines can do everything, can’t they? They make these perfect little skeins that make our crocheting lives so much easier. (But think about this, if machines are so darned clever, why can’t they crochet?)

What I tend to get when I stick my finger in the exact center of a skein and yank out what I think is the end is a large glob of yarn barf.
Which I then have to sit and untangle, largely eliminating whatever time I thought I was saving by skipping the ball-winder step. Sometimes the barf blob is pretty easy to untangle and tease out into submission. But if it is large, I end up wrapping it around the outside of the skein, again sort of missing the point of the center-pull skein in the first place. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of time to get the tangle out, and I start muttering some very unkind words under my breath—and of course the higher my stress level gets, the worse I get at the gentle art of yarn detangling, making the process take even longer. Sometimes I give up in frustration and start crocheting from the outside end, which makes the skein wobble away or get caught in the project bag as you pull off more yarn. I rationalize that the time spent chasing the skein is less than the time I might have spent untangling the yarn blob. I almost never resort to scissors—I hate knots in my yarn more than I hate wasting time sorting out yarn barf.

If center-pull skeins are so frustrating, why then do I even try? What draws me back again and again, wanting to believe that this time, this time I will reach in, pull out the end, and be crocheting within seconds of selecting the skein from the stash? Hasn’t experience taught me anything? Am I a glutton for punishment? Will I never learn? The answer is the rush I get from that rare time, maybe one time in ten, that it does work. I feel so enormously clever when I pull out the start of the yarn on the first try—it’s like winning the lottery. Yes, I know that the vast majority of times that I buy a lottery ticket will result in my holding a worthless piece of paper, yet the occasional win of a few dollars keeps me coming back for more. Intellectually, I understand that statistics tell me that I would be more successful rewinding every skein of yarn that I work with, just as I would probably be in better financial shape if I never again bought a lottery ticket but put those couple of dollars a month into some
sort of high-yield financial instrument. But playing it safe isn’t nearly as much fun. No risks, no reward. No lightning strike of good luck, no rush. So I will continue to walk on the wild side and gamble on the center-pull skein. I am just a rebel that way.

M
y daughter (and sisters, and anyone else who has been in the same room with me and a film or television program at the same time) has gotten quite used to my yelling at the screen every so often when I spot an egregious anomaly. Part of it, I suppose, is due to my odd work history in which I spent a lot of time making costumes for Broadway, film, and television, a lot of time buying and selling vintage clothing and textiles, and then a lot of time designing knit and crochet patterns. Anyway, what is guaranteed to send me right over the edge these days is when a character in some film or television show is supposed to be doing one craft or another and is quite obviously doing something else entirely.

There are people around the world who look for continuity errors for fun (Look! The glass on the table is full! Now it’s empty! Now it’s full! Now it’s halfway! Now it’s gone!!!) and post about them on the Internet—my
thing has always been costumes. I do not want to see the zippers in clothing that alleges to be three hundred years old. I do not want to see 1960s clothing on a set that is supposed to be in the 1940s. Do your research, people! My particular pet peeve has always been white Lycra tights in films set in the colonial era. I invariably yell something like, “Too white, too fitted, and they didn’t have freaking Capezio in 1776!” Not that the characters answer—if they did, that would just be creepy.

I don’t remember being bugged by this so much in years past, but now it seems that not a month goes by that I don’t catch a crochet/knitting-related jumble onscreen. Perhaps it is because as needlework has had a recent surge of popularity, writers turn more characters into knitters or crocheters. But for God’s sake, if they have a consultant on a medical show to make sure the actors don’t speak like complete nimrods, even if their standards of medical care would lead to lawsuits and death (not necessarily in that order), would it really blow the budget to check in with a needleworker somewhere and say, “Hey, crocheting … is that the thing with one hook or the thing with two needles?”

And I know I am not the only person who notices this stuff. There are umpteen million needleworkers in the United States alone. Was I the only one yelling at a recent episode of
Drake and Josh,
in which a mother and daughter said they were knitting, but the prop department had basically stuck two knitting needles and some loose yarn along the edge of a granny square afghan and the mother sort of flailed it around? Helloooooooo … not only was it not probable, but it was pretty darn ugly!

When I was in the costumers union in NYC, a good friend and I thought it would be a swell idea to offer our services as needlework consultants to film sets. We had experience as both crafters and on-set technicians, so we figured we could supply a range of prop and costume pieces that were actually accurate and save everyone time and aggravation. Need
a half-finished sock to put in your character’s hand? We could do that. Need a crocheted scarf because the character said she was a crocheter? We could do that, too. We could even go on-set and give the actors enough of a clue about the hand motions so that they could fake their way through a crafting scene … although it certainly would be a lot more fun for all of us if they hired crocheters to play crocheters on TV.

I could just see it now. “Okay, Vanna, you are going to crochet throughout this scene to add to the dramatic tension … Okay, cut! Vanna, I said CUT!”

“Not until the end of the row, darn it, I will lose track!” Or, “Hey, Vanna, we are going back to the start of the scene. Rip out the four rows you just did, for continuity please.”

“Rip them out? Are you insane? They are perfect!”

Then there is the speed issue. On
Grey’s Anatomy,
there was an episode in which a doctor knit and finished a man’s sweater in a day, and had time enough left over to wear it for a while, and then give it to her boyfriend. Yes, it was on largish needles, not a complicated pattern, and the character was supposed to be an experienced knitter. But come on, the finishing alone would have taken a good hour and didn’t she actually have to go be a doctor for at least part of the day? Seriously? It was kind of cool that the sweater was part of the plot and all, but couldn’t it have been at least as realistic as the medicine?

Actually, I think you can tell when there is a dyed-in-the-wool crafter in the writers’room instead of someone who read an article saying needlework was trendy and turned a character into a crocheter. On
The Suite Life of Zach and Cody,
there was a subplot that a rumor was running around the middle school that a romantically involved couple was going to move far away to raise llamas. Every time this got repeated, one of the boys scoffed at the idea “because everyone knows the real money is in alpacas.” I still
laugh every time I see that episode because I just know a needleworker in the writer’s room did the happy dance that week because she got some actual fiber jokes into the show. Good for her, whoever she is.

Oh, and for the props person who might be reading this, crochet is the one with one hook.

I
have been a devotee of playing with fiber since I was seven years old—and that is far enough in the past that I don’t quite want to say how long ago it was. Suffice it to say that I have crocheted, knitted, and needlepointed my way through many swings in any one craft’s social perception. I’ve been steadfast in my refusal to follow the dilettantes who put down their hooks and needles when a craft isn’t hip anymore.

Currently, I suffer discrimination when crocheting. However, the perpetrators aren’t the ones you might suspect. I have been working on a blanket for Project Linus recently, striped in vibrant blues and greens in response to the local chapter’s request for less traditionally girly colors. It is soft, cushy, and bright—and it is crocheted. When I work on it in the waiting room of my daughter’s dance class, no one says a word other than to comment on how pretty it is. When I pull it out at the local yarn store’s sit and knit night, however, I can see the eyes roll and
the teeth grit as soon as it become evident what project I will work on that night.

“That again?” says one woman who has umpteen unfinished knitted things in her bulging project bag. “Isn’t that … crochet?” says another as she looks down her nose and shudders. Here among my fellow fiber addicts, where I think I should feel completely comfortable in my choice of craft, I feel the sting of rejection. It is as if I have whipped out a cheeseburger and fries in the middle of a vegetarian restaurant. Often I am tempted to stuff the blanket back in my bag and pull out a pair of complicated socks knit on five double pointed needles just to fit in and prove that I am a “real” knitter. And some nights, when I am too tired to buck public opinion, that is just what I do.

In the last few years we have heard all we ever wanted to about knitting. The media blasted the same headlines over and over, “Knitting is the new yoga! Knitting isn’t for grandmothers anymore! Knitwear leads the fashion trends!” I knitted when it was trendy and I knitted when it wasn’t… the only upside that I can see to the media trumpets is that people don’t look at me quite so oddly when I knit on the bus.

But I feel on some levels that the knitters jumped onto the cool kids’bus and have tried to lock the doors behind them to keep the other crafters out. Are they so insecure in their newfound societal acceptance that they don’t want to muddy the waters? Is there only so much fiber tolerance in the world? Is it really that they can’t reliably do a double crochet and are jealous? I just don’t know.

I find it especially odd, because at the most basic level, crochet and knitting both are all about fiddling with string to make something beautiful. So why the competition? Why don’t people do both? And why do I feel compelled to hide my crochet habit when I am outnumbered? I find myself sneaking
Interweave Crochet
into the bottom of
my stack at the local yarn store underneath the knitting magazines. If pressed, I might even blurt out that I was buying it for a friend.

Craft, like medicine, has become increasingly specialized. Years ago, craft magazines catered to crocheters and knitters both, as well as those who did embroidery or needlepoint. There weren’t different magazines for each craft. You paged through
McCall’s Needlework and Crafts,
or any of the popular women’s magazines, and made whatever appealed to you. We weren’t neurosurgeons; we were general practitioners—solving whatever problem was put in front of us with the best tools we had at hand.

Like living through other trends, I am trying not to get carried away on the specialist wave. I make what I like, when I like it, and am happy enough to knit or crochet (or weave or spin or needlepoint) if that’s what I feel like doing at the moment. I got faked out by the surge of knitterly acceptance and need to get back to my “do what I feel like” roots.

But crocheters, knitters, weavers lend me your ears! Can’t we all just get along? I really need to finish that blanket …

T
he intersection of craft and technology always amazes me. When you come right down to it, you can’t get much less technology dependent than the basics of crochet. You need something stringlike and a bent piece of something (although if you don’t have that second item, you could probably get a fair bit of something made with your bent finger). So yarn + implement = craft, and sometimes, = art. It is the human input that makes crochet beautiful. Of course, in a lot of technological developments, human input = operator error. Human quirks are to be avoided rather than treasured.