Knitting Rules! (35 page)
Authors: Stephanie Pearl–McPhee
I love this about sweaters. I love that they're a big decision. Sweaters aren't like whipping off a pair of mittens
or a whack of socks. Other knitting can be forgiven for flaws: a hat with a weird top is eccentric, a pair of baggy mittens is still functional. A shawl with bad gauge still drapes. Sweaters, though, are really hanging it on the line. A sweater with a bad gauge, a weird neckline, and a baggy front has no charm. It's just bad clothes, and herein lies the rub, the reason that so many people â including me, from time to time â are scared off by sweaters from the word go. Sweaters are clothes, not just knitting, and because there is more to them, there's more that can go wrong. A bad scarf can still be charming on some level and the consequences will never make your breasts look saggy, but a bad sweater has impact.
Ten Reasons to Knit a Sweater
It's a commitment. Socks and hats are fun and, in their elevated forms, can certainly be artful, but sweaters are like a marriage (or at least an engagement).
It's an upgrade from an accessory, and a really good sweater can become like a good friend.
Once you get the hang of it, knitting your own sweaters makes it possible for you to have garments that actually fit, and sleeves the actual length of your arms. Realizing this was a big deal for me, considering i usually have an urge to phone commercial sweater producers and ask them if monkeys are their sizing models.
You could spend a lifetime exploring all the variations on sweaters: raglan in pieces, raglan in the round, top-down seamless, bottom-up seamless, cardigan, steeked Norwegian, fine wool English jumpers, Irish Arans, the weird thing you invented when you thought you were doing a cap sleeve but got two pages of the pattern stuck together.
There's a style for everyone. There isn't anybody who doesn't look good in a sweater. Admittedly, finding the right sweater can be a bit of a process, but at least you get to knit the experiments.
When a sweater goes wrong, it's much more spectacular than a wayward scarf. You can laugh about a hat that came out weird for maybe 10 minutes, but an unexpectedly “unique” sweater never stops being funny (once you work through the period of grief and shock).
A sweater's a big canvas. If you get an urge to knit an intarsia hockey player onto something you want to wear, a sweater is just about the only thing that's going to work. (Don't laugh. I'm a Canadian. When I was a kid, everybody i knew had a hockey player sweater. Well, except for Renee. She was lucky. Hers had a ballerina.)
A baby sweater done in chunky yarn is the fastest high a knitter can achieve.
A sweater project offers variety: the challenge of picking up stitches and working the decreases, the almost meditative calm of the plain bits for the body and sleeves, and that familiar urge to strangle yourself with a circular needle when you realize you missed the instruction “at the same time” and the sleeve is 10 inches too long. Good times.
A sweater affords the scientific-minded a chance to experience the phenomenon of the Knitting Black Hole. At some point in your work (although you have definitely knit 34 rows since you first noticed), you stop making progress. You knit and knit but the sweater doesn't get bigger. Then, mysteriously, you are released and discover that, even though you've been obsessively measuring every two rows, it's suddenly five inches too long. If you figure this out, let me know. It makes me nuts.