Knitting Rules! (36 page)

My first sweater was a nightmare. I had a boyfriend and we had been dating (actually, going steady, which at the time seemed a very important distinction) for about six months. Teen relationships, I realize now, are counted in dog years, with more time passing for the teens than for everybody else. Therefore, a month is like a year and we had been
going out for six months — we had celebrated our half-anniversary. (Now that I've been married for so long it seems stupid to celebrate a mere half year, but at the time it was hopelessly romantic.) So, I felt our relationship was solid enough that it was time to knit him a sweater.

I went through my stack of books, magazines, and leaflets, in search of the perfect thing. This phase can't be rushed. Sweaters need to be imagined, dreamed over. I'm forever taking hours with this part because I actually know what sweater I want. I can see it in my mind; it's just a matter of finding the pattern that I'm imagining. (I can't tell you how difficult it is to find a designer who's thinking just the way I am.) When I had the right plan, I trotted off to the yarn store for the yarn that the pattern suggested. (I told you I was young.) I found it, and after realizing that it was not only priced out of reach of my discount-store-cashier paycheck, I picked another yarn. The pattern called for 16 balls, so that's how many I bought.

When I got home, I enthusiastically pulled out the pattern and the yarn, piled the balls up around me and gleefully cast on, imagining not just the wonder of the sweater, but also the wonder of how much my boyfriend would love me when I gave it to him. Knitting a sweater takes time and for my more-than-six-foot-tall boyfriend, that time was going to be significant.

As I toiled away, I thought only lovely thoughts. How handsome he would look. How grateful he would be. How he would keep it close to him forever and when we were old he would sit on the porch swing and wear the sweater and our grandchildren would sit beside him in the evening light (they would be visiting us to catch fireflies in
the garden) and lean against him (still ruggedly handsome, even in his old age) and would say “Grampa, tell us the sweater story.” And he would. He would tell them it was when I knit him that sweater that he knew I was the love of his life. That I had knit him hundreds of sweaters since, and even a couple of vests, but it was this one, this first one that he loved most, since as he had unwrapped it and seen its soft blue stitches, as he ran his fingers over the wool, he had realized it wasn't just a sweater; it was the beginning of the rest of his wonderful life.

That's what I thought while I knit it. The sweater was going to have a life of love and glory … except it seemed just a smidge big. Truth be told, I had purchased chunky-weight yarn when the pattern called for worsted, and was too inexperienced to know the peril my mortal soul was in. To compound the problem, my youthful idea of gauge consisted of using the needles called for in the pattern without regard for the type of yarn.

This was very wrong (and resulted in me knitting not just an enormous sweater, but also one so stiff that the pieces wouldn't fold), but I was blinded by love. Plus, he was a big guy. What was the trouble with having a sweater that ended up a little big? It would be
comfortable and cozy, like a big hug. (Looking back, I hardly recognize myself.)

Then there was the problem with the neck. It was a little crooked. (It was a little crooked exactly the way that the Godfather was a bit of a criminal.) I thought about going back, but it had been really hard to do the first time and I thought it probably wouldn't matter once I got the neck stitches picked up.
Note to self:
If, when you go to pick up the stitches, if you get the 24 the pattern suggests on one side and a scant 13 on the other, this is a good indication that the neck isn't going to “block out” (the other solution I had in the back of my mind, which too was dreadfully wrong).

I plugged on though, even when one side of a sleeve sort of puckered in a strange way. I tugged at that quite a lot, but I was sure no one would be able to see it if he kept his arms at his sides. I tried to pucker the other sleeve so it would at least match, but it gaped at me without remorse. The other problem (not that it was exactly a problem, because what can stand in the way of true love?) was that I had needed to go back to the yarn shop twice for more yarn (why on earth the fact that the sweater was taking triple the amount of yarn the pattern called for wasn't a tip-off that it was going to be triple the correct size is a question I still can't answer) and that the sweater had now cost me more than three months of part-time income at a crappy job. What we do for love.

When it was done, I was really proud. Too proud, now that I think about how it actually looked. When I tried it on, the arms dragged on the floor (one of them less so than the other; the puckering subtracted some length),
and the hem reached almost to the ground. I took it off by letting it fall down and then stepping out of the left side of the badly unbalanced neckline. Still, I told myself, he was a big guy (Jabba the Hut would have drowned in that sweater) and it was the '80s. Oversize was in.

I folded it up, wrapped it in tissue paper, and presented it to my boyfriend with all the pomp and circumstance I could muster. I'll never forget the look on his face. At the time, I was sure it was awe. I'm still sure it was awe, actually. He took in the whole thing, declined to try it on, and three days later dumped me without so much as a nod in my general direction. I still feel bad about it. That was a lot of wool to kiss good-bye.

When I'm intimidated by the idea of a sweater, I use the concept of incrementalism to overcome whatever is flipping me out. I break down the thing and look at it only in parts. Often, once I look at it in pieces — only the individual pieces — I can pull myself together.

I sit down and read the pattern. Inevitably it says something like
Back: Cast on 89 stitches
. Easy. I can cast on. I cast on all the time. Heck, sometimes casting on
is the only part of a project I do! I know several ways to cast on and as long as I don't get bogged down trying to choose among them, I'm good to go.

Next?
Work K1, P1 ribbing for 4 inches.
Dude, I can knit and purl. Adeptly and in order. Bring it on.

Change to larger-size needles
… Okay, this could give me trouble. There was that time that I changed only one of the needles and the gauge of the sweater alternated in rows as I knit with one 4 mm and one 6 mm needle for the rest of the back of the sweater. It would've been a design feature except that I succeeded in switching both needles on the front and they were different sizes. Still, that was a particularly stunning bit of stupidity and I'm not likely to do that twice.

… and work in stockinette stitch until work measures 12 inches from cast-on edge.
The trickiest part here is finding a tape measure. Still, my husband has 12-inch feet and I can usually find him. I'll measure off his foot.

The pattern will go on (if it doesn't, that's a sign of a really, really bad pattern) and I'll go on reading it and soon I'll realize that it's not so bad, especially one bit at
a time. Sleeves are either tubes or vague triangles that you seam up, backs and fronts are based on squares — taken piece by piece, sweaters are easy.

• Casting on and off

• Knitting and purling

• Increasing and decreasing

• Sewing up seams (unless your sweater doesn't have any)

• Blocking

There will be some variations on these, but keep an open mind. Picking up stitches is still just knitting them, and increasing evenly across a row may require some thinking (or a calculator) but it's still just increasing. Even the most complicated knitting instruction in the world is (once you recover your equilibrium) just a combination of the skills above.

Emotionally speaking, I find I need a couple of other skills. Some stamina, for example, which is far, far different from patience, and has merits, as does the ability to do things one step at a time without being overwhelmed by the whole. Really, the one skill, knitterly or otherwise, that you can't learn while knitting is blocking. (Well, and sewing, but you can get out of that if you want to.)

In theater,
blocking
is when the director lays out all the movements and places for the actors. In knitting, it's much the same thing. You take all your pieces of knitting and lay them out, check the measurements on the pattern,
and then pin or smooth them to the suggested dimensions. Then, either steam the pieces in place after you pin them or pin them while they're still damp from a wash. Blocking can be a serious help to a knitter making up a sweater: it evens things out and lines up edges for sewing, that sort of thing. Knitters often think blocking is going to solve way more problems than it can, and I'm no exception. If I hear myself say “Do you think it will block out?” or “I'll fix it in the blocking,” it's a heads-up to me that whatever I'm talking about probably can't be solved by blocking.