We must have been at Corrie’s house, in the living room, some evening after supper. She was knitting a baby blanket, her favorite project, on the couch or in an armchair; I still remember the constant motion of her wrist (she knit English style and threw the yarn with her right hand) as she talked.
“Get size 8 needles,” she said, “that’s the kind you’ll use the most. Then get medium-weight yarn; it should have a 4 on the label. And pick a fun color.”
“Like pink?” I wondered. “Or yellow? Or the kind that has lots of different colors?”
“Anything you want—just pick a fun color.”
You Want Me To Do What?
In their April 2020 #StarMakeroftheMonth challenge, Lovecrafts posed a deliciously thought-provoking question: If you were introducing a beginner to your favorite craft, what advice would you give them? The first thing that popped into my head went along these lines:
“Start with worsted weight yarn—bulky’s going to be too thick to manage and fingering weight (that’s what we use for socks) is going to be too small. Actually, sport or DK would be fine too; but you’ll use worsted weight more at first, so get that. Then get needles—7’s or 8’s should be fine, it depends how tightly you knit—they come in wood, bamboo, nickel, or aluminum…”
Then I stopped. When did you learn all these things? Corrie didn’t tell you any of this—not at first. All these fundamentals, absolute basics in my mind, seemed at first like things I’ve always known about knitting. But Corrie didn’t tell me that there were six different weights of yarn, or that readily available needle sizes range from 000 to 17, or that they come in every hard material one can think of other than solid granite (why, how forgetful of me to leave steel, plastic, acrylic, carbon fiber, ivory, and milk protein off of the list above!); sometimes I wonder how much she actually knew about it herself, at the time. However, she told me exactly what I needed to know for that moment at the start of my knitting journey: size 8 needles and yarn with a 4 on the label. And, with 13-year-old wisdom that still astonishes me, she told me to pick a fun color.
No Joke
Later that week I returned to Corrie’s house in triumph, bringing a pair of yellow metal straights and 2 skeins of acrylic worsted in variegated shades of chocolate, taupe, aqua, and teal. (I did ask, in my ambitious curiosity, what those needles connected with string (circulars) were for—”Big blankets,” was her reply, all the while cabling with a stitch holder.)
“It may be hard to see your stitches with all those colors,” she went on, “but I think you can do it.” And we were off.
My mother paid Corrie $7 an hour, once a week (was it really for four years?) to teach me everything she knew about knitting. Every Friday afternoon I bundled my tangle of yarn, needles, project, and pattern sheet under my arm and ran down the street or through the backwoods path to her house, where we sat in the living room or on the front porch and I learned how to purl, increase, decrease, yarnover, cable, and use DPNs. (Corrie did eventually, gently, convert me to using solid yarns, but those 2 skeins of acrylic stayed with us far longer than I would ever have expected; in fact, I still had half a skein left 5 years ago, when I donated it during a big move.) As I’ve stated in my bio, there were tears. With all the calm that she exhibited, I’m certain Corrie expected all of them.
She expected them. Was that why she told me to pick a fun color? In my marvelous sagacity, gleaned through more than a decade of knitting, I would never, ever teach a grade-school knitter to knit parallelograms in a variegated yarn. She won’t be able to see her stitches; it’ll frustrate her! But Corrie obviously knew that; she also knew, I think, that I’d be frustrated anyway. Parallelograms are no joke (and I’m not joking when I say that). She wanted me to love knitting as much as she did, but there were tears to get me through first; and to do that she had to share just enough of the joy, the excitement, the fun of it, to make me want to come back for more. And she succeeded.
Serious Fun
One of the most popular questions in the craft universe today is, “Are you a process knitter or a product knitter?” All the cool kids, it seems, are process knitters; while I am an unabashed product knitter. (Now would be a good time to mention that I’ve never been cool.) Perfectionist through and through, I derive inordinate glee from even stitches, invisible seams, and custom fits.
Almost 2 years ago design became a paying job for me, and my hobby was now work. For the first several months I took every possible opportunity to wear myself out with sketching, swatching, researching, and sample knitting. (No prizes for guessing what effect this had on my hands and on my nervous system—a great orator like Seneca or Patrick Henry might have called it burnout.) Knitting became a matter of finish before that next deadline—and perfect, mind you! At some point it occurred to me that this was not how the Good Lord intended the whole thing to work.
I inaugurated the practice of having a ‘rest’ project, to be broken out once a week. My family celebrates the Lord’s Day from 7:00 PM on Saturday to 7:00 PM on Sunday; Saturday evening, the samples and the swatches are put away for the next 24 hours—I try not to even let myself look at them—and out comes the rest project. If I knit, that’s the project. In fact, the last few months, I’ve found myself bringing it out on weekdays; on movie nights, during games of Splendor, and now on Zoom calls.
All of a sudden, knitting is fun again.
Out there in the world, the Lord’s Day is usually regarded as a prison curfew. Imagine not being able to do whatever you want for a whole day! I find that what we really mean when we say this is, Why can’t I work on Sunday?
Saying it out loud, writing it down in the plain light of day, shows just how ridiculous it really is. We are given a whole day in seven for rest, for worship, for feasting and celebration (study the Sabbath festivities of the Old Testament, if you don’t believe me); and we want to work?
It turns out that the rules for life are also rules for knitting (or any craft). The commands to rest, to rejoice, to enjoy, filter down into the smallest details, even to casting on and binding off. And I believe that today’s emphasis on slow crafting, meditative crafting, process over product—and Corrie’s simple advice to me, many years ago—are an attempt (deliberate or not) to recover these simple facts of life.
So no, I am still not a process knitter; but I do believe in rest—and in joy.
What’s a Teacher to Do?
Corrie and I haven’t seen one another in many years, and I sometimes doubt whether we’ll ever knit together again, the way we used to. But if I were a new knitter today and she were my teacher, I have no doubt what she would say to me (and I hope I would say the same, to anyone who gave me the chance):
Pick a fun color.
