Knitting Rules! (10 page)

Acrylic yarns tend to be less expensive
than their natural-fiber counterparts and are not moth food. Acrylic yarn is easy to find, and most acrylics are also easy care, happily swinging in and out of the laundry without so much as a nod to the risk of felting.

Acrylic yarn can't be blocked the way wool can
and, with few exceptions, is less elastic and forgiving than wool. Acrylic yarn doesn't breathe or absorb moisture either, and although it doesn't felt, it can be ruined with heat, so follow the label instructions for washing and don't ever iron it. Remember, too, that acrylic is especially dangerous in a fire: it melts, burns, and sticks. This makes it an especially poor choice for anything you plan to put on a child at night.

This was a phrase we took to using when the kids were little. It meant that if you fed a kid a chocolate bar and four cookies, let her miss her nap, and then sat her down for 30 minutes of TV, you shouldn't have been surprised when she spent all 30 minutes trying to kick her sister in the head because “she won't stop looking at me.”

Knitting is like that. (Not that it tries to kick you in the head, though I understand that if you've recently experienced a knitting loss, it may feel that this particular metaphor is too close for comfort.) In knitting, your end product can be only as good as your starting place. Crap in, crap out.

There are exceptions to this: knitters who can start with the biggest pile of crap and have it turn out to be a breathtaking beauty. It's like they have the ability to look deep into a yarn's eyes and see its unique charms and then imagine how best this particular yarn can be brought into the light and be all that it can be. It's a gift, and not many of us have it. Most of us, given crap yarn, are going to knit crap. Whenever I meet one of these rare knitters who doesn't, I'm always torn between falling on the ground at her feet and begging her to tell me all she knows, and locking her in my basement and never speaking of her again.

It's difficult to write, once you're done with the technical aspects of yarn, about the real stuff you need to know about it: the soul of yarn, its magic, and why, beyond it being the material we need to practice the art of knitting, we love it. I could wax poetic for hours about the softness, the colors, the textures … the things I like about yarn. But none of that really gets to the meat of it.

In the end, the reason we fill our houses with it, visit it in yarn shops, speak of it in glowing terms, and hoard it with passion is that it is pure potential. Every ball or skein of yarn holds something inside it, and the great mystery of what that might be can be almost spiritual. These six balls of wool could be a shawl my mum puts around her shoulders when she's cold, or maybe it's a blanket a friend wraps her baby in. Maybe that baby takes a shine to it and it becomes his beloved companion blankie, comforting him for years and years. Maybe it's a sweater that my daughter is wearing the day she gets her first kiss, and from then on my yarn is a part of her memory of that day. Maybe, just maybe, those six balls are a scarf and hat that get tucked away for years and long after I'm gone someone pulls them out and says, “Remember how Grammy was with all the wool? Remember how she knit all the time?” fingering the soft wool and pondering who I was and what I did while I was here.

It's a mystery, each ball of yarn … and I don't know what each one is going to be or what life it will take when I finally set needles to it. But each one will be something I made with my own two hands. This yarn, then — my whole big sweeping stash —
is the stuff of dreams.

K
NITTING ISN'T JUST ABOUT THE YARN
and the projects. As the friends and families of knitters will tell you (as they look for a clear space to sit), knitting comes with a lot of stuff. From needles to patterns to tape measures, these bits and pieces are as necessary as yarn to our craft, and have a variety and volume that matches any yarn stash.

The wise knitter (that would be you; since my knitting stuff is a disaster) organizes her stuff, keeps it handy, and knows how to use it. The unwise knitter (that would be me) rummages around, makes do with what she's got, and still has a pretty good time. Part of the occasionally bitter song and the often wonderful surprise of knitting is that your projects don't always work out as happily as an after-school movie. There are simply too many variables for there to be no surprises, but over time I've learned that understanding your stuff (even if your stuff isn't very good stuff) improves the odds of getting a predictable knitting outcome.

When it comes to my spare time (and my working time too, now that I think about it, as I work at writing knitting books), it would appear that I'm a woman of limited intelligence. It's not that I consider myself unintelligent, I'm pretty sure I'm about as smart as the next knitter. Rather, I mean that the scope of my intelligence is limited. I know a great deal about just one thing. I don't know anything about barometric pressure; I can't make sushi; really, all I care about deeply (my family and spiritual life aside) is knitting.

I suspect that many of you are the same, and, considering the relative simplicity of knitting, that it occupies a space in your heart, mind, and home that's larger
than expected. This limited intelligence, or focus, makes the processes of knitting matter a great deal. Knitting is simple, and this means that once you have the basics of knit and purl down cold, attention to detail starts to matter and knitters tend to get uptight about smooth knitting needles, lost gauges, errant tape measures, and the accuracy of patterns. It turns out that if you're a Knitter (note the capital
K
) and you've taken up the process of knitting at all seriously, you'll be with me in thinking that figuring out the best kind of needle for you makes a lot of sense.

Without knitting needles, we would simply be surrounded by piles of beautiful string. Needles come, infuriatingly, in several kinds of sizes, materials, and types and if you're like me, you'll no doubt decide you need them all. There could be a therapy group for knitters driven over the edge by a circular needle with a sloppy join that snags their lace weight, and an entire evening could be spent berating a needle that lacks a tip pointy enough to do a “knit three together through the back loops.” How, then, to choose among the hundreds of needles currently littering your home?

Knitting needles come in sizes that indicate their diameter. These sizes are measured mainly by three systems (four, if you count my personal system of losing all my needle gauges and having to roll needles between my fingers and make a guess). There is the metric “mm” system, the most common in the world and, to my way of thinking, the
best. Each needle size is actually its diameter in millimeters, a concept brilliant in its simplicity. There is the U.S. system, in which each needle is measured and then assigned a number. In this system, the smallest number is the smallest size and so forth. It's still a good system, though used only in the United States, so if you're a knitter from another country, or a knitter who likes patterns from another country, you're going to have to get down with the metric system. The third system is the old United Kingdom one. This is like the U.S. one, except the smallest numbers are the biggest needles.

It pays to think outside of your own country. Once upon a time I had a nifty Irish sweater pattern. It called for chunky wool, and I had fished the appropriate yarn out of the stash. Glancing at the pattern, I saw that it called for size 4 needles. It seemed odd, but I grabbed my size 4s and attempted to get gauge. An hour later, when I had just about broken my wrists and produced a piece of knitting so dense that I thought about marketing it as a bulletproof vest, I thought about the conversion chart. I, naturally, being Canadian, had thought the pattern referred to the metric size 4. Feeling quite clever, I fished out my U.S. size 4s only to
realize that they were even smaller. Frustrated, I then did what any other knitter would do. I used whatever needle it took to get gauge … and complained bitterly to my knitting friends about the error in the pattern.

Laughing, they openly mocked me, and then showed me a chart with the UK sizes on it. Now, before I slag any pattern for being wrong, I try to remember that I don't live in the only country in the world.

It seems pathetic to list the conversion chart for these three types here again, since I'm confident that this is the ten-millionth time someone has written it down, but I can never find one when I need it, and until the world is run by a knitter government that standardizes this sort of thing, well, you're going to need one. Be warned that when knitters run the world, coming up with one consistent system of needle sizing is going to be the first thing we address.

Once you've come to understand knitting needle sizing, you'll have to weigh in on straight versus circular needles. This one simple point (or two) is probably the issue of greatest contention among knitters. It really doesn't take long for a knitter to make up her mind about her preference, and most make no bones about an inflexible opinion.