A Life in Stitches Read online

  A Life in Stitches

  Knitting My Way Through Love, Loss, and Laughter

  20 Pieces by RACHAEL HERRON

  For my incredible agent and friend, Susanna Einstein, with love and thanks.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks that I cannot possibly hope to verbalize go to my awesome editor, Jodi Warshaw of Chronicle Books, for championing this project, and to the impossibly talented memoirist (and knitter) Jennifer Traig, for reading my chapters with an eye that always saw so much more than mine did. Thanks go to Lala Hulse, for putting up with me while I wrote until my eyes resembled those of a wild animal; to my sisters, Christy and Bethany Herron, who allowed me to use their memories when mine became frayed and thin; to my father, Dan Herron, for passing on his entrepreneurial spirit to me; and to Lola Romero, for making my dad happy again. As always, thank you to the PensFatales, for being my other brain. To the women mentioned in this book who are both my friends and mentors: I owe you a debt I will try to repay over the course of our friendships. And to my beloved readers of Yarnagogo—you truly have helped shape me into who I am today. Thank you.

  Table of Contents

  FOREWARD

  INTRODUCTION

  Casting On

  Slip Knot

  Wrap And Turn

  Backstitch

  Double Crochet

  Circular Knitting

  Pick Up And Knit

  Whipstitch

  Tree Of Life

  Knit Two Together

  Basket Weave Stitch

  Stockinette Stitch

  Maidens And Flyers

  Duplicate Stitch

  Blanket Stitch

  Chain Stitch

  Negative Ease

  Join In The Round

  Drafting Triangle

  Repeat To End

  YARNAGOGO’S EASY CABLED HOT-WATER BOTTLE COZY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  CLARA PARKES

  FOREWORD

  Thanks to knitting and a little eucalyptus-spotted piece of land in Oakland, California, I knew Rachael Herron long before I actually knew her. In the spring of 1991, I could be found on most Saturday nights sprawled on one of the dandelion-colored couches in the living room of Orchard Meadow Hall at Mills College. I was joined by my friends Emily Jane, Hilair, and Jenny for what we called—in a very smug, antiestablishment tone—the Saturday night crafters.

  Emily Jane was perpetually in the process of turning the heel of a sock that never, to my knowledge, got finished. Hilair embroidered botanical prints of her own design, whereas Jenny dutifully slogged away on a giant pink acrylic afghan that she’d been crocheting for her grandmother since high school. And I rowed back and forth on an equally endless blue stockinette sweater whose finished pieces still await their seaming today—I’m just waiting for cropped, dolman-sleeved boatnecks to come back in style. Then as in now, I knit for the doing.

  Mills was, and still is, proudly and defiantly a women’s college. The previous year the students had barricaded themselves in the administrative offices to protest the board of directors’ decision to open up the college to men. (The board reversed its decision.) And, while some dorms were known to be a little more friendly to the hope chest–coveting crowd that dated UC Berkeley guys named Dave, I was in the dorm closest to the athletics, theater, and music departments—which made it a hybrid hotbed of performance artists and boisterous crew jocks. I was neither, but I found the blend so comforting that I stayed in the same dorm, in the same hallway even, my entire time at Mills.

  Feminism was in its second wave, a charged yet increasingly amorphous concept that people took turns claiming and then rejecting depending on the circumstances. We wrote papers condemning the male-dominated patriarchy, we marched to reclaim our power, and we tried to figure out how we wanted these principles to play out in our own lives. We spread the word “women” like butter on our toast every morning, and we were quick to correct anyone who dared call us “girls.”

  By the spring of 1991, I was a senior facing the last few months of academic cosseting before being pushed back out into the real world. I had absolutely no clue how I was going to stay afloat; I just kept hoping I’d find a job description that read: “Dreamer wanted. Must speak fluent French and have excellent parallel-parking abilities.”

  I took comfort in spending as much time with my friends as possible, knowing that no matter how hard we tried, things would never be the same after we walked across that stage with our diplomas. My friends and I all worked as receptionists in our dorm, and we had a tradition of keeping one another company on the late Saturday night shift. (This was just before the Internet had taken hold, way back when people relied on the physical presence of others for company.) Somehow it took us three and a half years to discover that we all knew how to make things with our hands, and it was a welcome, surprising revelation. Craft was such a secret, private part of our identities that nobody had ever brought it up, or if we had, clearly nobody was paying attention.

  We decided to do something radical with our Saturday nights. Hilair grabbed her embroidery, I my blue sweater, Jenny the giant pink afghan, and Emily Jane the sock. We took up residence in the living room, where we proudly, loudly, and quite probably obnoxiously announced our crafty inclination to any soul who passed us by.

  We were honor students, members of the student government, recipients of awards and grants and scholarships. We were being pushed to become ball-busting CEOs, to break gender stereotypes and shatter that glass ceiling once and for all—or to create parallel worlds in which any ceiling was of our own creation. But once every weekend, we found a time and place for something much slower and more satisfying.

  Knitting hadn’t yet reclaimed the positive image it has today in popular culture. For us, knitting in the dorm living room on a Saturday night was tantamount to donning a corset and churning butter by the fire before blowing out the candles and saying, “Good night, John-Boy.” Only in baggy T-shirts and leggings.

  And yet, as with all things, our revolution soon drew to a close. We graduated and moved on. And despite our best attempts, it wasn’t the same ever again.

  I never did find that full-time French-speaking, parallel-parking dreamer job. Nor did I become a ball-busting CEO. I worked with words, bouncing from field to field and job to job. Knitting never stopped yipping at my heels, though. In 2000, I finally heeded the call and launched my online knitting magazine, Knitter’s Review. I quickly found myself once again surrounded by women (and men) doing beautiful things with yarn, needles, and their hands. For the first time since those Saturday nights on the dandelion-colored couch, I was knitting in the company of others. It felt welcome and familiar.

  And the others? Emily Jane still knits, and Hilair still embroiders when the urge strikes. We lost Jenny in a car accident in 2004, but I’d like to think she’s up there in the clouds, still working away on that big pink afghan.

  Meanwhile, just six years after my blue sweater and I departed from the Mills campus, a young MFA student named Rachael Herron arrived. There, in the same eucalyptus-shaded buildings, she studied English and creative writing, she published a literary magazine, and she knit. A lot.

  She started blogging about knitting at Yarnagogo.com, and, unbeknownst to me, she was reading my Knitter’s Review. We spent many years like this in our parallel orbits, knowing and liking one another without ever actually meeting. When we finally did meet, the friendship was sealed.

  For me, the essays in this book provide deeper detail and higher contrast to a painting I’d begun outlining in my head years ago. They show how knitting can infuse itself in a far broader, deeper human experience. They’re a pleasure to read—a la
ugh, a surprise, a nod of understanding—and I know you’ll enjoy them.

  INTRODUCTION

  People measure their lives by many things. Some measure their days by how many races they’ve run. Some mark turning points by the songs they’ve loved. T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock “measured out his life in coffee spoons,” and others, when attaching meaning to incidents, look at when the children came, or when their parents got sick, or which house they were living in at the time.

  My life can be measured in lengths of yarn: what kind I held, at what time. Always, as far back as I can remember, I’ve had a knitting project somewhere close by, and no matter what emotion I’m feeling, I put some of it into the stitches I make. Grief translates into tighter stitches more likely to stand up to heavy wear, while happiness makes my knitting a looser gauge. It’s more likely to pill later, but I think pills show character. Luckily, more of my knitting is the happy, pilly kind.

  I’m a memoirist with a shabby memory. Luckily, I have a mnemonic system: I fold and stack my knitted sweaters in two tall white bookcases, and as I run my eye down the colors, I can remember where I was when I made each sweater. That orange sweater I made with yarn I carried home from Belgium—ten skeins I stuffed into an already overstuffed suitcase—only to find that the exact yarn was available at my local yarn store in Oakland. The yarn still felt exotic to knit, and as I worked the cables, I remembered the way the afternoon light fell into a tree-lined square as I sat by myself eating frites, drinking a dark amber Belgian beer. The green one is made from heavy cashmere bought during my first trip to New York City, when I was overcome by the city’s electric pulse, and its gold buttons are from a trip to Venice, found in a button display discovered during a quick glance into a hardware shop. It was warm and muggy in both cities, and the cashmere weighs heavy, like a thick blanket on my shoulders.

  And those buttons, there, are Edwardian, from the early 1900s. They cost more than the yarn for two sweaters, and I think of them as my button folly. But they remind me of my Edwardian diamond engagement ring, and of my mother’s engagement ring crafted in the same time period. When I touch the buttons, I see her emerald ring in my mind’s eye, and I’m pleased.

  I’m sure I’d still be knitting, still attaching memories to wool and silk and alpaca, even if the Internet revolution hadn’t hit knitting as hard as it did, but I’m grateful that I was around at the beginning of it all. Fifteen years ago, I knitted alone. I was positive I was the only one my age doing it, and the knitting patterns sold at the chain craft stores didn’t dissuade me of this notion. I could take my pick of afghan and teddy bear patterns, but it was hard to find fashionable, wearable patterns on the spinner racks next to the puff paint aisle.

  Then I stumbled upon something called a blog. I loved Carolyn’s Web site, called Dangerous Chunky, even though I didn’t understand it. The information on it changed daily! She wrote about knitting, and from her voice, she sounded a lot like me: Young. Urban. Trying to be creative with the tools we loved. I had to know more. I dove headfirst into the rapidly growing knitting community, and I suppose I really haven’t come up for air since.

  Throughout the years, I’ve learned that everyone thinks stockinette is ideal for car rides. Most think socks are appropriate for planes, since you don’t elbow your neighbor overly much. I’ve discovered that the Sweater Curse is just a myth, but it’s one that knitters don’t fool around with. I’ve realized that nowhere is too far to go for the yarn of your dreams, but sometimes it’s best to stay home and make your own. Most of all, I’ve learned that knitters aren’t all the same. There are perfectionist knitters, and knitters who can’t be bothered to learn more than one cast-on (like me). There are delighted knitters and grumpy ones, tall ones and short ones, but knitters, overall, are the nicest people in the world, and I mean that with all my heart. Just recently, I asked MaryEllen on Ravelry (who didn’t know me from Adam) to mail her hot-water bottle and its cozy, which she’d made from my pattern, to New York for a photo shoot, because I was lame and didn’t own one myself. And she did. Graciously. The very same day she was asked. She did it because another knitter asked her to, plain and simple, and she exemplifies the generosity of knitters everywhere.

  And now, my life cannot only be measured by things, the sweaters I’ve made, but by the people who sat near me (either literally or virtually) while I knitted, the people who helped when I couldn’t figure out a particular join, the people who’ve become my friends. This idea warms me, and I pull it around me like my favorite sweater (which I’ll tell you about in this book).

  Enjoy. And then, perhaps, share this book with your best knitting friend, and feel grateful, as I do, that we’re part of the most wonderful community in the world.

  CASTING ON

  I never was a Daddy’s girl. I loved my father, but I didn’t understand him. With three girls and a wife, he was the only guy in an all-girl household. Even our cats were female. I felt like my father came from a different planet. He said things a little too loudly, did things a little too quickly, and even the way he smelled of oil and pipe tobacco seemed strange and somehow foreign, as if he were a beloved visitor, one to be humored and then left alone to his customs.

  An aspiring entrepreneur, he always believed a million-dollar idea was just around the corner. He loved cruising neighborhoods in our VW van, hitting the brakes so hard when he saw garage sale signs that we would fly forward and land in a pile on the shag carpeting. He’d search each sale, looking for his next big find that would surely hurtle him into wealth: a button-making machine (who doesn’t want personalized buttons?), a dehydrator (turkey jerky’s the new thing!). We loved garage sale hunting, too, coming home with broken Barbies and board games with missing pieces, not caring that we’d have to use Monopoly pieces to play Candy Land.

  One particular Saturday morning, while Dad was trolling for business opportunities in piles of other people’s crap, I struck the yarn mother lode. There it was, in all its blueness: a pile of 100 percent acrylic. I’d never seen yarn that color; it was so blue it looked electrically charged. It pulsed at me from the box sitting on the dry, brown grass. It was the most thrilling color I’d ever seen.

  My meager allowance already spent earlier in the morning on candy, I begged my father to buy it for me. There were eight balls of lint-covered toxic blue yarn in the box, marked at a quarter each. It was the bargain of the century. He had to understand that.

  “Can you get ‘em down to a nickel each?” he said while looking at lathes.

  I was eleven. I would rather die than haggle.

  “Please?”

  “Why do you need it? You always knit with Mom’s yarn anyway. She’s still got lots of leftovers, right?”

  “But this would make a whole sweater.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He poked at something that looked like a saddle.

  Then it hit me. I knew what I needed to do to convince him. “I’m going to make sweaters and sell them.” I chickened out at the last minute and added a qualifying “I think.” I wasn’t sure I’d actually end up wanting to knit for money, but how much did it hurt to let him think I did? And maybe it would be fun and profitable.

  One thing about my father: Speculate about an interesting money-making venture that involves a ship and a pirate and sharks circling below with gold coins in their teeth, and he’ll be first in line to walk the plank.

  He handed me two dollars.

  At home, I cast on with wild abandon, not knowing I would soon be knitting into a black hole of a serious lack of knowledge. I didn’t do a gauge swatch—I didn’t even know what one was. I’d never followed a “real” pattern in my life, and I’d be starting with one from the fifties that I’d found in my mother’s cedar chest. I didn’t think it looked too dated—a simple raglan with no shaping and crew neck collar. I chose size medium arbitrarily, because it didn’t cross my mind that it was possible to measure myself and compare those measurements to those on the page.

  I just wanted to
knit a sweater. Just as I’d had the urge to teach myself stenography and drawing from books (I’d failed, by the way—I’d never make my living in the courtroom by either taking notes or sketching tense scenes), I was following an autodidactic impulse to teach myself how to knit a whole sweater, using the pattern as my tutor. The fabric would fly off my needles, I knew. I was ready.

  I flipped on my clock radio. Duran Duran. Perfect. I curled up on my bed. I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I steamed ahead, happily looking forward to the day I could wear my sweater to school and wow all my friends.

  Dad came up the stairs and popped his head in to see how my new capitalistic venture was going. I shooed him out. No time to talk.

  Not liking the idea of knitting a whole back or a whole front, I cast on for the flat-knitted sleeves first. Ribbing. I knew how to do this, just knits and purls. Easy.

  Then, suddenly, the instructions told me to switch to stockinette and increase every five rows. I understood stockinette, but how would I increase? I turned the pages of the brittle leaflet with increasing panic. I could have, of course, gone downstairs and asked my mother, but this was my project, and if she picked it up and started doing things with it, it would become partly hers, less mine. I didn’t want to give up any part of it, and, more than that, I wanted to have bragging rights by the end: “I did this all by myself. No one helped me.” I would stand proud when I said it, wearing electric blue.

  Increasing, increasing. Here it was. “Increase by making one,” it said. That was all it said. Were they serious? I knew how to cast on, was it like that? I had a feeling I was close, but I couldn’t make it work. Finally, I ended up just looping the yarn over the needle and hoping for the best.

  My sister Christy climbed the steps to my room and asked if I wanted to go play on the stilts Dad was helping her make.