Pearl-McPhee - Knitting Rules! : The Yarn Harlots Bag of Knitting Tricks

STEPHANIE PEARL-McPHEE

The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers
by publishing practical information that encourages personal
independence in harmony with the environment.

Edited by Deborah Balmuth
Art direction and text design by Mary Velgos
Cover design by Mary Velgos and Kimberly Glyder
Text production by Mary Velgos and Jennifer Jepson Smith
Cover photographs by Adam Mastoon
Illustrations by Diana Marye Huff
Illustration coordination by Ilona Sherratt
Indexed by Diane Brenner

Copyright 2006 by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other without written permission from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pearl-McPhee, Stephanie.
Knitting rules! / Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-10: 1-58017-834-0; eISBN-13: 978-1-6034-2098-3
1. Knitting. I. Title.
TT820.P3745 2006
746.432dc22

2006004622

For Janine
whose constant ability to find bright joy
in the mundane is deeply missed.

With thanks to:

My mate, Joe, for putting up with well. He knows what he puts up with.

My beautiful and clever daughters, Amanda, Megan, and Samantha, for not turning into delinquents while I wrote this book.

My mum, Bonnie, for not letting me turn into a delinquent while I wrote this book.

My siblings, Ian, Ali, and Erin for making out like all the knitting is cool.

My nephew, Hank, for being five years old and wanting to learn how to knit. (I forgive you for breaking the ball winder.)

My long suffering friends, Lene, Ken, Cassandra, Emma, and Denny. I owe them all hand-knit socks.

My friend and agent, Linda Roghaar, for always picking up the phone and not sighing (too loudly) when I tell her my troubles.

Deborah Balmuth, crack editor; Pam Art, visionary; and everyone else at Storey Publishing who totally understands that no matter what the rest of the world thinks, you really can have a knitting-book emergency.

Finally, special thanks to every knitter I ever met, e-mailed, or ran into in a yarn shop. Id know nothing without them.

IF YOU PICKED UP THIS BOOK, I probably dont need to convince you that knitting is great. Its more than possible, however, that you could use a little help explaining to people why you do it, or why you do it so much, or why you cant stop doing it.

The bare bones of knitting sound simple, and they are; sadly, this is probably the beginning of the confusion between those regular people known as non-knitters, and the enlightened, the extraordinary people we call knitters.

Heres the whole idea of knitting. One stick holds loops of yarn and a second stick pulls a continuous piece of string through the loops, one by one. Row upon row is accomplished until you have a piece of knitted fabric.

Non-knitters cant quite get it. You explain the basics of knitting to them, then tell them that you spend all of your money and all of your spare time on this pursuit, and inform them that you bitterly resent any time taken from it by ordinary activities like laundry and employment, and theyll look at you as if theres crazy all over you, like plaid on a Scotsman. You can show them all of your yarn (although I dont recommend this; revealing the size of the stash while youre trying to convince someone youre not nuts is counterproductive). You can even make them touch and hold it, and theyre still going to wonder if youre a few sheep short of a flock.

Admittedly, if you think about it from the non-knitters point of view, the statement I play with string for several hours a day and never tire of it does sound as if youre touched, but thats because the bare bones of knitting is not all there is. These non-knitters havent lived the considerable charms of knitting or, even better than that, gotten themselves a Knitting Lifestyle.

Non-knitters dont understand that it all starts with the simplicity of pulling one loop through another (and that at first it aint so simple). They dont understand that theres the detail of getting the loop to sit on the needle just right, or that you can knit two together, or wrap the yarn and get one more, or, horror of horrors, drop one and sit stunned, afraid that if you so much as breathe the stitch will run all the way down to the start and youll never, ever get it picked up again. They dont know that all of this holds the key to a tiny little world of genius intrigue.

If you find a non-knitter who thinks what you do is clever, beautiful, and artistic; who never asks for knitted stuff but wears it with pride when you give it to him or her; and will help you carry home a whole fleece or a stack of stitch dictionaries without once implying that you might want to get a grip marry that person.

Non-knitters dont know what we do, that when we first learn to knit, this sort of thing is exceedingly high drama, that the thrill of getting it right is like skydiving (except, you know, safer), and that the defeat of messing up is as nasty as losing the Boston Marathon by 10 seconds to a guy who didnt even train. How about trying to tell them about the surprise of discovering that you arent knitting what you thought you were? That due to some bizarre and repeated error on your part, youre making a tube top instead of socks and despite the really big difference between those two items, you cannot, for the life of you, explain why. They dont understand that knitting is surprising, perplexing, and gripping, as you loop stitch after stitch through each other and make Something.

Pointing out to non-knitters that as far as dorky habits go, running marathons and keeping a stamp collection are at least as pointless as knitting and dont even keep you warm in winter wont endear you to them. Furthermore, it doesnt make them think your knitting habit makes any more sense. Stick to your knitting and say nothing about rock collections or racing plastic boats. (You can think it, though. I would.)

Once you get the hang of the act of knitting, you get to discover its variations knitting, purling, decreasing, increasing, cabling, yarn overs, intarsia, Fair Isle, entrelac, Estonian, Latvian How about twined knitting or my, the mind reels, and its only the beginning. Do you do it left-handed or right? Pick or throw? Use stranding or bobbins? Wool or cotton? Circulars or straights? Use four or five double-pointed needles, or never touch them?

The techniques available to you can take a lifetime to learn and the different ways to make these loops with sticks is engaging, clever, and not at all monotonous. Non-knitters dont understand that theres always something left to learn, and trying to tell them that there are so many extremely interesting ways to do something with string is folly. They werent interested in the first way to do it, never mind all the ways youve read about. Non-knitters usually stop you at this point and tell you that youre out of your tree. Ignore them. Knitters have it figured out. It is non-knitters (even though they out-number us) who havent grasped the magic.