Okun - The curse of the boyfriend sweater: essays on crafting

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To Pat and Pa

You cant really know what a project is going to be until its done. This is true of many thingsbooks, recipes, relationshipsand it is especially true of knitting.

Say you want to make a hat. You knit an inch, meant to be the brim, but its still only the suggestion of a brim; a brim isnt a brim until its attached to a hat. This brim could just as easily become the neck opening for a sweater, if you decide to keep going and have enough yarn. Or you could call it a day and end it right there, making one of those stretchy headbands women in cleanser commercials are always wearing as they splash water on their already-perfect faces. You could decide you still want a hat, but its going to be ribbed all the way up, or cabled, or a completely different color from the one you started with.

You could plow through the whole project in a single afternoon, the vision of the end product firmly fixed in your mind, or you could set it aside for months at a time, only picking it up to knit a couple of rows when the spirit moves you. You could start it as a gift only to decide you want to keep it for yourself, or the reverse. You could realize it looks nothing like what you intended and either despair or delight. Or, as so often happens, you could reach a place of peaceful ambivalence and decide to just keep pushing through, even though youre not sure, even though you dont know what it will be after youve invested all those hours and all that yarn. You can trust the project to reveal itself to you, outside of your control.

* * *

I have always loved control. I like having it, and I also like giving it up in measured doses. This sounds like some sort of BDSM thing, but mostly it plays out for me in my crafting, that interplay of making something just how you want it to be but also allowing for mistakes and detours. Im a knitter, a crocheter, an embroiderer, and a general dabbler in most fibery pursuits. Ive been doing some combination of these things for about as long as Ive been on the planet, and theyve helped me get through and make sense of some of the hardest-to-control parts of being a personanxiety, grief, heartbreak, ecstatic joy, total boredom. A craft project allows you to hold something concrete in your hands even when everything around you is swirling and illegible; it allows you to take tiny risks and solve tiny problems and achieve tiny victories. It reminds you that there are calm and good parts of your brain where you can retreat when the rest of it feels like a war zone, and that you can, in some small, brief way, save yourself. Also: you get a lifetime supply of hand-knit socks.

* * *

When I talk to people about crafting, nine times out of ten they have never held a needle or spent hours in a yarn store. They dont know about stitch count or care about gauge swatches, the same way I have never really understood what a fourth down means. But we usually manage to find some common language, some point of connection where one person or the other goes, Oh, you too? I thought I was the only one!

Because I think most people have their version of knitting, or spend their lives trying to find itthat small but constant motion that helps them metabolize the universe and comprises a corner of their identity. For my dad, its fishing; for my brother, its music. My mother makes homes and my sister makes art from forgotten objects. Some of my friends draw, some run marathons, some make Internet memes, and some have sat beside me on the couch as they struggle to insert the tip of a needle into a stitch for the first time.

Sometimes, weeks later, Ill get a text message. Usually its a picture of a ragged but serviceable piece of fabric, inches longer than it had been that first day, the number of holes and mistakes reduced with each newly knitted row.

Look! these texts read, in some form or another. I have no idea what its going to be, but look!

I tell them that nobody does, at least not right away. The important thing is to start, even if its ugly, even if its hard. Even (especially) if you are the sort of person who is used to having everything exactly the way you want it, who worries that the world will end if one stitch is out of place. The nice thing about the world is that it rarely ends, and even when it does, you can always rip your stitches back and start from the beginning.

Anyone who makes things should make something for a baby. There are obvious objections: babies will throw up on the beautiful item you spent months laboring over. They wont appreciate how the slate gray looks next to the mustard yellow, no matter how carefully you selected the yarn. You cant include dainty buttons or tiny pom-poms because babies are super dumb and think everything is food, and, in any case, theyll outgrow whatever it is within weeks. Also: they smell.

But despite all this, there is no better way I can think of to remind yourself that life can come into this world just as it leaves it.

By the time I graduated college, Id barely ever held a baby, let alone made anything for one of their ilk. They were so foreign and separate from me that I didnt think Id know where to begin, like trying to make a mitten for a fire hydrant. At my great-grandmothers funeral, my second cousin handed me her infant daughter while she went to the bathroom. The babys head flopped onto my shoulder and I stood rooted to the spot, petrified that if I moved, I would definitely break her. When her mother came back I was surprised that I missed the weight of that warm, sacklike little body, even if it was filled with spit.

In the following year I made a couple of tiny hats for the newborns of coworkers and choir friends; I started and then abandoned a baby blanket for the family that lived next door to us growing up. (That baby is a sophomore in high school and the blanket is still two rows wide.) But those projects were easy, mindless, no different in construction from scarves or the felted bowls I made to keep laundry quarters in. They didnt require me to narrow or widen my field of vision. And then I found myself knitting a moderately difficult cardigan for a baby who hadnt even been born yet.

* * *

I met my best friend, Aude (she introduces herself in one long breath: Hi-Im-Aude-like-Ode-to-Joy), the summer after both of us left our respective colleges. I had been living in Poughkeepsie and had never known that thirty minutes away, in a small fairy talesounding town called Annandale-on-Hudson, was the girl who would soon make up a fairly large chunk of my everyday life.

We would meet in New York City, where I had moved for the first time and where she had moved back to. Once we met, we would IM throughout the workday and text throughout the night. We would sleep in each others beds and keep toothbrushes next to each others sinks. (Aude still refers to hers as the guest toothbrush, which, ew.) We would meet each others families: shed join me at the beach in Rhode Island with my parents on Memorial and Independence and Labor Days, and I would have long, luxurious dinners with her French mother and native New Yorker father at their townhouse in Brooklyn.