Rachael Herron - A Life in Stitches: Knitting My Way Through Love, Loss, and Laughter

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

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 Yarnagogoyou truly have helped shape me into who I am today. Thank you.

CLARA PARKES

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 calledin a very smug, antiestablishment tonethe 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 shed 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 todayIm 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 womens 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 chestcoveting crowd that dated UC Berkeley guys named Dave, I was in the dorm closest to the athletics, theater, and music departmentswhich 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 Id 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 allor 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 hadnt 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 wasnt 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, Knitters 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 Id like to think shes 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 Knitters 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 Id begun outlining in my head years ago. They show how knitting can infuse itself in a far broader, deeper human experience. Theyre a pleasure to reada laugh, a surprise, a nod of understandingand I know youll enjoy them.