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A Life in Stitches: Knitting My Way through Love, Loss, and Laughter

Oleh Rachael Herron

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Penilaian: 3 dari 5 bintang3/5 (34 penilaian)

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Penerbit:: Chronicle Books Digital
Dirilis:: Jul 22, 2011
ISBN:: 9781452109978
Format:: Buku

Deskripsi

In these 20 heartfelt essays, Rachael Herron celebrated romance novelist by day, 911 dispatcher by night, and founder of the hugely popular blog Yarnagogo.com shows how when life unravels there s always a way to knit it back together again, many times into something even better. Honest, funny, and full of warmth, Herron s tales, each inspired by something she knit or something knit for her, will speak to anyone who has ever picked up a pair of needles. From her very first sweater (a hilarious disaster, to say the least) to the yellow afghan that caused a breakup (and, ultimately, a breakthrough), every piece has a moving story behind it. This beautifully crafted and candid collection is perfect for the knitter who loves to read and the reader who loves to knit.

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A Life in Stitches: Knitting My Way through Love, Loss, and Laughter

Oleh Rachael Herron

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Penilaian: 3 dari 5 bintang3/5 (34 penilaian)

Panjangnya: 170 halaman2 jam

Deskripsi

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Penerbit:: Chronicle Books Digital
Dirilis:: Jul 22, 2011
ISBN:: 9781452109978
Format:: Buku

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Rachael Herron

Rachael Herron has been knitting since she was five years old. She writes the popular website Yarnagogo.com and lives in Oakland, California.

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A Life in Stitches - Rachael Herron

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.

I shook my head. Nope. Knitting a sweater.

But it’s fun. Dad said he’ll make you a pair of stilts too. He wants to sell them if they work out. Will you be done soon?

Probably.

Six months later, I was still dragging that blue yarn around. Kids at school teased me when it trailed out of my backpack. The electric color that had looked so mod, so exciting, at the yard sale now just looked like something a grandmother would crochet for a tissue-box cover.

Dad watched my hands as I stubbornly knit while we watched TV.

So, you’re pretty fast, huh?

Yep, I said. At night, I liked to sit in our living room and use the window glass as a mirror, watching my hands flash. Seen in reverse, it made them look like someone else’s hands, not attached to me. They went so quickly, moved so nimbly. I was vain about the way I knitted. I’m very fast.

How much can you get for a sweater?

I shrugged.

But you think you can really make money doing that? he asked.

How’s the bumper-sticker business?

We grimaced at each other and went back to watching M*A*S*H.

Of course, it was the ugliest sweater in creation. For starters, I made a huge error with the neckline. When it said to bind off loosely, I didn’t think it was necessary. I didn’t want my stitches to be saggy—the garment already looked wonky enough. And I was in a blazing hurry. So I sewed it up using an unholy combination of backstitch and double (double!) crochet, thinking, Just these last final steps of binding off, and the sweater will be done! I’d pull it over my head, and my doubts would go away, and though it looked pretty strange on my lap, I was sure it would look great on.

I bound off. I wove the end in so completely,

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Not the best knitting memoir I've read but a fast read.

Rating: 2

This was a pleasant surprise - I had heard about this book from my weekly Barnes and Noble newsletter, put myself on the wait list at the library, and then promptly forgot about it. I've been wanting to pick up knitting for a while now, so this showed up in my inbox at the perfect time. This was a bit of a tearjerker though (the author isn't kidding about the lossportion of the title) which I wasn't prepared for, but all in all, a lovely little collection of short stories. Took me maybe an hour of solid reading to power through.

Rating: 4

I'm probably highly biased towards the book because I have been reading the author's blog for a number of years and have been a fan/online friend for a while. Even though some of the essays in the book were originally blog posts, I could tell that Herron took her time to rework and expand them into short pieces that evoke the fullest extent of the original blog posts. Another excellent commute book, as the short pieces could be read one at a time and pondered over.

Rating: 4

So warm and endearing. Rachael seems like she could be everybody's best friend, and there is a lesson to be learned in this for some. (No spoiler here.)

Rating: 5

I loved,loved,loved this book. Ok,I love to knit but this book is not so much about knitting as about a knitter. The author, Rachel Herron does weave in bits about knitting and things that she has knitted because after all, she is a knitter. If you are a knitter, you can probably can look at a finished project and remember what was happening when you knitted it. That's what the author does and that's what I do too. I can look at a scarf and know that I knitted it sitting beside my husband's bed while he was in IUC for a week. Into that scarf, I knit fears, tears and finally relief. This book is like that. Rachel Herron gets into subjects that are common to knitters, like struggling with a very difficult pattern and then when it is finished, it still doesn't work. But she says "Oh, crap, how can I make a better one next time". That is the mark of a true knitter, don't give up, think of improvements. The author mixes in her romantic life and well as stories about her mother and how difficult it was to have her mother tell her about herself. She delves into knitter lore like "never knit a sweater for a boyrfriend or you will lose him. She also knits love blankets. For me that was a surprise, I have knitted several myself and have given them to friends and relative before a moved away from them. One of my friends crocheted a blanket for me. There is nothing in the world like a love blanket when you are missing the people who knit it. You can wrap it around you and feel the warmth, enjoy the design and feel their love knitted right into it. The pretty little book fits together like a well made sweather with patterns and pictures woven in. It is a book that you will want to hug! I recommend it to all knitters and those who love people! I received this book from the Amazon Vine program but that in no way influenced my review.

Rating: 5

This is a memoir of essays, each one focusing on a different piece of knitting. Herron has knit ever since she was five years old. Knitting helped her through the good times and bad, and through it she is able to return to her true self when she goes off track. In this book she tells her life story through her knitting.If that sounds like a cliché, don’t worry – this book is not an overly sappy memoir. It’s a very balanced read – with laughter, tears, memories, and knitting blended together like a beautiful sweater. This book is delightful, and will be enjoyed by anyone who loves knitting, crocheting, or any kind of crafting. Reading this book will send you running for your crafting supplies.(I received this book through Amazon's Vine Program.)

Rating: 4

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A Life in Stitches: Knitting My Way through Love, Loss, and Laughter

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