Splitting Yarns

Writer, illustrator, and knitter Franklin Habit joins us for his monthly column featuring humor and insights into a yarncrafter’s life.

You’re toodling blithely through a normal day when suddenly WHAM! A memento of forgotten love hits you right between the eyes.

I was wriggling around under the work table trying to retrieve an errant ball of silk when among the thriving community of dust bunnies I found a crumpled lump that turned out to be a mitten pattern bought in a shop seven years ago.

It was an impulse purchase. I remember the impulse. I was only buying stitch markers, thank you. Then the shop owner was saying, Have you seen these? Then I was buying the stitch markers and the pattern for the mittens and the needles for the mittens and the yarn for the mittens, thank you.

If you would like to know how the mittens came out, please see “crumpled lump,” above.

I can’t recall why I abandoned them, but I can see why I snapped them up. They have an unusual, slightly tricky thumb. I get a kick out of slightly tricky knitting. It makes me feel dauntless and clever, like a lion tamer who has not yet had his head bit off.

Yet I don’t think I finished the cuff, let alone the thumb. Today the yarn is (probably) in one of my stash boxes and the pattern is wadded up like old Kleenex, covered with dust. It is likely to remain so. The passage of time has not been kind to these mittens. They now remind me uncannily of the shapeless peacock blue suit that I wore to a high school debate banquet in 1987.

I went to that banquet with a boy I believed to be the absolute Last Word in romance. By the time the ice cream was brought around, he had revealed himself to be an aficionado of fart jokes and I had changed my mind.

The mittens were like that brief, naïve interlude. Momentary infatuation, forgotten in a flash. No great loss. Yet I flinch even now at the thought of another project that began the same way. A sweater vest. My first fitted garment.

The magic of the beginning–there was a spark; then a second, lingering look. Longing. Contact. Flirting. Petting. Finally, a promise. Then the work. So much work. Tears. Shouting. Elation. More tears. Threats of abandonment. But I stuck it out until it was mine, complete.

I tried it on in front of the mirror.

It looked…odd. I turned sideways. It still looked odd. I stepped back and squinted. It looked blurry, and odd. I tried two other mirrors. Odd. Odd.

But you don’t just walk away from a commitment like that. It was my vest, and I was going to love it no matter what. I can make this work, I thought. So I wore it to knit night and showed it to my friends.

They tried to be kind.

“Wow,” said one. “So…are you happy with it?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Well,” she said, forcing a smile, “that’s all that matters. Congratulations.”

Others were less charitable. When she thought I was deeply engaged in a six-over-six cable, our group’s most unrepentant gossip hissed, “It’s all wrong on him. Is he blind?”

In my secret heart I knew she was right, but denial is powerful. It wasn’t until a complete stranger in a yarn store said, “Well, don’t worry–I’m sure your next one will come out better,” that I was able to admit it: the vest and I were through.

Don’t go looking for it on my Ravelry projects page. There are no photographs. A break-up like ours required nothing less than the obliteration of all evidence. The pattern went in the real recycle bin, the snapshots went into the digital recycle bin. The yarn (which was expensive) was reclaimed after much tugging and pulling to undo the bind off and all the woven-in ends.

At knit night, somebody asked why they hadn’t seen me wearing the vest in a while. I told her the truth–it was gone. “Good for you,” she said. “You’re better off without it.”

I stashed the yarn for years, telling myself maybe with time and thought I could turn it into something else. Something happy. Then one morning without a second thought I put it into a pile of supplies that were going to a homeless shelter.

I almost never think of that vest now, except sometimes.

Bad projects. You think they’ll change. They tell you they’ll change. But they never change. Not really.

Sniff.

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Writer, illustrator, and photographer Franklin Habit is the author of It Itches: A Stash of Knitting Cartoons (Interweave Press, 2008–now in its third printing) and proprietor of The Panopticon (the-panopticon.blogspot.com), one of the most popular knitting blogs on Internet. On an average day, upwards of 2,500 readers worldwide drop in for a mix of essays, cartoons, and the continuing adventures of Dolores the Sheep. Franklin’s other publishing experience in the fiber world includes contributions to Vogue Knitting, Yarn Market News, Interweave Knits, Interweave Crochet, PieceWork, Cast On: A Podcast for Knitters, Twist Collective, and a regular column on historic knitting patterns for Knitty.com.

These days, Franklin knits and spins in Chicago, Illinois, sharing a small city apartment with an Ashford spinning wheel and colony of sock yarn that multiplies alarmingly whenever his back is turned.