Are you getting enough fiber? (the other kind)

It has been a while since I have written about my love for knitting on this blog. But if this summer has been the summer of cooking, it has also been the summer of knitting.

I saw a therapist once whose opinions I otherwise was not very fond of, but who had some interesting things to say on the subject of knitting. Knitting -- or any craft work -- can be an excellent distraction from eating (when one tends to eat too much; I don't recommend it for this purpose if your tendency is towards restriction). It's very hard to binge when you have two long needles in your hands and a pile of wool in your lap! It's also hard to smoke, to drink, to have sex, to do drugs (hey! -- that's an idea: substitute one kind of needles for another...). You get the picture. Knitting emerges as the sort of perfect compulsion control technique. Oh, cognitive-behavioral therapy!

To clarify: I did not learn knitting for compulsion control. I learned to knit when I was seven years old from my grandmother, and I have been knitting ever since. I knit during the lean years where there weren't any age-appropriate patterns (late adolescence, late 1990's), I knit before the celebrities joined the crew, and I am still at it, thrilled that there are so many young designers and online knitting resources, such as Ravelry.

With the help of that therapist, I was able to make the connection between knitting and that oh-so-lovely-feeling of being in the flow (thank you, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Flow as in: uninterrupted concentration; delight; calm; connectedness. This is how I feel when I knit; once I recognized these feelings, I was able to harness this knowledge to use my knitting more deliberately, to replace more destructive hobbies.

If I feel the urge to eat after dinner, the worst hours of the night for me, I sit down with a knitting project and dedicate myself to it for at least 15 minutes. By that time, the urge has usually passed, and I am so engrossed in my knitting that it takes all my husband has to convince me to put it down to come to bed. Knitting, I find myself absolutely bedazzled by fiber and the infinity of combinations that I can produce with my needles and thread. I study lace patterns; compare color swatches; and linger over new designs. There is so much to knit, I don't have time to think about snacking or wander into the kitchen. Knitting, at times, has been my safe haven, a place to put all of my energy and concerns and anxiety, and spin straw into gold:


Take the sweater above, my best fit yet: the Katharine Hepburn cardigan, from Lace Style. I sewed on the last buttons while in Italy a few weeks ago, and now that I'm here in Minnesota, where the weather is cooler, I wear it in the evenings.

There is something so satisfying and so nourishing in creating a sweater -- the ultimate act of self-care, I think, is to dress oneself warmly. Knitting brings me deeper comfort than consuming any culinary dish, and produces more fuzzy-inside feelings than those famous exercise endorphins.

Here's to form meeting function!

Creation

I love the way this summer is turning into a season of knitting and cooking.

Even as a small child I knew that I loved to create things: I sewed wall quilts and knitted woolen mittens, drew paper-dolls and followed the American Girls Handy Book for further inspiration. It didn't trouble me then, as it sometimes does now, that most of my crafts were of a decidedly feminine nature -- that I was reproducing, in the late 20th century, the same tasks that my great-grandmother would have learned as a girl in the late 1800s.

Now, I can point to any number of theories of gender role development to explain why I was drawn to knitting and cooking instead of heavy machinery and archery; why I still take more pleasure in the so-called domestic arts, and would rather not think too much about my computer's specs or my bike's components. Yet, whatever form it takes, I know that I am following an older desire to create that women and men have equal share in. I am speaking of the pleasure in one's craft, and of the delight of adhering to a technique so well as to be able to improvise from it. I am also speaking of a sort of physical act that cannot be replicated by what I am doing here, at my screen, typing and pushing words and images around. I yearn for the tactile, the colored, the savory and fragrant. And so my knitting -- ah, fiber! -- and puttering around the kitchen here, and hikes to find wildflowers, and trips to the market.

The yellow of this lace shawl echoes the evening sunlight here in Umbria, the fuzzy bodies of bees and wasps, and the inside of the bell peppers that we stuffed for dinner the other night. Half-finished, the shawl is still caught up in its creation, still evolving and revealing itself -- not unlike this season, these days of summer's peak.

I want to dedicate this summer, half-fled, to creation in all its forms. I want to roll in the grass with pagan delight and visit old Roman temples without a tour book. I want to taste sweet new wine and discover new ways to wind a ball of yarn. I want to dance to samba music and plan long expeditions in the hills. I want to live.

Here's to summer and to yellow lace and to all of the jubilant acts of creation which the season inspires in us!

The good life

Today I spent nearly the entire afternoon sitting in the shade under the wisteria arbor, listening to a LibriVox recording of Moll Flanders, knitting various pieces, and reveling in the rare opportunity to do exactly as I pleased.

Yet I know that if I let too many days pass this way -- long lunches followed by a nap and knitting -- I'll soon feel restless. The voices in my head, perhaps some remnant of Puritan duty, will scold me for enjoying myself too much, as if there should be a limit to pleasure. Should there be?-- when my pleasure consists of such simple, honest things, like books and music and fiber and food and, lastly, bicycles? Where is the wrong in these things? Where else should my duty lie, in these fallow moments, if not in seeking such pleasures, the better now than later, when more somber responsibilities might indeed call?

I began this web-log to write about the things that make me happy; to write about my avid and eager search for happiness in the face of external burdens that, at times, made life almost unbearable this spring. Yet, now relieved of some of these concerns, I feel almost guilty in taking my pleasure today, as if I only deserved it when there was real hardship in other areas of my life.

Perhaps the guilt that I feel is the only truly Puritan part of this dilemma, for ancient philosophers had something to say on the matter of happiness as well. Aristotle, for example, believed that though the end of life was happiness, happiness did not come from the possession of material goods (as is so often presumed), but from living a life of virtue, and practicing moderation in all things. This notion is sometimes referred to as "the good life," and was a principal concern of Thomas Jefferson as well, who made sure to write it into the Declaration of Independence, changing John Locke's right to "life, liberty, and property" into the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."Gautama Buddha talked more of ending suffering than of finding happiness, but what is the path to enlightenment if not a middle road between the two, another way of stating Aristotle's principle of moderation?

I already know that I am not after money or property in my pursuit of the good life. I also know that, having seen more than my share of suffering in these short 25 years, and having emerged from my sorrows mostly unscathed, I wish to help others out of theirs. But still I am searching for that "happy medium" in my own life, a way to balance the good with the bad, the joy with the pain, and to not err too much towards excess in any direction. Thus, this space, these words. Avid happiness, happy life: A V I D A L E G R I A.

Osage orange into lace

Remember the yellow yarn that I have been musing over?

A few "sketches" in the bee hive lace pattern, from the Honeybee Stole pattern from KnitSpot. I think it rather does look like beehives!

It's in the process of being blocked, that is, I've soaked the knit piece in water overnight to let the fiber soften, and now it's being stretched (with blocking pins) and laid flat to dry in the sun.

C O L O R

Since I began to knit again last year, I have found myself drawn to the color of yarn with such intensity that it sometimes startles me. I might spend an hour in a yarn shop staring at the shelves of yarn and pawing at one skein after another before, disappointedly, I admit that I can't find what I want, and won't settle for second-best.

Whence this love-affair with color? I was never the painter in my family; I preferred music and books to drawing and sculpting. Yet, the passion that I feel from color must have come from somewhere, or some time when my eyes were open wide enough to see.

The first time I remember feeling a certain way about color was when we were living in China; I became fascinated by a certain shades of brick orange and dark, deep yellows -- similar to the yellow in this ball of yarn here, the shade of goldenrod.

Perhaps I dreamed of colors because, for the first time in my life, I could not speak or understand what was spoken to me -- or, rarer still, what was written. Chinese characters on store-fronts and roadways might as well have been drawings to me, for that is how I interpreted them. Neurologists believe that, when one part of the brain is injured, other parts learn to function in its stead; a small miracle. But forget lesion -- what happens when a faculty is not injured, but instead rendered useless, as was my ability to speak and interpret speech in China?
There, I spent a humbling half-year deaf and dumb, but enchanted, nonetheless, by the smells and the tastes and the sights -- as if they could make up for my voicelessness. Those colors, like the yellows and green of the clay Buddhas at the Fragrant Hills, find strange parallel in the yellow yarn and green grass of the photos that I took yesterday at the Cloisters.

It took China for someone like me, enamored of languages and other sounds, to let go of words and explanations long enough to start seeing the patterns in front of my own eyes: the gray stones of the old hutong neighborhoods around the Forbidden City; the swirl of rice noodles in beef broth; the swoosh of the Beijing subway as it circled the outer boroughs; and the swinging wicker cages that old men would carry along to "walk" their birds. I sought an older, imagined China, growing more nostalgic for it even as the people around me looked ahead, towards the Olympics that are, now, almost upon us. I looked backwards, towards temples and emperors' gardens and pleasure grounds; they anticipated that the Middle Country would rise again, and prepared for it.

What does all of this have to do with my knitting? I didn't knit in China, and I never saw anyone knitting there, although my mother-in-law says that she used to knit her own sweaters after the Cultural Revolution, when everyone learned to make do. No, knitting doesn't have a lot to do with China, but I believe that color does -- or, at least, it has to do with my version of China, imperfect and fragile and beautiful in its wordlessness. I'm sure that, had I stayed longer and learned more Mandarin, some of the charm of incomprehension would have been lost, and I would have begun to read signs as words, not drawings, and look for a label for every passing sensation. Instead, I remained eyes-open, childlike in my delight and appreciation. Something of this same feeling I have now, when I grasp a yellow ball of yarn, take a strand between my fingers, and cast on for another project.

No words -- just yellow.

Osage orange

Some people thrill to see a blank notebook and dream of all the ways that they can fill it; a new skein of yarn gives me a similar yearning to sketch, design, calculate, and measure for a knitting project.

It is amazing to me that this skein of yarn came to me by way of a dyer in Ohio named Tricia, who hand-dyed over 1000 yards of lace-weight merino for me using only a mordant and natural, plant-based materials. I found her online shop on etsy.com, a sort of sales hub for craftspeople and do-it-yourself fiends.

In this case, osage orange helped create this rich shade of yellow, to which Tricia's photo doesn't do justice. But can any photo ever show the texture and heft of yarn, or the way the threads follow the same contours, giving depth to and contrasting one another? Most people agree that yarn on the hank is prettier than yarn knit up, but that's only a bad thing if you are fooled into thinking that what you see when you buy the yarn is what it will look like knit up into a pattern. As soon as you start knitting, that's the moment of disillusion, when the yarn becomes fabric, and thus is set in its ways -- the moment when you have to stop dreaming of all of the things that the yarn could be, and accept that the raw material has decided on one shape, and one alone. With so many thousands of patterns to choose from, and hundreds of colors, not to mention dozens of types of fiber, knitting brushes with the infinite. And yet every project is a step away from the absolute and towards the ordinary, the flawed, the one.

I think that the desire to keep the idea of the yarn, with its possibilities intact, is behind the tendency that so many knitters have to hoard yarn, often letting years go by before they find the project that is "worth it." This yarn-greed resembles other kinds of greed: the insatiable belly-hunger that no food is rich enough to fill; the hunt for the next sexual partner who turns out to disappoint; or the accumulation of books, CDs, newspaper clippings, recipes, and other cultural objects that one person could never enjoy in his lifetime.

What these desires have in common, I think, is the longing for the absolute: that fall into infinity that opens up before us when we contemplate the bottom of the wine bottle or the last dance before the nightclub closes at daybreak. We want never to stop, those of us with such appetites -- we'd rather fling ourselves up and up and up and keep searching, leaving our options open until the very last minute. Some nights I fall asleep with a knitting pattern in my mind's eyes, or two or three that I play with, switching back and forth between them in my imagination, unable to settle on the one I'll cast on with the next day. That's my sort of hunger now, an acceptable sort when confined to fiber and fabrics; it's a hunger that I can live with, and a far cry from the older sort of appetites that always ended in frustration, and emptiness.

Here's a new idea, one that I've had some luck with lately: choosing the pattern first, and not the yarn. Letting the form dictate the content, so that the pattern calls for its own yarn. In the case of Tricia's lovely osage orange, I bought it with a pattern in mind already, a certain "Bleeding Hearts Stole" from Interweave Knits, spring 2008. I have to admit that it doesn't thrill me as much now as it did when I first saw it, before I had made several other shawls and scarves and such of lace, and learned the gist of the technique -- the spark has dimmed. But the stole is an elegant and serviceable pattern, and will discipline me to stick to the plan that I had in my mind when I purchased the yarn, instead of losing myself in yellow waves and fans and fairy-leaves.