Mossy Cottage Knits

Revenge is Sweet

Look! Smaller and lighter pots! Why, is that “Pomp and Circumstance” I hear playing faintly in the breeze? (Actually, the yarn didn’t need much “potting” at’all but in her desire to make her best yarn so far, TMK threw a coupla inconsequential cooking vessels into the mix for a lark.)

Now that TMK is making, er, useful yarn—unlike the red romney which threatened to go all Chainsaw Massacre on my fingers when I knit with it—we've run head-first into the dreaded place where her lack of knowledge about knitting is causing Un Problemo Grande.

But, first, a story:

Many years ago, I decided I wanted to build a wooden box/trunk/crate/ whathaveyou. Although this took place during her pre-woodworking days, TMK knew enough even then to launch into a long description of all the things I would need to have before I could make a box: a pattern, the dimensions, the right kind of wood, the right kind of nails, a measuring tape, a hammer, a miter box, wood glue, clamps, hinges, a saw, sandpaper, wood filler, and oil or lacquer to finish it with. This was followed by a (well-meant) lecture about all the things I would need to know and do in order to make such a box. It’s about then, I believe, when I stamped my foot, rolled my eyes at her, flapped my hands at her in a dismissive gesture, and said, “Oh, I don’t want to do All That. I just want to whap a box together.” TMK laughed long and hard at my naiveté and, ultimately, the box was never made since we could not close the Grand-Canyon-like gap between careful, controlled, calculated woodcrafting and mere “whapping.” To this day, however, whenever I insist on simplifying something to the point of idiocy, TMK can’t help but trot out the phrase “whap a box together.”

Now, fifteen years later, she’s getting a taste of her own medicine. Granted, over the years, thanks to her strange brand of “commando learning” in which she just vacuums up miscellaneous pieces of information without your realizing it, TMK has learned a surprising amount about the tools required for knitting, if not about knitting itself. She knows there are different kinds and sizes of needles, she knows there are different kinds of yarn, she knows the difference between lace knitting and Fair Isle knitting, she even, remarkably, knows what a steek is. She does not, however, know about The Big Picture, about how the right type of yarn, the right type of needles, the right pattern, the right stitches, the right techniques, the skills of the knitter, and a sufficient amount of time have to come together in one cohesive whole to result in a finished, aesthetically pleasing and functional objet d’art . She doesn’t understand that, especially when working with Mystery Yarn like the Tropical Juice, this can entail swatching, blocking, frogging, tinking, analyzing, mulling, mathematics and perhaps much redoing. Not to mention she wouldn’t know a purl stitch if it bit her on the arse. This inexperience with most things knitty means that, ever since she finished the Tropical Juice, she has been wondering why, in effect, now that I have the yarn, I can’t just “whap something together.” I feel so vindicated.

Posted by Ryan at December 6, 2006 10:04 AM