Read Online The Yarn Whisperer by Clara Parkes - Free Book Online Page B

I’d embedded a hacksaw into both toes. To this day, no amount of explaining (and confessing) will do—she’s convinced that all handknitted socks are instruments of pain. Which has conveniently gotten me out of knitting her socks for Christmas, but it also makes me feel like I’ve let knitting down.
    As soon as I began knitting for other people, especially the likes of my sister-in-law, I realized I could no longer coast on my sloppy compromises. My pride was on the line, the entire reputation of knitting was on the line, and my friends and family deserved better. I had to work on this.
    Thus began my slow journey from Kitchener dreader to true believer. While it didn’t happen overnight, it was propelled by one particular collision of project and circumstances.
    In my mid-twenties I was pretty sure I’d never have a childof my own, so I was determined to become a memorable auntie for everyone else’s children. I just needed my friends to start breeding. Finally, one sunny February morning, my friend Jeanne announced that she was having a baby. Showtime. This was it. I would go full-out Martha Stewart and, naturally, there would be knitting involved.
    At the time, Debbie Bliss was just about our sole source for the adorable, charming, and whimsical. Among her creations was a knitted all-in-one outfit that made the wearer look like a teddy bear. It buttoned up the front, with sleeves that had attached mitts and legs with integrated booties. The hood even had two little ears. Perfect. I procured bear-worthy brown wool yarn and got the project under way. I don’t think I even swatched, I just cast on and started going.
    As is often the case, life intrudes. The yarn turned out to be splitty, the gauge finer than I expected, my progress tediously slow. Work got busy. Then my grandfather suddenly got sick and passed away, pulling me into that weird limbo place where my mind was mostly in the past. Things like work and relationships and knitting cute onesies for fresh new babies had no appeal whatsoever.
    Fortunately, Jeanne’s baby knew nothing of my life and continued to grow. Soon a beautiful little cherub named Nadiya was born. Gradually my own appetite for life returned, and I resumed work on the little brown outfit.
    Debbie Bliss tends to write her patterns row-by-row, while my mind thrives in the narrative big-picture realm. This project had many odd-shaped pieces and few schematics to showme (a) what they were supposed to look like and (b) how they were all going to fit together. The only way to know was to finish knitting and hope that, in all my distraction of late, I didn’t lose count or miss a crucial row, like Bugs Bunny and that notorious left turn he should’ve taken at Albuquerque.
    The baby was crawling by the time I finally finished. Proud and relieved, I wanted to feel like I’d darned the ends of everything that had passed through my life since I began the project, that I’d converted my own sadness and sense of loss into a beautiful object that a new generation could cherish.
    But something was not right. No, it was more than not right, it was wrong. Undeniably, irrefutably so. When I held up the little brown suit to admire, both feet were pointing in the wrong direction. As in backward. If you had dressed the baby using those feet as your guide, it would’ve seamed up the back with a hood that smothered the face. I’d knitted a cruel straitjacket with bear ears.
    As I pondered what Freud would make of my mistake, I considered my options. Unraveling was not one of them, nor was tossing the whole thing into the trash. There was only one choice: I’d have to operate. No shortcuts, no glue, and no sloppy three-needle bind-offs; this baby deserved to have feet done right.
    Immediately that inner voice began its “you can’t do it” mantra. But for some reason, I didn’t listen. I grabbed a good pair of sharp-tipped embroidery scissors