teeth, knitting

There are many things I could write about today. My sore, post-wisdom-tooth-removal mouth is the obvious one. Whining is attractive, so let me proceed: My mouth still hurts some but I can’t take any more ibuprofen or narcs because they have savaged my stomach, I’m thoroughly sick of yogurt and pureed fruit, my prescription mouthwash has a bitter aftertaste, my stitches make me feel like I have spider legs stuck in my teeth, I can’t have carbonated beverages for another two days and I want a fucking beer. And potato chips. ME WANT POTATO CHIPS AND BEER NOW.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. What I want right now is Grandma’s Tummy Mint tea and antacids that I don’t have to chew.

My oral surgeon looks like Stephen Colbert. With a mustache. In the two hours or so that it took for me to come out of general anesthesia, I estimate that I made some babbling reference to this fact approximately thirty times. Eric might be able to give an exact number, but I am too humiliated to ask him.

(I am not, by the way, of the ranks that find Stephen Colbert attractive. So you can get that right out of your head. And it's a good thing, too, because someone who looked like someone I find attractive would be an uncomfortable person to permit to render me unconscious, jack open my jaw, and fish around in my mouth with metal implements.)

The upside to oral surgery is that recovery provides an excuse to knit for hours on end. For most of Thursday and Friday, and substantial parts of the weekend, I did nothing but sit on the couch, knit, and watch Futurama and Buffy. I finished a pair of socks and cranked out over half of a sweater. I forced Eric to feign admiration of my prowess with cables. I slipped into serious knitting addiction, and I still feel it pulling at me now, suggesting that I don’t really need to finish this blog entry, deal with our refinancing application, file all the papers on the desk, clean the litter box, exercise, pull weeds, or take action on any of the numerous household projects that have to be completed before I start school next fall. Surely I could find some NPR podcast that would be constructive listening…something, anything to give me an excuse to knit some more.

My friend Dee Anna, in the throes of a work-related repetitive motion injury that renders her incapable of knitting more than a few rows at a time, distracted herself from the misery of yarn withdrawal by posting a list of questions on her blog to her fellow knitters, about how and why we began the craft. I’ve been wanting to answer them, so I will do so here, with my best attempt to make this interesting for non-knitters (Muggles). If there is a fiber whore in your life, perhaps this will help you to understand her/him better.

How did you learn to knit? Let me backtrack. When I was nine years old, we lived in France for a semester and I was often lonely, scared, and above all, bored. My mom, probably in a desperate attempt to stop me whining, taught me to crochet. I still remember the chunky red and white variegated yarn she bought me, the white plastic handle and silver hook of the crochet hook, and the bumpy, uneven scarf I created. But most of all I remember the calm and sense of protectedness that came to me when I was crocheting. It was a magic shield that I made myself, at a time when most of the outer things in life were foreign and strange.

A few years later, someone, I can’t remember who, gave me a long implement that was a cross between a knitting needle and crochet hook and attempted to teach me a knitting/crochet hybrid that I have never encountered anywhere else. For lack of a better term, I will refer to it as croshitting. It did not stick.

I crocheted off and on for the next seventeen years, making mostly afghans and later, when my friends started having children, baby blankets. I enjoyed it, but that elemental need that it fulfilled for me back in France was ultimately replaced with boredom. Crochet…no offense to any crocheters out there, but it’s a craft with definite limits, particularly for those whose tastes don’t run in the seventies retro direction. I knew that knitting was superior, but I believed that knitting was an art akin to glass-blowing, so intricate and disaster-fraught that one misstep would ruin hours of hard work. I was wrong. Mostly.

About six years ago, when we were living in Ann Arbor, my cousin Liz sent me a rave review of Debbie Stoller’s Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook. Along with thousands of other twenty-something Third Wave feminists, I taught myself to knit from this book.

Did you have a teacher or any outside guidance? I lied—actually, my aunt taught me to knit, in my early twenties. The thing is that my aunt knits the way most Americans knit, by holding the yarn in her right hand. For some reason, I am constitutionally unable to do this, and was constantly trying to put it in my left. Knitting did not take for me until I got this book and learned that holding the yarn in one’s left hand is a perfectly viable method of knitting. Continental, even.

At various points, I have sought counsel from the much more experienced Suze, but I usually just figure it out on my own.

How was it in the beginning? Obsessive. It took over every evening, and I took it to work with me and knitted during all my breaks. I considered possible methods for knitting while conducting phone interviews with clinical directors of outpatient drug treatment facilities, which was my job at the time, but fortunately my desire to remain employed kicked in.

How long did it take to learn to love knitting? Just a few days. That’s about how long it took me to master the basic movements. Almost immediately after that I had that magic shield experience again. And that’s a big part of why I still knit: because the world feels so scary sometimes, and knitting makes me feel safe, and calmer about things. And then there’s something about hope and regeneration and tapping into creative forces and living metaphors that I’m not really capable of articulating without sounding silly.

I also had a fellow twenty-something Third Wave feminist knitting friend at work, who learned that soaking one’s feet while knitting a white cardigan and drinking red wine is a bad idea, so that I didn’t have to learn for myself.

What was your first project? Promise you won’t laugh? It was a cell phone cozy, with orange and pink stripes. Eric pronounced it the most absurd piece of fiber known to humankind, and I have to say he was right. It muffled the sound of my cell phone ring so that half the time I missed it, and when I did happen to hear it, I couldn’t get it out of the cozy in time to answer it. Also, at that time I didn’t know that they had invented such a thing as a keyguard, so while my phone was cozied, it was randomly calling my friends and family and treating them to the sounds of the inside of my purse.

What do you wish you had made for a first project? The Princess Snowball Cat Bed from Stitch ‘N Bitch. Because I’m sure it would have been a spectacular failure from every possible angle, and would make a much better story.