"It's a metaphor for everything I've ever failed at."
October 12, 2015 11:32 AM   Subscribe

"There are two kinds of women: those who knit and those who unravel. I am a great unraveler. I can undo years of careful stitching in fifteen gluttonous minutes. It isn't even a decision, really. Once I see the loose thread, I am undone. It's over before I have even asked myself the question: Do I actually want to destroy this?"

Stephanie Danler's piece for The Paris Review and well over a dozen more knitting-related essays, including Christina Baker Kline's "Why Should Cancer Make Me Want to Knit?," will appear in an anthology to be published next month: Knitting Pearls, a follow-up to Knitting Yarns.
posted by divined by radio (17 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Whoa. That was beautiful, thank you for posting.
posted by lepus at 12:15 PM on October 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I love this a lot. Which is funny because I should dislike it, because I have all these thoughts about how the metaphor is wrong (although it's not wrong, it's just not the metaphor I would use as a newbie knitter.) But it's such lovely writing, and I like knitting-as-metaphor so much, that I utterly love it anyway. Thank you for sharing it.
posted by Stacey at 12:25 PM on October 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


I love this. I'm an unraveller too, but a very controlled one. I take my pieces and I label them carefully to make sure I can put them back together again. I envy the abandon of this even as I fear it.
posted by corvine at 1:12 PM on October 12, 2015


I haven't read this yet - just about to - but all of my knitting friends are consistently amazed at how often I will stop midway through a project and just rip the whole thing out. For me, there's something so satisfying about being able to start all over. Now off to RTFA.
posted by Sophie1 at 2:01 PM on October 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't have the patience for knitting, my life unravels and I revel in it, and my friend is her friend. Thanks for posting, it puts wonderful words to my experience.
posted by Grandysaur at 2:23 PM on October 12, 2015


That looks like an interesting book, thanks.

Metaphor or literal, unraveling is a lot easier than knitting. And often more satisfying.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 3:09 PM on October 12, 2015


A little-known fact about knitting: for some of us, it doesn't take patience, it gives us patience.
posted by clavicle at 4:45 PM on October 12, 2015 [9 favorites]


Knitting for me has been an incantation against PTSD and anxiety. I use knitting to keep from unravelling.
posted by Stacey at 4:56 PM on October 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


I ravel and unravel regularly as the tides. Those things have taught me that what can be pulled together, can be torn apart, and that most of the time you get what you aim for in that realm. I knitted so many ugly scarves and half done blankets before I gave in and stopped punishing sheep for my shortcomings. After all, they gave of themselves- they should have better than that.
posted by LuckyMonkey21 at 6:51 PM on October 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


You know what freaks people out? Me unraveling a 600-stitch cast on skirt because knitting from the bottom up is a pain in the ass, and then people seeing it and going OMG!
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:57 PM on October 12, 2015


Metaphorically speaking, I used to be an Unraveler and am now a Knitter, and I read this essay with a combination of empathy and consternation. I'm sort of over people who dive headfirst into fuckuppage, knowing full well that it's a terrible idea, yet convinced they're unable to control themselves and it's just their nature to self-destruct. At the same time, I know it takes a lot of work to climb out of those holes and learn to avoid them, and I know the appeal of breaking something to see what's inside.

Literally speaking, I am someone with several unfinished knitting projects and ten years' worth of yarn stashed under the bed. Knitting is full of sloppiness and chaos and disappointment and ruin, and from that perspective I think it's sort of funny that Danler would categorize knitting as a tidy activity for people who have their shit together. To extend Danler's metaphor, I think she's seeing other people's cabled socks and lace shawls and assuming she could never pull them off, not realizing that everyone starts out making misshapen garter stitch scarves and acrylic fun-fur monstrosities.
posted by Metroid Baby at 5:58 AM on October 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


Another thing: nearly anything that's unraveled can be knit again. People buy sweaters from thrift shops and take them apart for the yarn. It's one of the great things about knitting. No mistake is permanent if you're willing to rip back and fix it.

(I usually let my mistakes stand and knit on.)
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:02 AM on October 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


I loved this essay.

I tried knitting a scarf once and I did something wrong because it started to get wider and wider and wider and wider as I kept going, so really at the end, I knitted a manta ray. Not sure exactly how that fits in the metaphor of being a knitter and being an unraveler--I do things very very carefully and on purpose but the things I do are nuts?
posted by millipede at 6:14 AM on October 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


Having now RTFA, I am raveled (or wound) very tightly. I try desperately to prepare for any eventuality, sometimes becoming completely paralyzed by the perfectionism. Knitting is one of the only places I feel comfortable, even free, to begin something haphazardly and then completely unravel it. Great essay.
posted by Sophie1 at 7:50 AM on October 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Knitting is full of sloppiness and chaos and disappointment and ruin, and from that perspective I think it's sort of funny that Danler would categorize knitting as a tidy activity for people who have their shit together. To extend Danler's metaphor, I think she's seeing other people's cabled socks and lace shawls and assuming she could never pull them off, not realizing that everyone starts out making misshapen garter stitch scarves and acrylic fun-fur monstrosities.

And the better you get at it, the better you get at noticing the little flaws in your own work... so that even those people with the cabled socks and the lace shawls, if you asked them they could say "Ah, that's where I had a stitch fall off my lace and I nearly lost the whole thing and had to frog it; here is the place where I accidentally put in two yarn-overs where there ought to have been one and wound up with a weird hole I tried to mend with a needle and thread; there is the bit where I accidentally flipped my cables backwards and didn't realize for twenty rows and couldn't get up the energy to tink back and fix it." (And no one brings out the cabled sweater they spent months on and wound up being much too short in the bell-like, volumnious sleeves and too tight in the torso, such that it made the intended wearer look like a very well-decorated sausage indeed. Sometimes you have to throw a project in the closet in a fit of rage and quit dealing with it until you have the emotional distance to pull it out, rip out the yarn, and re-make it. Ask me how I know.)

To me, learning to knit--learning to make things--it teaches you to see where there are imperfections in anything and how to decide when to put in the energy to fix a mistake and how to decide when to just go "oh, fuck it; fixing it isn't worth it." Of course, that doesn't mean I think her metaphor is remotely bad--just that it looks different from the perspective of a person who is always trying to make things. I'm a knitter metaphorically more than I am literally at the moment, since my hands hurt and I never seem to have the time to sit down and work on any of my three unfinished pieces lately, but I think that her metaphor is actually perfectly fine in terms of spending your life building things--both tangible and emotional. I do disagree that anyone is inherently either a knitter or an unraveler, because I think everyone is both. (Unless, possibly, her entire life is spent unraveling the work of others--which I think is a reading that doesn't fit with the examples she chooses, and is a bit hard on herself.)

We're all constantly building things and ripping half-formed, misshapen pieces back, learning from the things we try and doing our best with what experience we have. It's just that mistakes are scary to confront, scary to deal with, and scary to accept... and it's so much easier for many of us to focus on our own errors and flaws while we stand dazzled by others' strengths. And that poisonous juxtaposition is so paralyzing and so terrifying.

Thank you for posting this.
posted by sciatrix at 7:50 AM on October 13, 2015 [4 favorites]


When I was in full knitting phase I took it with me everywhere - I was also trying to quit smoking. I was at dinner with a friend and her mother, who is an amazing knitter and a very nice person. Her mom is more my contemporary than her daughter is- she gently took the crazy ball I had made of my excess and wrapped it very tightly into something that didn't unravel as I finished the piece . For once, I was not embarrassed by my mistakes, but grateful for the help.
posted by LuckyMonkey21 at 8:50 AM on October 13, 2015


I'm pretty big on donating the sweaters that didn't quite work out and thereby eliminating them from my closet. (hah can't bring myself to delete them from my ravelry projects page though- I need documentation of the time spent on them!)

It's also been a few days since this has been posted, but it gave me the hope to go back to my current project, unravel it YET AGAIN (3x!) and start over and do the modifications to the goddamn shoulders that I need to make things better. (SHORT ROWS FOR ALL!).

Maybe I'll even pick up last years sweater (at 98% done, I realized that the yarn relaxes way too much after blocking, and I need to re-nit it about 2 sizes smaller), and unravel it and start over.
posted by larthegreat at 8:37 AM on October 19, 2015


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