April 22 2002, 09:11 PM On the Way Back Out

I have learned how to knit.

It is my little joke that I am being extraordinarily precise in that statement: in general, knitting is turning a strand of yarn into cloth. In particular, one specific method of manipulating the yarn into itself is referred to as a knit stitch, and I can do that. I can also do this thing called casting on, which is how it starts. In full disclosure, I cannot yet purl, graft, rib, increase, decrease, slip, or yarn over, expect by accident. I can bind off (this is how it ends), mostly. But I can knit.

I feel I can claim this because it is my fingers that know how, now, so I can click away at doddering speed while listening to NPR, or sometimes MTV2, stopping in the latter case when MTV2 decides to allow Michel Gondry to show me something impossible, which I enjoy.

My efforts have been clumsy and odd, so far, because while the manipulations that give rise to the particular topologies of knitted material are simple, there are also subtle considerations such as tension in the knit that I am not near to understanding. I also lose a sense of the work when in the middle, the row divided across the needles and angled strange.

But I trust it. That should be enough - it turns out that it is.

A while back a friend of mine needed folding screens. I thought of a way to do it with string and pieces of bamboo (with the help of a glue gun - not strictly necessary, but makes it all much easier) to make frames that could be covered with paper or cloth. I made some on the kitchen floor, working over stark pages of The Wall Street Journal. When I was done, I said to myself: "if I ever get stranded on a deserted isle, I can make folding screens. I should learn to make cloth, so as to be able to make a sail."

I can make a really shitty sail.