The Yarn Whisperer Read Online Free PDF Page A

things and was constantly ducking into a barrel to avoid being trampled, and people applauded it.
    Arizona had only been a state for sixty-four years at this point, and the Wild West spirit still reigned. We even had a formal school holiday—“rodeo vacation”—so that we could all hitch our wagons and head out to the fairgrounds for some roping and cattle rustling.
    How I longed for my gorgeous dancers trotting in their sandboxes, for the creaky wood floors of the Botsford School of Dance and the piano player who accompanied us as we flailed around, dreaming we were prima ballerinas. I missed being able to run around barefoot on the grass. I longed for tall, leafy trees and soft snow and my father in his blue cashmere sweater.
    Then came square dancing, which I soon discovered was as important a school ritual as math, science, or the daily recital of the Pledge of Allegiance. Every week we’d file down to the cafeteria, line up, and march to the yammering orders and old-timey jingle-jangle coming from a small portable record player by the stage. “Hemmina hemmina hemmina,” the man would babble, occasionally calling us to “allemande left, chase yer neighbor, do-si-do” before resuming the random “hemmina hemmina hemmina …”. We’d march to and fro in clunky synchronization like awkward little Maoist soldiers.
    After the initial affront, something strange clicked inside of me. The pleasant mathematical order of things overtook any of my angst about boys, breasts, or body odor. I liked how all our movements fit together like clockwork. There was nothing personalabout this. I wasn’t waiting for a boy to ask me to dance—we all had to do-si-do, no matter what, or the engine would come to a stop. Each person played a vital role in keeping the machine running smoothly.
    This may be part of why I like knitting so much. All knitting is choreography. Some moves are more graceful than others, but they all fit together and create one cohesive piece of fabric. Whether it’s an allemande left or a simple pirouette, each move dictates the dance as each stitch dictates the knitting. Both rely on discrete elements that are arranged and repeated in a certain fashion, whether through the movement of body alone or that of yarn, needles, and hands. Break out into the Charleston in the middle of a tango, or feather and fan in the midst of a heavy cabled sweater, and the public will take notice.
    I’ve always thought that ribbing was the perfect knitted embodiment of tap dance. Knit a front-facing stitch and purl a back-facing stitch, and you’re performing a perfect shuffle ball-change. Vary the order of your knits and purls from row to row, and the shuffle ball-change becomes a more nuanced time-step.
    Cables add the sideways shuffling of Bob Fosse, with his telltale one-leg-behind-the-other stance and jazz hands flashing midair. Elaborate lace motifs, those are as close as we’ll ever get to classic ballet, to knitting
Swan Lake
on our needles. Feather and fan is the ballerina seated on stage, legs straight ahead, who opens her arms to the sky and then gracefully collapses forward until she and her legs are one, the breathing motion of yarn overs collapsing into the condensed silence of knit two togethers.
    And the truly expressive, Martha Graham–style modern dance? That likely gets you Kaffe Fassett colorwork or a particularly vibrant piece of freeform knitting, the unexpected geometry of Norah Gaughan’s designs, a Cat Bordhi moebius.
    In the world of knitted choreography, one stitch makes me particularly happy: the three-needle bind-off. You do this when you have two rows of live stitches you want to join conspicuously—say, you’d like to attach the front and back shoulders of a sweater and want the prominent look of a raised seam.
    It begins with a lining up of the two needles, the rows of stitches facing one another. One by one, a stitch from