The Yarn Whisperer Read Online Free PDF

each needle marches forward to join its partner. The two are knit together into a stitch on the right needle. Another pair joins hands and moves to the right needle, at which point the first joined pair leapfrogs over that second pair and off the fabric. On and on they go, forming an orderly line of bound-off stitches.
    Every time I do this, I’m taken back to the cafeteria of Peter E. Howell. I’m wearing white painter pants, blue Adidas shoes, and my favorite blue plaid shirt with gold threads woven in and faux-pearl snaps for buttons. I’ve adjusted to my strange new life. My father hasn’t remarried, both sets of grandparents are still alive, and I don’t yet know how the story will unfold. I’m simply standing in a row eagerly waiting my turn to walk to the center, grab hands with my partner, and sashay down the line.

NOBODY’S FOOL

    RIGHT AFTER I was born, my father called my Great-Aunt Kay from the hospital to tell her the news. He called collect, and she was so insulted that she refused the charges.
    So heavy was the burden of her guilt that, for my sixth birthday, she made amends by shipping her mother’s entire bedroom set to me. Which is just what every six-year-old girl wants, isn’t it? A heavy, carved-walnut seven-piece Victorian bedroom set?
    My room wasn’t nearly big enough to contain it all. I was entrusted instead with just the bed, the shorter of the two dressers, and the dressing table—a real-live dressing table at which I sat, throughout my entire adolescence, and stared at myself. I looked nothing like the girls in
Seventeen
magazine. My room was nothing like their rooms, and my life, well, I might as well have been on a different planet.
    But still I sat at that dressing table with my Maybelline mascara and my little tub of purple eye shadow—it had fine silver sparkles in it—carefully applying them and wishing they could somehow magically make me fit in.
    By the end of college, I’d abandoned makeup entirely, dismissing it as the oppressive mantle of the patriarchy.
    Then, in 2009, I got an email. Interweave was filming segments for its TV show during the National Needlework Association conference in Ohio. They wanted to do a “wild about wool” show, and would I like to host it? Sure, I said. I can prattle about wool for hours, cameras or no cameras.
    Everything was fine until the producer emailed me the guidelines for being on the show. There in black and white, right below “get a professional manicure,” were the dreaded words “apply your own camera-ready makeup.”
    The notion of talking to a potential audience of millions didn’t scare me a bit. But the prospect of applying my own makeup? Terrifying. That tub of sparkly purple eye shadow had been gone for easily twenty years. I had nothing. They might as well have been asking me to hang drywall or remove an appendix.
    I picked the fanciest hair salon in town, a hoity-toity place that offered sparkling water in wineglasses and advertised massages on the third floor, Botox on the fourth. I scheduled a makeup class. “Can I also schedule a manicure?” I found myself asking. How foreign were these words. Who are you, mouth, and what have you done with Clara?
    Soon I was at the reception desk giving my name to a slender woman with perfect teeth and impossibly tall shoes. Shetottered us to an area that resembled a giant church organ, only instead of keys and buttons and knobs it had tier upon tier of tubes and jars and bottles of color, color, and more color, stacked as high as the eye could see. (Which wasn’t that high considering I’m only five foot two, but still.) A young woman swung around and smiled. I immediately forgot her name, but it ended with an “eeee” sound. We said our hellos and she glanced around me expectantly. I realized she was looking for the gawky preteen daughter I’d presumably brought for the lesson.
    â€œUh,