The Yarn Whisperer Read Online Free PDF Page B

no,” I explained, “this is for me.”
    And we were off. She pulled my hair back and started rubbing my face with a cool gel that tingled. “I’m just applying a toner to make sure we get rid of any residual makeup.”
    â€œNo worries there,” I mumbled.
    For almost an hour, I sat while she slathered, smeared, dotted, brushed, and blotted my face with layer upon layer of cream, paste, powder, and gel. She played a cruel trick of applying things on just one side of my face, then making me apply them on the other side. Soon I looked like a Raggedy Ann doll that had suffered a stroke. She kept notes of what she’d done, marking swirls and slashes on a drawing of a face and then adding product names and colors. The eyes alone had twelve different notations.
    While I gazed at the weird face in the mirror, she asked if I felt confident enough to do this on my own.
    â€œI think so,” I lied.
    â€œShould I start setting you up with some product?” she asked.
    â€œUh … sure.”
    The initial tab came in at $600. We slowly whittled away at her masterpiece until I left with just an etching of a face. It was still wildly over budget, but what could I do? This was television, after all.
    The morning of the shoot, I met a friend at the hotel elevator. She studied my face for a good long time. “You look,” she said finally, “like someone who got a very good night’s rest.” I decided she meant it as a compliment, but as soon as the taping was over, I returned to my room and used a hot towel to remove the well-rested face and let the puffy, jet-lagged one back out. On the washcloth was a clear outline of my face, like the Shroud of Turin.
    The closest thing we have to cosmetology in the knitting world would have to be duplicate stitch. While the rest of what we do involves building our foundation from scratch, block by block, stitch by stitch, duplicate stitch is about etching new colors and fibers directly on top of existing ones. You may know it by its raised-pinkie name, Swiss darning. The goal is to trace the exact outline of the existing stitch with new yarn so that it is, in fact, a duplicate. But just like my TV-ready face, everybody knows that something is different.
    The knitting show wasn’t actually my first time on TV. In the 1980s, around the same time that duplicate stitch was being used on sweaters with giant shoulder pads, I appeared in a local-access TV show called
Back Alley’s.
High school friends and I wrote, acted, directed, produced, filmed, and edited this path-breaking drama whose only real claim to fame was a guestappearance by the late Michael Landon. I played Alley, the wisecracking owner of the bar where all the characters hung out—when they weren’t being hit on the head by watermelons and feigning amnesia in the hospital.
    This led to an equally brief but illustrious career in television voice-overs that lasted, if my memory serves me right, exactly one commercial. I went into the dark, padded sound room of a Tucson studio and donned my headphones, each the size of a sweet roll. I gazed at my on-screen subject: a woman handing a bag to a customer and saying the words “thank you.” That was my canvas.
    I wanted this to be utterly seamless, so I got to work. What was her motivation? Did she like her job? Was this at the beginning or end of her shift? Had she eaten lunch yet? I looked closer. There was something in her expression … perhaps she and this man had been lovers years ago, and she was hoping he wouldn’t remember—yet was secretly hurt that he didn’t.
    We recorded about thirty takes before the job was done. I tried to make my addition as smooth as possible, but I’m sure my voice, like even the most expertly worked duplicate stitch, still formed a slight bump on the scene’s otherwise smooth surface.
    That’s how duplicate stitch works. It’s the voice-over of the knitting