This Thread

If stranded on a deserted island, I could unravel a sweater and make it into a rope, or a ribbon, or a hammock, or a shoe. I could unstuff the cotton from an aspirin bottle and spin it into sewing thread, while telling you about Gandhi and Indian cotton, or the handspun hemp for Columbus’ sails. I would have fun, and I would make you try your hand, too. I can teach anyone who is willing to learn.

If a single, practical thread might string this life together, I’d want you to feel that thread, too. I would tell you, this is the thread of the universe.

It’s trite to say that this yarn is my religion, but it is not trite to say that my faith, like ancient faiths, is woven tightly to the tangible world. My ancient faith begins with nomadic people, shepherds, sheep: because sheep provide an endless crop of wool, and wool is the most versatile stuff in the world. A skein of yarn almost sings to me: see how cleverly all of this is made.

When day-to-day tasks make no sense, I knit, almost as a form of pacing, following the brilliant color, the shape of the project.

Where this project gets cast-on, where it begins:

I would wake on a summer morning to the sound of my mother’s upholstery shears gliding across the oak dining table. She pushed the sharp blades through plush fabric in long strokes, and I could hear the quiet swish from rooms away. I would find her in the kitchen with her chalked-out fabric shapes, wearing a pencil tucked behind one ear, talking herself through her checklist for this piece of furniture.

When she wasn’t upholstering, she crocheted doilies in freeform patterns, and she cross-stitched elaborate designs for framing. Her hands liked to be busy.

My father, too, penciled patterns onto tissue paper in his woodworking shop. He used professional lettering stencils for posters and signs, measuring more than twice, penciling guide marks until the pattern was perfect. Then he would begin, often on the same oak table protected with layers of newspaper. He could paint a wall without using tape, without dripping, without thinking twice. They were both effortlessly skilled.

Raised by “makers”—that’s what we say now, but my parents would have brushed that off: didn’t everybody make something? They didn’t say, “I hope you find something to do with your hands.” They didn’t need to. My brothers and I taught ourselves candle-making and resin molds and model cars, working with kits and markers and paints. We took care of our tools. We built stuff. Unlike my parents, I never measured if I could avoid it. I chose options that defied paper patterns. I hand-stitched stuffed animals from fun fur. I tried freehand calligraphy and pressed-flower art, making greeting cards for my friends. I tried a fancy sewing class, but store-bought patterns never suited me. After one fussy embroidery project, I swore I would never sew again. I didn’t need framed bric-a-brac—I wanted useful garments that didn’t need tweaking when I was done. My parents were craftspeople, maturing in their skills with each project—and I was more of a dabbler.

Maybe I just hadn’t found the thing. Makers: they were the pattern, and I was the dropped stitch.

Now. With a big fluffy yarn and double-pointed needles, I can knit you a hat in about an hour. I don’t need a pattern: I know the size of the human head, and I can figure it out. If I make a mistake, I can unravel it and wind it back into a ball of yarn, then I’ll start again. With even fluffier yarn, I can knit you thrummed mittens with an added layer of warmth, or a cowl the shape of a Mobius strip.

But with thin yarn, I can knit you the best gift ever: a pair of socks in tiny little stitches. I can knit socks by hand, but I like the experience of color when I knit on my hand-crank sock-knitting machine that was first engineered in the Civil War era. I knit about 200 pairs of socks each year, sometimes less, and in this pandemic season, sometimes many more.

When I’m done knitting, my day-to-day tasks might still make no sense, but eventually I have a hat, mittens, a scarf, a pair of socks, a dozen pairs of socks.

In the meantime, I sometimes whisper to the yarn, this yarn is my favorite. And it’s true.

Now that the pandemic season is shifting, I’m carrying my “finishing bag” to outdoor meetings, to church in the courtyard, sewing the final inches of yarn firmly into the fabric of sock after sock, checking for dropped stitches that need to be anchored, snipping close to the fabric with my tiny stork-shaped scissors. If I find another knitter in a crowd, we nod to one another: Where would I be without this thread? How would I have managed this season without this thread?

Where we pick up the dropped stitch:

In my thirties, far from my parent’s home, I craved a genuine wool sweater. Expensive sweaters in stores were the wrong colors, the wrong length. My husband and I were live-in tour guides for an historic home in a seaside town, and between grad school semesters I found a flyer that advertised “Knit Your Own Icelandic Sweater in Five Weeks,” hosted by a local art gallery. The course was ambitious: we began with photos and patterns of Icelandic collars, with colored pencils and graph paper. I sketched a coffee-brown sweater and a collar with bands of purple and evergreen, drawn together with a red netting pattern that stretched into the brown. I drew yellow accents with a highlighter. I cast on my first red border stitches with my teacher’s help, and I learned how to switch colors as I moved upward from the lower ribbed hem. I measured the arms to fit precisely, so I wouldn’t need to roll up the designs at the cuff. Sometimes my teacher would knit the body of my sweater while I worked on the sleeves, hoping to finish within six or seven weeks rather than her advertised five. I was a new knitter, after all.

A bottom-up sweater project ends with the glorious collar—the fun part—and I topped it with a tall mock-turtleneck of red. I finished the underarm seams and sewed the yellow highlights in a duplicate stitch—the ends are still not properly woven in, but I tell you it’s a thing of beauty, that sweater. The fair isle hem is a little wonky—that was me, learning how to knit an heirloom sweater I still wear after almost thirty years. After the price of yarn and needles and the class, it was the most expensive garment I’d ever owned, and it was well worth the investment.

I knit hats as the next practical step, years later when kids needed earflaps in acorn-colored yarn, with long braided ties. Unlike the sweater, I could make it up as I knit. Later I designed a fair isle sweater for my daughter, using rose-colored fluffy boucle yarn, with hearts around the cuffs and collar. It took a little knitting and unraveling before I could get it right.

And once you’ve learned to make stitches, to increase, don’t you find that you keep going?

Sometimes lovers of wool go deeper, asking, “But how is this yarn made? How is it colored this way? Can I do that myself?” In a quest for affordable art-yarn, affordable fabric, we take on every property of wool: spinning with a spindle, spinning with a wheel, weaving to use up all of the hand-spun wool, wet-felting and needle-felting to skip the spinning and move straight to fabric. Shrinking thrift-shop sweaters and upcycling them into something else. How do I make shoe-strings? How does angora yarn make that fuzzy halo? How does merino wool perform differently? How do I make garments that will last?

Maybe it’s an impulse to know the created order of the universe a little better.

I remember stumbling into an exhibit called Needles and Pins at the The International Folk Museum in Santa Fe, and weeping over the kinship of women and fabric and tools. Darning eggs and batik stamps and indigo works and lace-making pillows, and photos of women spinning yarn by the roadside—fabric and handwork genius from all over the world. Reels for making thread from silk-worm cocoons.

What makes my heart soar? I am a part of some greater “we.” Maybe it’s an impulse toward fellowship. Women have been provisioning their families from the beginning of time. That one thread.

When I was a child, I was looking for one grand unifying theme, one overarching metaphor to make sense of this life, and in my search for religion and belief, I imagined one thread, beginning to end. Later, I taught a Montessori religious curriculum called History’s Golden Thread, with timelines of ancient history traced in gold pencil. This thread, and the intimate love of the creator, this blessing. One thread makes it all work. We talked about sheep in Hebrew scripture, and wool and spinning, as I threaded blunt needles with colorful yarn, one for each child, and handed them bits of wool that I’d meticulously trimmed from scraps. We made sheep, and necklaces, and bookmarks.

My first socks began on tiny needles wound with figure-8s—a Turkish cast-on that becomes the tip of the toe, adding stitches to become sixteen stitches, then seventy-two stitches around, from two thin sticks to four, around and around, one line of stitches after another. I learned a new method with each pair: toe up, toe down, afterthought heels.

If only everything was as easy to follow as this one thread.

In the year I was learning to knit, I volunteered as a chalice-bearer for a small Episcopal church, and the windows of the church all bore scenes of water: Jesus on the sea, Noah and the Ark, Jonah striding out of the mouth of a brilliant red whale and onto the sandy beach. When I stood behind the kneeling rail in my white alb, tipping the cup for my plumber, for the janitor, for the banker who helped us with our car loan, I would see sunlight through those watery windows. I would hear the descant of soprano voices harmonizing and above the singers’ heads, I would sometimes see a shimmering ribbon of tapestry being woven, pulling us all together, a thousand threads, my people, my world, all. I felt, in that moment, that I was in the right place, at the right time, and that glimpse of wonder, of holiness, was a small gift of a vision that I would forget until the next Sunday, and the next.

When we moved from that church and I became a parent, my imagination moved to hats, mittens, socks, and I never wore the alb again, never saw that vision again, but I believe it’s still there, above our heads, shimmering, pulling me to everything else.

I could tell you the story of how I learned to knit socks on a machine, but all you need to know is that I followed the thread, and I will keep following the thread, a cuff, a heel, a foot, a toe, and the next sock, and the next. All you need to know is that each pair of socks is my favorite, that I am always thinking of the person whose foot might fit this sock.

What do we have, in strange seasons of turmoil like we are living through now, if we do not have a vision, a thread, a heritage, a unifying theme? What do we have if we do not have a practice, something to do, to busy our hands? I’m not saying this is the only way to live, but it’s the only way to live for me, the child of makers, with that vision of a tapestry and the kinship of the ages. On a frayed and tiresome day, all I have is this one thread, knitting around and around, and often enough, this thread is enough.