How to Pack Your Knitting Bag
Yarn: Pack enough yarn for the extra knitting time you might find if your travels are delayed or prolonged. Packing extra yarn for a number of projects is always prudent.
Needles: Pack a full assortment in case you begin a project and find your gauge is off or you decide to switch projects mid-trip.
Patterns: Make copies of your patterns so as not to add to the weight of your bag with heavy books. Or simply store them in a library on your electronic device.
Extra Lighting: A small, inexpensive headlamp is handy for knitting on the go after dark. It can be worn around the head, or hung from the neck.
Notions: Pack small scissors, a ruler (one with gauge holes is especially handy to have), a tapestry needle, stitch markers and stitch counter, and a small note pad and pen or pencil for jotting down notes.
As knitters, we often spend our days filling in the cracks of time with a few rows here and a few rows there. Nothing calms frayed nerves during travel like a lap full of knitting. The plane is delayed? An extra half hour on the train? A two-hour traffic jam and you are in the passenger seat? It is all good, for it is all just more time to knit.
At first, you may find you are shy about knitting in public. Like a new mother needing to breastfeed her baby, you have the strong urge to do it, even though whipping out your needles in pubic can be, well, daunting. I promise you, women have knit in public for eons. Once you have done it, there is no turning back. So take a deep breath, grab your packed knitting bag, and repeat after me, “It’s always time for a bit of a knit . . . It’s always time for a bit of a knit . . .”
Did you know that if you were living in Finland in the eighteenth century, you could be arrested for knitting in public? Since many undergarments were knit for the cold climate there, some speculate that it was an embarrassment to be seen knitting “undies.” Others contend that the ban was put in place to stop gossiping. Whatever the reason, travel in that part of the world in that day and age, by horse and carriage, and/or sled was long and tedious, made all the more so without a little knitting to break up the trip.
Shedding Some Light on the Subject of the Headlamp
Imagine my surprise when Mr. Wicks thought to give me a headlamp for Valentine’s Day one year! I must confess I was not as impressed with this gift as I might have been had jewelry been attached. I am afraid that Mr. Wicks’ sense of romance tends toward the practical. My initial response was to refuse to put the thing on.
“I will look too wonky with that thing on my head,” I told him, but he insisted I give it a try. It was just a wide strap of elastic with a little light in the center, but oh, that glorious light!
A long car trip at night was suddenly transformed into a knitting fest! I no longer whined about wanting to take my turn behind the wheel. Who wants to drive when they can knit?
I began to use the lamp more and more. Now, I won’t travel without it. I often catch Mr. Wicks smiling when he sees me putting it on my head. I am not sure if the smile is because he thinks himself quite clever at gift giving or because I really do look wonky wearing the thing. Whichever it is, I keep my headlamp where I can always reach it, in my knitting bag.
DEAR MRS. WICKS,
Lately I seem to spend more time on my computer looking for knitting patterns than I do actually knitting. Does this ever happen to you?
Sincerely,
Screen Addict in Alaska
“She had read too many books and it had addled her brain.”
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
DEAR SCREEN ADDICT,
Yes, it has happened to me and judging by my mail recently, I’d say it is a serious epidemic in the knitting community.
“She had read too many patterns and it had addled her brain . . .” Mrs. Wicks
La Belle Lectrice, Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789)
Just this morning, I logged on to Ravelry, to look for a new pattern for a pair of baby booties. What I found were 127 patterns from which to choose! My first thought was Oh, happy day!
I eagerly dove into that virtual mountain of patterns, looking at one, then another, and another, and another, until my eyes began to bug out and my desire to knit for dimpled little feet began to diminish.
Then I did something novel. I turned off my computer and went to my bookshelves instead. I began paging through my knitting books, and within a few minutes, I found the perfect pattern for the booties I wanted to make. This is how simple the act of choosing a pattern used to be, before modern technology lulled us into thinking that more is always better.
Of course, once I found my pattern, I ran back to my computer to see if it was posted on Ravelry. It was! 476 people had posted it with pictures! Would I care to see them in a red worsted wool? Oh, yes I would. How about in a saucy yellow cotton? Yes, indeedy! Or a trendy green merino? Let’s take a look. Want to see them in stripes with mittens to match? How about with pink ruffles along with a cap? And on, and on, and on.
Stickande Kulla, by Anders Zorn (1901)
It pains me to admit how long I sat there trolling through those hundreds of posts. Suffice to say, there was a whole lot of brain addling going on and no knitting to speak of. The only remedy is to stay strong. Set limits on how long you can waste hours of your life on just looking rather than doing. If all else fails, pray for a power outage. You will have to knit by candlelight but at least you will be knitting.
DEAR MRS. WICKS,
I want to learn to knit but I am not a patient person. Is it possible for someone like me to become a knitter?
Sincerely,
Impatient in Texas
DEAR IMPATIENT,
We knitters are often mistaken for patient people.
“He that can have patience can have what he will.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
The truth is that knitting can be the perfect remedy for an impatient person. I am the living proof. Restless by nature, I found that as a young mother, knitting often gave me the patience that I needed.
When the little Wicks were very young, Mr. Wicks built them a large sandbox in our yard. We added shovels and buckets filled with water. Never underestimate the gravitational pull of small children to sand and water. The sandbox instantly became their favorite place to play. They would start begging to go outside first thing in the morning. So after breakfast, I’d throw the dishes in the sink and together the little Wicks and I would troop out together into the morning light, me with my knitting, and my little chicks with their small hands clutching their buckets and shovels.
But as I sat in a chair beside the sandbox, the thought of my unfinished household chores would nag at me. There were the unmade beds, the sink full of dishes, the playroom carpet covered in a layer of play dough and cookie crumbs, and the errant hamster who had broken out of his cage and hadn’t been seen in days.
I could feel my restlessness building as I ticked off the list of must do’s in my mind. I was impatient to make some order out of all that disorder. But what I discovered that summer was that once I took up my yarn and needles, the mindfulness of my knitting never failed to calm me. For the grace of knitting is that it centers you in the here and now. Your mind gives way to what you are doing, rather than what you could be doing or should be doing. Impatience soon dissolves into patience.
I realized that the dishes and beds could wait. The hamster was probably happily asleep in the pile of dirty clothes on the laundry room floor. The house was not burning down.
I looked up from my knitting. The sun was shining on the fat, red hollyhocks growing beside the kitchen window. The little Wicks laughed as they knocked their sand castles down and built them back up again. All seemed so right with the world, and I was glad not to have missed that moment.
Today, so many years later, my beds are always made and the dishes always done. There is a hush in the house now for my little Wicks have all grown up and gone off to other houses filled with little ones of their own.
&n
bsp; Sometimes on a summer’s morning, I will stand at my kitchen window and look out into the yard. Though the sandbox is long gone, and the ground covered over with grass, I can almost see us all out there again, in that early light. We all look so busy: they, bent over their buckets, and me, over my knitting. I can see the stitches for a small blue mitten or a little red hat on my needles. If I listen closely, I can almost hear the laughter of the voices I have loved most in my life.
I was not born a patient person, but I was a knitter as a young mother and I feel lucky in that.
Knitting Girl Watching Toddler in a Cradle, Albert Anker (1885)
THE LITTLE WICKS ELEPHANT HAT
Fits baby, six months to one year old
Let’s Begin!
Materials: 1 skein Red Worsted Weight
Small amount of white Worsted for pattern work
Teeny amount of green yarn for French Knots
Needles: 1 pair US size 5 Straight Needles
Gauge: 4 inches = 20 stitches
Hat Front: Cast on 36 stitches.
Work ribbing K1, P1 for 2 inches.
Row 1: K all stitches.
Row 2: K all stitches.
Rows 3–26: Work Chart.
Rows 27–33: K all stitches.
Add French Knots to peaks of pattern 1.
Slip stitches to spare needle.
Hat Back: Cast on 36 stitches.
Knit all 33 rows.
Work a Three Needle bind off with front and back stitches. Sew up sides.
Make tassels and attach at corners.
DEAR MRS. WICKS,
Help! I seem to have developed the habit of buying just one skein of yarn, which I never seem to know what to do with. How can I break this one-skein habit?
Sincerely,
Impulsive in Ohio
DEAR IMPULSIVE,
This puts me in mind of that woman of infinite passion and grand impulses . . .
Theda Bara from the silent film Cleopatra (1917)
“Fool don’t you see now that I could have poisoned you a hundred times had I been able to live without you.” Cleopatra (68 BC–30 BC)
“Fool, don’t you see now that I could have plucked you out of my stash a hundred times had I been able to live without you.” Mrs. Wicks.
I recently had a short, one-sided conversation with a ball of ruby red angora that has lived in my stash for years and seemed to beg the question, Why am I still here?
When you feel the urge to make this one-skein purchase, it is best to look around the yarn shop for the nearest exit. Run, don’t walk toward it, and whatever you do, don’t look back. It is akin to looking at a stray kitten. If you stop to pick it up, you know it is probably going home with you. This kind of impulse one-skein shopping leads to a stash full of odd balls of yarn that may never see the light of day on your needles.
What usually prompts knitters to give in to impulse and plunk down their money for just one skein is their inability to resist gorgeous yarn. Either the color or the texture lures them in, but the high price keeps them from buying enough to make anything more useful than a nose-warmer, and honestly, how many nose-warmers can one use?
The one-skein purchase is such a common misstep among knitters of all experience levels that it has given rise to the many one-skein pattern books on the market now. If you find yourself making this mistake on a regular basis, you might want to purchase one or ten of these books. But even then there are no guarantees, for taming the one-skein wonders can be harder than herding cats.
I myself have much experience with this problem. I once picked up a skein of qiviut, spun from the downy underside of the arctic musk ox. The fine undercoat of the muskox is called qiviut (kiv-ee-ute in the Eskimo language). One of the warmest fibers in the world, qiviut is naturally a soft grayish-brown color. Finer than cashmere and eight times warmer than wool, qiviut is lightweight enough so that it preserves heat in the winter, while also providing cool, breathable comfort in warmer weather.
(The name musk ox comes from the strong musky odor the males produce to attract the female’s attention. Thankfully, this odor is long gone by the time your ball of qiviut makes it to the yarn shop shelves.)
After I got over the sticker shock for that ox’s hank of hair, I realized I’d have to remortgage my house in order to make a scarf, much less a sweater, out of qiviut. And yet, I had to have some!
You could not even call what I ended up buying a skein. It was more like the size of a dustball, a gorgeous, teeny, lavender dustball that cost me three times the price of a full skein of wool.
Once home, I found myself totally intimidated by that teeny bit of qiviut. I had never used such expensive yarn before. What if I ruined it? Having knit with a lace weight, I knew that any ripping out would be a nightmare. I ended up setting it out for display rather than try to knit anything with it. This is a common ploy knitters often use to lessen their guilt after ridiculous purchases of yarn that they have no idea what to do with.
“Just look how pretty it looks in that wooden bowl! Why, it brightens up the whole room! I’m so glad I spent all that money on it!”
While I had no knitting plans for my qiviut, I had faith that some inspiration on how to use it would come to me. Five years later, I am still waiting. My qiviut has yet to meet my needles. Instead, I keep it in my stash of wildly assorted one-skein wonders. I do take it out every now and then to feel it and wonder which of my children I should will it to.
Never underestimate the luxury of underbelly hair.
Today’s muskoxen are descendants of the wooly mammoth, which are believed to have migrated from Siberia to North America some 200,000 years ago. Before 1900, musk ox was hunted in Alaska for their meat and their hides. By the early 1900s, they were so over-hunted that they became extinct there. It was not until the 1930s that they were reintroduced from Greenland. Jump ahead to the 1950s and we find John Teal, an anthropologist from Vermont, working in Alaska. He came up with the idea to try to domesticate the musk ox. He hoped they would make a perfect foundation for a cottage industry for the indigenous people. Along with several women who had experience in handcrafts, a co-op was established and a line of yarn developed. Patterns followed. Native women all over Alaska were taught to knit the lace designs that were charted. The first lace pattern was adapted from the carvings on an ancient harpoon. The success of the co-op and the sale of qiviut provided the native Inuit women with a source of income that did not take them out of their homes and villages. Thanks to John Teal and the shaggy underbelly hair of an ox, a native people have found a livelihood that sustains them as well as preserving their way of life.
MRS. WICKS’ CLEOPATRA CUFFS
Cleopatra was famous for decking herself out like the Goddess Isis. Here is a pair of wrist warmers fit for a queen or goddess. If you want to be extravagant, you can knit them out of qiviut. However, the pair above was knit from a wool blend, which still look quite regal. Can’t you just picture Cleopatra wearing them on a chilly day for a sail down the Nile?
Let’s Begin!
Material: One skein of black DK yarn for main color
1.2 skein DK yarn in contrasting color (I used a multi-colored yarn)
Needles: US size 3
Start at bottom right
Cast on 42 stitches and work in ribbing K1, P1 for 2 inches
K1 row in contrasting color
Begin chart and work all rows
Cut contrasting color and leave enough of a tail to weave in
K1 row in main color
Purl one row
K8 rows
Cast off loosely. Turn hem on purl row and sew to inside of cuff, stretching a bit as you go.
DEAR MRS. WICKS,
I cannot walk into a yarn shop without buying something. At this rate, my stash is taking over my house and I am sure to go broke. Please help.
Sincerely,
Going Broke in Brooklyn
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” Oscar Wilde (1
854–1900)
DEAR GOING BROKE,
Take heart. You have already taken the first step in yarn addiction recovery. You have admitted your problem. As for the next step, well, I am afraid you are on your own, for I have never gotten past the first step myself. I tend to fall back on Oscar Wilde’s advice, which has expanded my stash to monstrous proportions and put the children of our local yarn shop through a very trendy private school.
Every visit I make to a yarn shop becomes a lesson in yielding to temptation. I have learned this lesson well. I have become an expert. I have also had to become an expert at explaining to Mr. Wicks why this happens on a regular basis. The problem is simply that as knitters, we have extraordinary imaginative vision.
When we enter a yarn shop, we see so much more than just yarn and needles. We see a breathtaking vista of possibility in our mind’s eye, a vista that is unhampered by the boundaries of frowning spouses or the dreary accumulation of credit card bills. As I troll down the worsted aisle, I see skein after skein of yarn. I finger the reds and the whites, and suddenly, I see a string of little red horses galloping over a white horizon!
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A Helpful Hint: When you have to pay for your yarn purchases in cash and then shred your receipts, so as not to leave a paper trail for your spouse to find, you may want to seek help for your fiber addiction.
LITTLE HORSES ON THE HORIZON SWEATER
Let’s Begin!
Size: 12 months
Materials: 3½ oz/100 g each approx. 245 yards. Worsted weight
1 skein contrasting color
Needles: One pair US size 5 and size 7, or size to get gauge of 18 sts. and 24 rows to 4in/10 cm over stockinette stitch using larger needles.