One Thousand Cranes

In 1955, a young Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki made approximately 1,300 origami cranes. She was trying to invoke the power of a folk tale that promised the granting of one wish to anyone who could fold one thousand cranes. Whichever gods were responsible for following up on that promise must have been occupied with other business in 1955, because Sadako died on October 25th of that year. A resident of Hiroshima, she had been only one mile away from the location at which we dropped the atomic bomb. She died of leukemia.

The popularization of Sadako’s story has turned it into a universal call for world peace, and the folding of paper cranes has become a physical realization of that call. A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced (via my friend Nate) to a Portland knitter and artist named Seann McKeel. Seann is inviting knitters to knit and felt one thousand cranes (ten per knitter), which she will display publicly late next year.

Would you like to participate? Is your stash waiting for a higher calling? Then download the pattern (along with information about deadlines and where to send your cranes) right here.

The World is Flat

A lot of people seem to be wondering why I designed Halfdome to be knit flat. It’s a round item, after all, so knitting it in the round makes intuitive sense. I have some very good reasons for designing it flat, though, and I am now going to tell you what they are.

  1. Knitting stockinette stitch in the round is boring. Knit, knit, knit, knit, knit, knit, knit. Nary a purl in sight. Maybe it’s because I’m a bad buddhist and I haven’t fully accepted that boredom is a form of suffering, which comes from desire, which comes from a failure to recognize that the self is an illusion, or maybe it’s simply because I can’t read and knit at the same time, like my wife. Either way, endless rounds of knit stitches drive me bonkers.
  2. I like seaming.
  3. Stripes look funny when they’re knit in the round. I know there is a technique for preventing that little jog between color changes, but even the best examples I’ve seen don’t look as good as when that seam disappears and the stripes slide up together like teenagers on prom night.
  4. I prefer straight needles. I inherited my grandmother’s preference for straight metal needles (along with the needles themselves), and although I have a sizeable collection of circular needles, I don’t really like any of them. Their plastic wires never bend the way I want them to, I always feel like I’m struggling to point the needle in the right direction, and the spot where the needle joins the wire often features a yarn-snagging ridge. Addi Turbos are a lovely exception to these problems, but at sixteen bucks a shot, I’m not overhauling my circular needle collection any time soon.
  5. I’m lazy. Halfdome appeared in Knitty only this past summer, but I initially designed it about four years ago, when my relationship with double-pointed needles was on the rocks, George W. Bush was winding up for his catastrophic international blunder, and I hadn’t yet discovered the magic loop. Rather than going through the work of rewriting the pattern to be knit in the round (which Catherine has been kind enough to do) I sent Knitty the pattern as it was originally written.

All knitters have their quirks, and these are a few of mine. The great thing about getting your patterns published is that you get to revel in your own knitting quirks. The great thing about knitting in a free country is that you can ignore all of the knitting quirks you want.

D’oh!

I had thought that the silence in my “ask yarn boy” mailbox was because no one had any knitting questions for me.  Turns out it was because the CGI form that handles those questions wasn’t working.  Silly me.  It’s working now, so ask away!

Knitting vs. . . .

The content of the picture to the left is the reason you haven’t heard from me in a little while. Ringing in at nineteen chapters, 342 pages, 87,000 words (approximately), and just over three years in the making, that stack of papers is my first novel.

Just before I put the finishing touches on my manuscript last week, I also wove in the last yarn end on , which I will hopefully be able to show you soon. Both of these projects were substantial, but the knitting project was much, much easier. In fact, compared to writing, all knitting is easy.

It’s not that knitting isn’t challenging, or that I don’t ever feel like hurling my needles against the wall and swearing off yarn forever. It’s that knitting projects have obvious dimensions. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. Novels have those, too, but they’re not as clearly defined. What you thought was the middle turns out to be the beginning, the end is really the middle, and the beginning often gets lopped off altogether. There’s no binding off, there’s no blocking, there’s no sewing in the last yarn end and calling it a day. When I say that I’m finished with my novel, what I’m really saying is that it’s finished with me.

And this is one of the biggest reasons why I love to knit. Knitting projects have tangible goals and concrete satisfactions. The frustrations are manageable, and the worst mistakes are solveable by ripping out and starting over. My hand-knit sweaters, unlike my writing, have never demanded that I stare into the gravitational center of my soul and try to balance my life on it.

More knitting on the way . . .