The Yarn Whisperer Read Online Free Page A

surface of a peach. That evening I learned my first lesson of the desert: Never pet a cactus, no matter how soft it looks. It took days to pick all the tiny thorns out of my fingers. Welcome to Arizona.
    Of course, my mother reminds me that we all knew about the move for months, that I even helped with some of the packing.She also points out that we left on an August morning,
not
suddenly one day after school. Rationally, I know this to be true. But my eight-year-old brain still remembers the whole experience quite differently; no amount of preparation would’ve changed this.
    Cut something apart, and there’s always a momentary shock to the system. What was once whole is now sundered. Slice through the veins of your knitted fabric, and the newly exposed stitches may easily unravel as they scramble back toward a home that no longer exists. At the same time, there’s no doubting the sense of possibility that accompanies this opening, a curiosity about what the new fabric may hold.
    There’s a way to do it right, without pain. We work a series of steps called a steek, so that the stitches are prepared for what’s coming and can absorb the shock, heal without any scars, and even thrive in their new environment. According to Alice Starmore,
steek
is an Old Scots word for hardening a heart or closing a gate—a fitting way to describe what you’re doing to get those stitches ready for what
could
be a traumatic experience. Even now, I keep discovering stray loose ends from that shocking cut when I was eight years old. A favorite cup will get broken, a pen thrown away by accident, some unexpected change is foisted upon me, and I am overcome with a powerful panic I know is not rooted in the present.
    A good steek is much more than just going at it with scissors. It begins at the cast-on, when you add several extra “waste” stitches to buffer each side of the cut and prevent deeper fabric erosion. Right before cutting, you’ll use a sewing machine orcrochet stitches to reinforce either side of the waste stitches. Secure those edges well enough, and the floodwaters will never breach. In fact, once those first steps have been taken, the cutting is almost anticlimactic. Instead of grieving the cut, your fabric can enjoy the new scenery.
    We like steeks because they let us make colorful, intricate Fair Isle garments in the round without ever having to fuss with a purl row. We can just set the engine on “knit” and speed on down the road, going around and around until we’re done. Then, simply pop the steek, sprout the armhole, and you’re nearing the finish line before you know it. Forget to add a steek, and your sweater remains, at best, a fancy pillowcase.
    Steeks represent a necessary part of life, almost a coming-of-age for fabric. As roses need pruning and seedlings need thinning, steeks require cutting if your fabric has any hope to grow into something else. Eventually, we all need to cut open our stitches to leave home and become independent human beings.
    By my late twenties, I became aware that my life was calling for a steek. I’d been going around and around at a job in San Francisco. I had a cool title on an impressive-looking business card. I’d made a snazzy fabric, but it wasn’t very well tailored to
me.
Either I would stay in that tube forever, my movement slowly shrinking and changing to fit the confines of the fabric, or I would do the scary thing and cut open those stitches to see what could grow.
    My steek required a cross-country move back East to the scene of my childhood summers in Maine. There were two of us now. My partner, Clare, and I were knitting this new fabrictogether. It took us three years to build up a wide enough band of metaphorical “waste” stitches to absorb that cut and buffer us from its impact. Unlike the last time I’d gotten into a car and headed to a new home on the other coast, this time I was in the driver’s