Things I Learned From Knitting

. . . whether I wanted to or not

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

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Edited by Deborah Balmuth
Art direction by Mary Winkelman Velgos
Text production by Jennifer Jepson Smith

Cover design by Mary Winkelman Velgos
Cover illustration by Dan O. Williams
Hand-lettering and interior illustrations by © Sarah Wilkins

© 2008 by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

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Printed in the United States by R.R. Donnelley
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pearl-McPhee, Stephanie.
    Things I learned from knitting— whether I wanted to or not / Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.
        p. cm.
    ISBN 978-1-60342-062-4 (hardcover w/ jacket : alk. paper)
    1. Knitting. 2. Knitting—Miscellanea. 3. Knitters (Persons)— Miscellanea. I. Title.
TT820.P3748 2008
746.43'2—dc22
                                                                                                                   2008005462

This book is for my mum,
the clever and formidable (but non-knitting)
Bonnie McPhee.
I love her.

Despite the way it makes non-knitters look at me like I'm a few sheep short of a flock
— I have often remarked that I think knitting is an excellent metaphor for much of life. Whether we like it or not, becoming knitters changes the way we think, feel, process information, and interact with the world around us. In short, I believe knitters — by simply engaging in knitting, learning what it has to teach us, and looking at how we learn it — somehow become different from other people.

There is a school of psychology called “cognitive psychology” that concerns itself with how your brain handles mental processes like language, memory, problem solving, and reasoning. To illustrate the concept, these psychologists imagine your brain a little like it's a computer: Information goes in, is somehow stored, is accessed when you need it, and then is reused. People who research this sort of thing
are interested in how you
filter
what you will focus on, the way you use
pattern recognition
and
object recognition,
and the way you experience
time sensation
— all those things that influence that computer-like processing. Now, I'm no knitting cognitive psychologist, but it struck me right away that if I did happen to be one, I would have instantly recognized these four areas as being all about the knitting.

Attention and filter theories
are the ideas surrounding how you focus your mental energy
. In a vivid, busy world, this is about how you will sort the hundreds of pieces of information coming at you at once and decide what you'll pay attention to, store, recall, and use. In knitting terms, you use this skill when you count out loud to drown out the kids as you're casting on, struggle with choosing one yarn that you love out of the many in the shop, or show the remarkable ability to consistently ignore the instructions for working a gauge swatch that appears at the top of every pattern. It is the skill you're using when you can peacefully set aside everything around you — the dog, the kids
and the pot burning on the stove — while you knit in the living room, interpreting a chart.

Knitters use
pattern recognition
every time we knit.
At a higher level, pattern recognition is what's happening every time you notice that you're decreasing along a center line and don't have to count anymore or when, after five hours of struggling with the instructions for a particular stitch, you finally experience that moment when it comes together and you understand where the whole thing is going. You're also using pattern recognition every time you make a stitch. The simple act of making one stitch after another is a pattern, and internalizing that pattern is what makes knitting easier over time and lets you know when you've arsed it up.

Object recognition
sounds simple, and it is: It's the skill that your brain uses to tell a tree from a face or to recognize your car keys when you need them.
You'd have a really hard time getting around without using this skill at its most basic level. In its more complex
forms, you're practicing object recognition when you identify garter stitch, even though this time it's blue and on a hat instead of last time, when it was green and on a sweater. (That's way more complicated than it sounds.) It's how you can tell that your decrease is wrong and how your brain knows that your sweater isn't working out. It doesn't look like a sweater.

All of these cognitive theories are interesting, but none as interesting as
time sensation.
Even if they don't know the name for the concept, people talk about this all the time: the idea that the passage of time can feel different according to what you're doing or what you're experiencing. It's the genesis of the phrase “time flies when you're having fun” or, to put it in a knitterly context, why the plain black, garter-stitch scarf you loathe seems as if it's taking forever while the much bigger sweater made from a yarn you adore moves like lightning. Knitters play with our brains and time sensation all the time, actually using knitting to change how we feel about time's passage. I know that
I am deliberately altering my sensation of time when I'm knitting while waiting for an appointment, and I know that if you don't let me knit while I wait, that time will slow down and I'll just about go raving out of my tree.

If cognitive psychology is about all these things, and about how these things change how you store, retrieve, and use information, then surely, it must be obvious that engaging in knitting has to shape your brain and how it works. All these years I've maintained that knitters are hooked up a little bit differently than everyone else … and maybe I haven't been wrong or joking. Considering all this psychology stuff, it has to be true that I was right in the first place, and what we have always suspected is true: By virtue of playing around with all these brain functions on a daily basis, knitters are learning lessons and changing all the time. Knitters are actually becoming different from ordinary people.

When I add all of this up, everything I've read about the human brain and everything I know that knitting has beaten into my brain over the years, I am left thinking that there are really
only two things I could do with the lessons I've learned from all this wool: I could go back to university, bust myself getting a PhD and become a really kick-ass cognitive psychologist or I could write a book about what knitting has taught me.

I went with the latter … and here it is.

I THINK IT'S A FEELING
every knitter knows. I am unclear why it happens, but I've seen it triggered in myself and others by exposure to new yarn or a perfect pattern or even by watching my knitting friends start something I covet. Occasionally, it happens when I'm stash storing or tidying (which we all know can trigger all sorts of maladies caused by a dreadful overdose of wool fumes).

It's startitis: the almost overwhelming urge to start a new project or ten or twenty, regardless of what's on the needles now and how much you love this current work. There's an almost itchy feeling when you get it, and a great many knitters are forever pulling themselves back from the brink of being stricken down. Startitis is often misunderstood as some sort of disapproval, a negative response to what you're currently knitting.
People think you must start turning a longing eye afield because you're bored or because your current project (or projects; a monogamous knitter is a rare thing indeed) isn't working out, or they think that you're going through a troubled patch in a project. People assume that if you're starting something new, you must be trading up due to a short attention span or a sudden urge to engage in a flighty woolen love affair.

Knitters know how it looks to others, this constant parade of new projects. We know it makes us look as though we lack loyalty, faithfulness, follow-through — or even commitment. It makes us look as though we have no sense of continuance in a relationship, and most of us even feel guilty about it. Most of us, when considering a new project, feel at least a pang of regret for work abandoned. Some of us (even though there are no knitting police and we could start twenty thousand projects a day if we wanted to) try to “do better” or work on being a monogamous, “one project at a time” knitter … as though there was some sort of moral victory in resisting the urge to do more of what we love.

This needs to be understood: Startitis is not a rejection of the things we are knitting now, although I do understand how a perfectly good half-finished cardigan could take it this way if you toss it in the corner like it is a dirty wash-rag just so you can start a sexy new silk pullover. Instead of a rejection, however, startitis is actually an embracing. It's all a matter of looking at the big picture.

Constantly taking up with (and rejecting) a series of projects may look as though the knitter in question is a smidge on the unfaithful side if, by a smidge, we mean that the knitter is making Don Juan look like a paragon of devotion. Yet it's not faithfulness to an individual project that should matter, but faithfulness to the art of knitting overall. By exposing ourselves to as many projects as we can, we're actually strengthening our bond with and relationship to knitting, which is, after all, all that matters.