Alpaca, Angels, and Baby Tears

I would be the first to admit that I am not a natural knitter.  I jam, I drop, I snag, I lose count, and worst of all, I don't have any fun while I'm doing it.  But thirteen and a half years ago, I walked into a yarn store in Vancouver, and I fell in love. The yarns in that shop yarns were so soft - so colorful and so soft -
With wool like this, I felt, I could definitely become a knitter. Arms full of skeins and hanks of fluffy, gently-rainbow-colored heaven, I told my husband I was ready - I was really, truly, definitely ready-

My husband petted the softness and loudly admired the colors and promised me that if I could finish ONE scarf, he'd bring me back to Vancouver and let me buy ALL the yarn in the whole shop.

 

Twelve years later,  I took my scarf to the house of a friend who knits and begged her to help me finish it. My husband is a pretty good judge of my knitting aptitude, I reckon.  

 

My twelve-year scarf is very beautiful.  It is striped in bright magenta-and-turquoise-emerald rainbow colors, and it is worked in wide ribs of knit-two, purl-two, and it has a sweet lettuce-like ruffle on both ends.  It is so beautiful that you would hardly notice where the knit-two purl-two becomes knit-two purl-one or purl-one knit-three, and I think that these little variations give it depth and character and stop it looking mechanical, as if it were something off a knitting machine or bought in a shop.  A scarf should speak of life, and if this one is talking about twelve years spent mostly rolled up in the back of a cupboard and me trying to pretend it wasn't there?  Let those stitches breathe a little, I say. Let that knit-two-whoops-where'd-the-purl-go lift up its head and yell. 

 

 

Valentina, my Santiago knitting friend, is at the other end of the knitting spectrum to myself.  Valentina can knit a hat in three hours and a cable-ribbed herringbone lace stitch sweater in a week. She can intuit a pattern from a twenty-second look at a photograph in a magazine, and knit it for herself without needing the intermediary steps of making a pattern - or even a diagram - first. She knits without looking. She knits in the dark. She truly believes that she operates at a normal, accessible level, and my fumblings with knit and purl were, to her, unfathomable.  

 

Just a little something Valentina whipped up over a weekend - because it felt good.

The way that I knit involves flapping both arms like wings and letting go of the needles every time I loop the thread. For Valentina, it must have been like a Rolls Royce mechanic watching a beat up little Yugo struggle up the road with its muffler hanging out on the asphalt and big holes knocked into its oil pan.  When I knit, there is a lot of heavy breathing, and I have to stop regularly to massage out the finger cramps.  When Valentina knits, her arms and fingers look like they're dancing, and watching her fingers glide through movements utterly unlike any sort of knitting I had ever known, I began to feel a faint inkling that there might be something in it after all.  Doing it her way might not actually be horrible.

 

I accidentally voiced that thought aloud, and after I'd cast off my last stitch on my rainbow- colored scarf, she told me I would have to make another one.  And after one more afternoon of watching her fingers dancing, I said yes.

 

Beyond Valentina, support has been somewhat thin.  My husband, his voice oozing sympathy like thick, warm honey, told me that I ought to make a little visit to the super-high-end Peruvian alpaca store.  Alongside the indecently expensive alpaca sweaters, they apparently sell yarn as well. He said that if I’m going to spend another 12 years making a second scarf, it needs to be WORTH it.

It took a further 18 months, but when I was in Santiago last month, I called his bluff and went to the Peruvian alpaca shop, where sweaters are knitted from the tears of baby angels, and the shawls might be the very angels themselves.  I played with skeins of powder-blue yarn so sweetly soft that I cried tears of my own as I touched them, and to my shock, while angel tear sweaters may be priced higher than platinum, the value must all be in the knitting, because the yarn itself was no more expensive than the ordinary sheep stuff I'd bought in Toronto 12 years ago.

 

I bought 6 skeins. Valentina will look at me proudly, and when it is done, my husband will have to wear it, and every single angel tear around his neck will fall with a sound, and that sound will be "So THERE."