How not to knit a tie

Instructions are for sissies and other thoughts on making whatever the hell you want.

Las Vegas Arts District. Art by Recycled Propaganda, Deathpony, et al. Listen while you read: N’Djema by Kasbah on Spotify/YouTube.

When I was a teenager, someone told me I was knitting wrong, someone who by all accounts should have been encouraging. I wonder if she felt I was encroaching on her turf as the family’s last remaining needle worker. It makes a crooked sense. She told me I was knitting wrong but didn’t show me how to do it right. I still wonder how intentional that was.

20 years later, I stumbled into an otter-themed craft shop in a tiny New Mexico town. The proprietress set me to browsing while she helped a few artists put the finishing touches on a hand-sewn puppet — land of enchantment indeed. I picked out some yarn, a recycled off-white slub that promised to knit up weird, uneven, unpredictable.

When the otter lady reemerged, I blurted out that I was pretty sure I’d been knitting wrong all my life. I didn’t share much about the backstory. I told her I remembered it was something about twisting stitches. The string in the wrong place, the needle in the wrong place, my finger in the wrong place, I’m in the wrong place. I’m doing it wrong.

The proprietress was angry on my behalf; it wasn’t the first time she’d received a discouraged crafter. She asked me to knit a few rows. She watched me do it, she checked the work. “No,” she said. “You knit right.” We picked apart the twisted stitches on one side, and she showed me how I was untwisting them on the way back. Her point was that I knitted in my own way, just like everyone who has ever knitted, and it’s knitting for god’s sake, who cares if you do it right or wrong or naked on a Tuesday?

We caked the yarn together under the skylit workroom at the back of the craft shop. I showed her the pattern I had picked out: a simple necktie. The document opened with a short essay about the creator’s life as a midwestern mom and how she’d designed this tie for her son’s wedding. I knit the swatch, we measured and adjusted. Otter Lady checked that I knew all the stitches and techniques the pattern called for. She gave me a hug, spun me around three times clockwise, blew some fairy dust at the back of my neck and sent me on my way.

I’d successfully completed countless projects in all the years I’d spent knitting “wrong,” so I’m not sure why I allowed the lie to burrow so deep into me. Because I was a teenager when she said it? Because she was someone with authority in this department? Someone who was supposed to love me because we were kin? Someone who never seemed to have much affection for me to begin with?

It seems silly now, in my mid-30s, tangled on the couch every night beneath a blanket of half-finished sweaters and scarves and tiny garments for other people’s babies. Knitting is enchanting. It is mathematically complex, it is otherworldly. It is a self-referential web of thread hooked in on itself, no one loop alive without its neighbors. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a spell.

After I met my otter-loving Knitting Fairy, I drove back east from New Mexico and winter turned to spring and more and more of me came up for air. When I started the project, I’d spent a few days just on the tiny triangle tip, knitting and unknitting and knitting again until it laid flat and looked right. The rest of the tie is basically a rectangle, so I found my groove quickly. I stayed up late knitting without paying much attention because it felt good in my fingers.

I realized too late that I’d passed the midpoint of the pattern. Halfway in, I was supposed to decrease to form the skinnier backside of the tie, the part that hides when looped around the neck. I’d been so enamored by my rows and rows of bumps and holes and loops in a tight little line, I’d entirely forgotten about the pattern. I was knitting again. Look at me, knitting right.

Of course I snapped out of that newfound confidence as soon I realized I’d knit beyond the pattern’s instructions. A portal straight back to wrong. I’d have to undo a good eight inches of work to get back to where Midwestern Mom wanted me to be. I let the project sit untouched for a few days while I overthought what to do next.

Backtrack and try to follow the instructions? Go off piste and make my own thing? Cross my fingers that it would still be something wearable, interesting, pleasing to hold and behold, instead of the fun-house-mirror joke that so often results from my self-directed DIY crafting?

Is it wasted? Is it wrong? Is it too late? Am I doing it right?

It’s easy to see these doubts as overkill when applied to an entirely voluntary craft project, but “doing it right” has driven a lot of my life. Seeing the pattern of mind play out at my literal fingertips — over nothing — gave me some clarity. So instead of choosing to knit forward or backward, I ended up at something more like fuck it.

I decided to make the thing I want to make, because I was enjoying the making of it, even if what it becomes is not what it was supposed to be. Even if it’s not what I thought I was making when I started. Even if it’s not following the rules, or doing what was asked of me, or doing what I asked of myself. I don’t even care about the tie in the end. I just want to knit this silly little slub until I’m done doing that.

It’s summer, eight months since New Mexico, and I’m still working on the mutant project. I’m not at all sure if or how I’ll ever finish it. The tie is now threatening to stretch into infinity because I haven’t yet found the courage to tackle an ending for which I have no pattern. I don’t know how to invent an inverted triangle tip. I don’t know the spell. I’m not doing it right. Same old song.

So I keep knitting the rectangle. It’s only 18 stitches wide on tiny double pointed needles, so knitting two rows takes less than a minute. I’m doing a seed stitch, which means knitting the purls and purling the knits. For reference, beginners are typically taught to knit the knits and purl the purls. It’s a good way to keep things straight, but it’s just a method of learning, not the absolute truth. At the same time, graduating to more complicated stitch patterns means, in a sense, doing it wrong.

At the start of the original pattern, Midwestern Mom’s instructions say to place a stitch marker on the “right” side of the tie—that’s what the front is called in knitting. My Knitting Fairy sent me home with a few removable stitch markers she made on the spot, twisting onto the wire a few delicate beads and charms she had selected for me. She did what felt right. It was second nature to her. She didn’t even look down at the project while she did it.

I clipped one of her stitch markers onto the tie a few hundred rows ago, like the pattern told me to. I’m not even sure it’s where it’s supposed to be. But seeing it dangling there reminds of my Knitting Fairy’s benediction. Make things. Figure it out. It will be your own. Keep going. Row after row. The wrong side, and then the right.