Modern yarn, like modern life, is compartmentalized. Specialized to perform certain tasks and satisfy certain tastes. Yarn has its followers. You’ll find cotton people and silk people and wool people and down at the very bottom you’ll find people like me, your ordinary “whatever is on sale at the local craft shop” people. We are heavily into 100 percent Orlon Acrylic Fiber - mothproof, colorfast, shrink-proof – affordable. But every once in a while I splurge, enter a real yarn shop, chat with real knitters, follow an argument over Alpaca versus Merino, a debate about felting. I buy a skein of hand-dyed deluxe sock yarn. Later, at home, I sit at my desk, wind it into balls, admire their perfection.
“Yes,” I say out loud, holding one in my hand, “this is what a ten dollar ball of wool looks like.” Then I smile at the one-dollar ball that’s waiting to be knitted into a doll skirt or bear sweater. Both are beautiful to me. But I have to admit that expensive yarn is tempting. It is an adventure. Like leaving the beach party to attend an exclusive engagement at the top hotel in town. I give up what’s comfortable and predictable in favor of an unknown entity with alien rules and rituals. I give up “machine wash and dry” for the privilege to choose from labels that indicate “use for felting” or “hand wash only.” I might even encounter bleeding, shrinking - premature death. Oh Dear, I might run into the Yellow Canary.
The clothes I wore as a child began as large pieces of cloth on my grandmother’s sewing machine or they purled off my mother’s knitting needles in a million stitches. Then the new garment was pulled over me and tugged into place until it fit. I was twirled and bent and twisted, commanded to walk back and forth. After wrestling with pleats and folds, buttoning and unbuttoning, scrunching and stretching, somebody usually said, “She’ll grow into it.”
I did, of course. After the first season. But sometimes a sweater would sag and stretch, lose its elasticity and race me for maximum growth through another winter. At the beginning of the third year, after my mother had taken the winter clothes from the armoire in the back room, she would inspect a hemline or pull on a cuff and then she would sigh,
”Ach ja……ach ja.” Which means something like oh well, oh well.
While I inhaled mothballs and tried to loosen a tight collar, she led me to the kitchen and announced to Oma: ”She can wear this one more winter.”
When I was nine and we no longer lived with my grandmother, my mother called on Frau Palinkas, our upstairs neighbor. The Hungarian woman knew she attended confirmation of my winter wardrobe but probably only had a vague idea about my mother’s determination.
My mother always sandwiched a few “gells” between her sentences. “Gell” is a slang word, a dictatorial RIGHT wrapped into polite question marks. A word everybody understood.
My mother pointed, “This sweater fits Gisela. Gell?”
She smiled at Frau Palinkas, grabbed the bottom end of the sweater just above my hips and gave it a quick tug. “ It’s big enough, right?” And a final statement. “Schön.”
Frau Palinkas always nodded in agreement. The result of these inspections was that only one third of my clothes fit. The others were either too large or too small. I had no active part in selecting what I wore. At first I was either the victim of a cheap bolt of material or at the mercy of a new knitting pattern. Later an excessively tight garment was blamed on my sudden growth during the summer. No matter what, I wore what I was told to wear.
The wildest sweater I ever owned grew from a bartered yellow shawl and a gift of leftover yarn pieces in every color you can imagine. I helped unravel the shawl. My mother wound the yarn into several loose balls while I held the piece up towards her with both hands so the yarn could undo its own pattern in an easy back and forth path. Sometimes my attention drifted and the shawl slumped into my lap. Then my mother pulled and said: “Ein Knoten. Pass auf.” (A knot. Pay attention.)
It was difficult to watch the rhythmic travel of the yellow line without being lulled into a daze, but another knot and a sharp yank usually brought me back. The shawl shrunk and the yarn ball grew and finally my mother cast on the first yellow stitches of what would later be admired by adults as another miracle of her creativity.
Every evening while I drew or played solitaire, my mother knitted. None of the color scraps were more than a yard long and soon the fast growing backside of the sweater looked like a wooly maze with loose ends crisscrossing the yellow borders. The front was neatly organized into red and green and blue and purple rectangles and yellow dividers. After the ends had been woven in and the pieces sewn together, there was no more escaping.
“Anprobieren,” came the order and I dutifully lifted both arms to try on the sweater. It was very yellow and bright. The high collar swallowed my neck and only my fingertips peeked through the sleeve holes. My mother folded the collar down and rolled the sleeves up. She adjusted the ribbed edge over my hips and announced: “You’ll grow into it.”
The next day in school a wave of giggles made the rounds. Here and there a louder laugh escaped. On the way home a friend told me: “They called you yellow canary bird.”
“Everybody liked your new sweater?” my mother asked, leaning over my homework.
I didn’t tell her what my friend had said. It wouldn’t have made a difference I thought. When she later heard what they called me in school, she said that envy made people cruel. That you had to accept and be above it. Once a week, all winter long, she insisted, “You want to be a canary today, gell?”
Maybe I grew particularly fast between nine and ten or maybe my mother took pity on me. At any rate, the next fall she gave away the yellow sweater without explanation. We had moved in with my new stepfather who lived above a restaurant and butcher shop. One day, when I looked out the window, the sweater rushed by on one of the older “poor” girls. A few weeks later, on a sled in the snow, I saw it again. I had to look twice before I recognized it. The family everybody considered to be the poorest in town had several children. Now the smallest one wore my sweater. But was it really the same sweater? The bright yellow was drabbed down by streaks of blue and green and red and purple. You could no longer see individual rectangles. As if somebody had melted them into a sea of swirling color. I liked it.
My mother had a different reaction. She saw it close up in the butcher shop and when she told my stepfather her voice was low. I could tell she was angry. “What do I have to do? Attach washing instructions when I give away clothes? Terrible. Just terrible.”
All winter long the little girl wore the shrunken, felted canary. I wondered if she knew that it used to be mine. I was - I think – without understanding why – just a little envious.
“Yes,” I say out loud, holding one in my hand, “this is what a ten dollar ball of wool looks like.” Then I smile at the one-dollar ball that’s waiting to be knitted into a doll skirt or bear sweater. Both are beautiful to me. But I have to admit that expensive yarn is tempting. It is an adventure. Like leaving the beach party to attend an exclusive engagement at the top hotel in town. I give up what’s comfortable and predictable in favor of an unknown entity with alien rules and rituals. I give up “machine wash and dry” for the privilege to choose from labels that indicate “use for felting” or “hand wash only.” I might even encounter bleeding, shrinking - premature death. Oh Dear, I might run into the Yellow Canary.
The clothes I wore as a child began as large pieces of cloth on my grandmother’s sewing machine or they purled off my mother’s knitting needles in a million stitches. Then the new garment was pulled over me and tugged into place until it fit. I was twirled and bent and twisted, commanded to walk back and forth. After wrestling with pleats and folds, buttoning and unbuttoning, scrunching and stretching, somebody usually said, “She’ll grow into it.”
I did, of course. After the first season. But sometimes a sweater would sag and stretch, lose its elasticity and race me for maximum growth through another winter. At the beginning of the third year, after my mother had taken the winter clothes from the armoire in the back room, she would inspect a hemline or pull on a cuff and then she would sigh,
”Ach ja……ach ja.” Which means something like oh well, oh well.
While I inhaled mothballs and tried to loosen a tight collar, she led me to the kitchen and announced to Oma: ”She can wear this one more winter.”
When I was nine and we no longer lived with my grandmother, my mother called on Frau Palinkas, our upstairs neighbor. The Hungarian woman knew she attended confirmation of my winter wardrobe but probably only had a vague idea about my mother’s determination.
My mother always sandwiched a few “gells” between her sentences. “Gell” is a slang word, a dictatorial RIGHT wrapped into polite question marks. A word everybody understood.
My mother pointed, “This sweater fits Gisela. Gell?”
She smiled at Frau Palinkas, grabbed the bottom end of the sweater just above my hips and gave it a quick tug. “ It’s big enough, right?” And a final statement. “Schön.”
Frau Palinkas always nodded in agreement. The result of these inspections was that only one third of my clothes fit. The others were either too large or too small. I had no active part in selecting what I wore. At first I was either the victim of a cheap bolt of material or at the mercy of a new knitting pattern. Later an excessively tight garment was blamed on my sudden growth during the summer. No matter what, I wore what I was told to wear.
The wildest sweater I ever owned grew from a bartered yellow shawl and a gift of leftover yarn pieces in every color you can imagine. I helped unravel the shawl. My mother wound the yarn into several loose balls while I held the piece up towards her with both hands so the yarn could undo its own pattern in an easy back and forth path. Sometimes my attention drifted and the shawl slumped into my lap. Then my mother pulled and said: “Ein Knoten. Pass auf.” (A knot. Pay attention.)
It was difficult to watch the rhythmic travel of the yellow line without being lulled into a daze, but another knot and a sharp yank usually brought me back. The shawl shrunk and the yarn ball grew and finally my mother cast on the first yellow stitches of what would later be admired by adults as another miracle of her creativity.
Every evening while I drew or played solitaire, my mother knitted. None of the color scraps were more than a yard long and soon the fast growing backside of the sweater looked like a wooly maze with loose ends crisscrossing the yellow borders. The front was neatly organized into red and green and blue and purple rectangles and yellow dividers. After the ends had been woven in and the pieces sewn together, there was no more escaping.
“Anprobieren,” came the order and I dutifully lifted both arms to try on the sweater. It was very yellow and bright. The high collar swallowed my neck and only my fingertips peeked through the sleeve holes. My mother folded the collar down and rolled the sleeves up. She adjusted the ribbed edge over my hips and announced: “You’ll grow into it.”
The next day in school a wave of giggles made the rounds. Here and there a louder laugh escaped. On the way home a friend told me: “They called you yellow canary bird.”
“Everybody liked your new sweater?” my mother asked, leaning over my homework.
I didn’t tell her what my friend had said. It wouldn’t have made a difference I thought. When she later heard what they called me in school, she said that envy made people cruel. That you had to accept and be above it. Once a week, all winter long, she insisted, “You want to be a canary today, gell?”
Maybe I grew particularly fast between nine and ten or maybe my mother took pity on me. At any rate, the next fall she gave away the yellow sweater without explanation. We had moved in with my new stepfather who lived above a restaurant and butcher shop. One day, when I looked out the window, the sweater rushed by on one of the older “poor” girls. A few weeks later, on a sled in the snow, I saw it again. I had to look twice before I recognized it. The family everybody considered to be the poorest in town had several children. Now the smallest one wore my sweater. But was it really the same sweater? The bright yellow was drabbed down by streaks of blue and green and red and purple. You could no longer see individual rectangles. As if somebody had melted them into a sea of swirling color. I liked it.
My mother had a different reaction. She saw it close up in the butcher shop and when she told my stepfather her voice was low. I could tell she was angry. “What do I have to do? Attach washing instructions when I give away clothes? Terrible. Just terrible.”
All winter long the little girl wore the shrunken, felted canary. I wondered if she knew that it used to be mine. I was - I think – without understanding why – just a little envious.
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