Knitting Nancy

KnitLit
by Linda Roghaar, Molly Wolf

(Page 2 of 2)

Knitting Nancy
Nancy Chamberlin

Every story has a beginning and mine begins in my early teens. I was taught to knit by a left-handed friend. Since I am right-handed, my knitting ability and form are not the greatest. Nonetheless, over the years, I found knitting to be a great tool for relaxation purposes-until I became an alcoholic. Knitting then became a chore. There were too many dropped stitches and the patterns were too difficult to follow. After many years, I stopped fighting alcohol and started to attend meetings to learn how to live without drinking. I found it hard to focus on what the others said about learning to live in a sober reality. At this point, I started to knit again and I found it easier to concentrate when I was knitting. Thus knitting helped me to "learn to listen so I could listen to learn." Since people attending these meetings seldom if ever use last names, they often use adjectives to denote a particular person-Bald Harry or Mary with the Glasses, or the like. That's how I became known as Knitting Nancy. I'm happy to report that I still have the nickname over 31 years later.

Big Ugly
Rosalia Feinstein

One winter about thirty years ago, when I was at home with small children, I knitted two bulky cardigans for myself. In those years, I never re-knit anything. If it didn't fit right, I put it away or gave it away, but I never undid it and re-knit it to size. The first sweater (with matching hat) I knit with heathery gray bulky yarn. I made it big enough to wrap comfortably across my body. The cardigan ended up looking like a hip-length bathrobe, but I wore it for many years to work in the yard or to slip over my real bathrobe when running out to get the newspaper on chilly mornings. My second project that winter was a cardigan jacket. I still have the pattern for this item. The cover describes it as a wrapped cardigan, but the illustration shows several inches of space between the front panels, even on the model's skinny figure. Moreover, it was in early 1970s trendy orange. I knit it anyway. It was a disaster from the beginning. Even with my pattern adjustments, the sweater left a good twelve to fifteen inches of my ample bosom and belly exposed. Needless to say, I never wore it.

Some years later I went back to work. I loved my job and my co-workers, but I hated the thermostat wars. You know-this woman's always too warm and the other one's always too cold. I was the lucky one. Management kept the place cool and I loved it that way. My secretary, Robin, was always chilly. She kept saying that she would be more comfortable with a blanket or something over her legs. Then I thought of that disastrous orange sweater. It was big enough and warm enough to be a lap blanket. I brought it in. Everyone who saw the sweater laughed. Here was this monstrously long sweater, knit to fit a size 3X body, in bright orange yarn. It was immediately christened Big Ugly. At first Robin used it like an afghan. Then, one day, she actually put it on and wore it around the office. That happened more and more often. One day, when Robin was absent, a co-worker came by to see if she could borrow Big Ugly that day. This began to happen with some frequency. People actually wore the thing, instead of draping it across their laps.

Big Ugly was an equal opportunity cardigan. It looked equally awful on tall people, short people, thin people, fat people, white people and people of color. I suspect it would have been just as ugly on a man if one of them had ever borrowed it. It was an act of courage to actually walk around wearing that thing, but it had the great advantage of being very warm and cozy. Periodically I would take Big Ugly home and wash it. Whatever I did, the orange synthetic yarn never faded, stretched or shrunk. It just stayed ugly.

When I retired after sixteen years in that office, I bequeathed Big Ugly to my co-workers. That was more than five years ago, before we moved to New Mexico. A few months ago we came back to Maryland for a wedding and I paid a visit to my old office. Guess what! The staff told me that Big Ugly was still around, still being actively worn by a variety of people. I have the feeling that Big Ugly will outlast all the people I worked with-that it's now a permanent office fixture. I hope its story lasts as long as Big Ugly itself.

Copyright © 2002 by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Linda Roghaar is a literary agent and an obsessive knitter based in Massachusetts.

Molly Wolf, writer, editor, spinner, and frequent sock knitter, is the author of White China: Finding the Divine in the Everyday. She lives in Kingston, Ontario. They are the editors of KnitLit and KnitLit (too).