Who's the Yarner

A personal essay by Bekah Luthi

Slide-hook-pull, slide-hook-pull, slide-hook-pull

One Friday night, my dad calls me to ask, “What are you up to?”

As I tidy up the living room, I tell him that I finished my homework only a half hour ago and decided to relax.

He disagrees. “It’s Friday night! Why aren’t you out? The night’s still young.”

“It’s eleven o’clock,” I remind him. He tends to forget about the time difference. “I’m tired. I just want to watch some TV and crochet for a bit before bed.”

“Crochet? Why would you do that?”

“Because I like it,” I remind him. He tends to forget that too.

My dad expects a person to work all day and well into the night, to sculpt their body and feed their mind, to spend their spare time with plenty of friends and their spare change on securing their own future. Crafts have never fit into that philosophy, except for when he needs a button reattached or a tear mended.

“Well, crocheting sounds useless,” he says. “You should go out instead.”

Learning the Stitches

My mother has crocheted all my life, and I loved watching her when I was little. I studied how she could twist boring balls of yarn into cozy baby blankets. But she never taught me. She says that before she thought to teach me, I came home from school one day already knowing how.

It was Mrs. Coe’s mother who taught us in the third grade. She came in every Wednesday to teach us how to chain, how to create rounds, how to keep our ends from tapering, and how to keep our scraggly balls of yarn mostly untangled.

She smelled like sugar cookies and bubble gum. I have no idea anymore what she looked like, but I still remember that scent. It was like crack for eight-year-olds. It followed her around the classroom as she stooped to assist each of us.

Unlike her daughter, the elder Mrs. Coe was unendingly patient as she taught. She didn’t mind that Juan didn’t want to learn more than the basic chain stitch and she praised him every week as his wound ball of yarn chain slowly grew to be the size of his head. She didn’t mind that Carmella wrinkled her nose at crocheting and she let her bring knitting to class each week to work on instead. Week after week, she continued to praise us for our uneven stitches and our messes of knots.

Following the Pattern

In the fourteen years since, I have improved. My stitches have evened, my corners have uncurled, and my ends have straightened.

I sit curled up on my living room couch or poised in a church pew or sideways in a left-handed classroom desk and I crochet the puffy blanket I’m making this year. The slide-hook-pull, slide-hook-pull, slide-hook-pull is soothing.

For this design, it takes six colors of yarn—autumn red, gold, pistachio green, forest green, sky blue, navy—and more than six hours to complete just one of the twenty rows that will make up the entire blanket. By the time this blanket is completed, I will have invested a minimum of fifty dollars and one hundred twenty hours into this one creation.

And each day I put my materials away in the chain-net bag I crocheted this summer and I research more projects for the future and I consider what my friends and family might want for the holidays.

Untangling the Yarn

“Who’s the yarner?” my neighbor asks, gesturing to the overflowing bag of yarn and crochet hooks.

“That’s me,” I say. Then, because yarner is not a word, I add, “I crochet.”

He and his friend ooh and ah for a moment before the first one says, “That’s kind of pointless, though, isn’t it?”

“No,” I say. Slide-hook-pull, slide-hook-pull, slide-hook-pull…