Wednesday, March 5

Everything Old is New Again

I don't think that it would be news to anyone that what goes around, comes around. These days, everything retro is cool again. We reprocess fads decade by decade: you can't watch any television coverage of the runway shows without being convinced of that. What's hot with Marc Jacobs for Fall 2003? Why, it's the seventies! Ralph Lauren is doing the forties sophisticate thing – again! You might think the corset went out with the bustle, but Jean-Paul Gaultier did both last season!

I mention all this because I just started taking knitting lessons. (Insert grandma joke here.) But before you start laughing, note the following:

Martha Stewart, who might be slightly cooler now that it has been insinuated that she's not perfect after all, featured a story on easy knitting in her February 2003 magazine. Nearly thirty-eight million women in the United States, including Cameron Diaz and Sarah Jessica Parker (!), report that they know how to knit or crochet. Fifty-seven percent of new knitters are under the age of thirty-five, and sixty-two percent say that they knit or crochet to relax. Some say it even serves as meditation for them in times of stress.

I had some sort of needlework block when I was in Girl Scouts, which was when I first tried to ply the needles. I was terrible at it. Terrible. Everyone else finished a scarf or some junk, and I couldn't even make a potholder, much less a doily. I'm not sure that Knitgate didn't contribute to my resignation from the organization later in my sixth-grade year. I certainly didn't get my knitting merit badge.

Therefore, when one of my friends (we'll call her K.) told me that she was taking knitting lessons at a shop in her neighborhood, I didn't think much about it. She is creative and good with her hands, and apparently had never suffered at the cruel hands of other Junior Girl Scouts. I figured she'd start cranking out beautiful sweaters and I would continue to buy mine at the Gap.

From that moment on, though, it seemed knitting was everywhere. A friend's mom knitted the cutest cardigan I had ever seen for another friend's new baby. The mom of the new baby decided that she wanted K. to teach her how to knit. The Martha Stewart article arbiting that yes, knitting is cool again was published. And someone pointed out that many knitting circles eat and knit at the same time.

That's how I found myself two Fridays ago, sitting on one side of K. with our mutual friend A. sitting on the other side, completely tense and trying to focus on my needles despite the occasional flashbacks to knitting failure that were dancing through my head. Needless to say, A. picked it up much faster than I did; I was basically paralyzed with fear until I managed to successfully cast on twenty-four stitches and knit my first row in garter stitch. Shortly after that, we broke to eat popcorn and Cadbury Mini Eggs.

I left that night completely hooked – pun intended – and completely knotted up. Knitting may become meditative but at the beginning it is nothing but stress. I obsessively knitted the garter stitch all that week, casting on and knitting ten rows and then pulling it all out and starting over. Imagine my joy when, at last week's lesson, we learned to purl, making my dreams of stockinette stitch a reality!

Our little group has grown to four, and we'll be having our last lesson (decreasing and binding off) this weekend. Hopefully, by the end of that lesson I'll know how to take the needles out so that the lucky recipients of my hand-knit scarves will not have to wear the needles too. I will definitely have consumed a large amount of the dill dip to the right of your screen.

If all this does not convince you, no big deal. Make the dill dip anyway and eat it while you're watching television. You won't have a scarf at the end, but the dip is too good to miss. You can watch Prada reinterpret the eighties and wonder why square shoulder-pads haven't come back in.