Project Thoughts (Close-Knit)

How do you describe a community, held together by bonds of love and trust?

You call it close-knit.

A piece of knitting is a row of knots holding together the row of knots beneath it. Done correctly, those knots can’t come undone–each knot supports the knots around it, holds together its neighbors so they can’t come undone.

A dropped stitch produces a run–that knot undoes the knot below it undoes the knot below it undoes the knot below it. Runs are unsightly things in a careful stockinette, disruptive in a delicate seed, blatantly out of place in a carefully patterned lace. They’re not supposed to be there, because they’re evidence of a failure. With each run, the structure of the piece is compromised; if too many stitches run, you’ve just got strings in a messy tangle, not a smooth piece of cloth.

You can fix a run, if you catch it early enough, use a hook to darn your way back up the piece. It’s tedious work, and it never quite looks right, but it will keep the piece from falling apart. You could frog the whole piece, unravel it entirely and build it again stronger. You could use nail polish and seal the run so it can’t rip any further.

I didn’t write last week. I was reeling from a rip in our society, fearful for the family of someone I love deeply. Las Vegas was not just a tragedy, but a fucking shame, as the knots holding us together unravelled further. The shooter in Vegas was a run, a dropped stitch that unravelled fifty-odd lives and destabilized the knots around them. Our society wasn’t close-knit–it was frogging itself into a mess, and we’ve decided to let that run go.

You can deliberately set up a run, you know, for places where you want a ladder effect. You can make a mistake look intentional.

This isn’t a mistake that should look intentional.

I don’t have more to say, not this week, not last week. But someone needs to do something about the runs before we end up with a mess. Unless, of course, we’re already a mess and we’ve just got to cut our losses and start over.

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This is part of a series on yarncraft written for a nonfiction class at George Mason University. It's being crossposted here for archival reasons.

Original publish date: 10 October 2017, on bittyknittygritty.wordpress.com