Free Free-Range Knitter by Stephanie Pearl–McPhee

would get stuck down to it, and that when I thought about it, I wasn’t sure I had seen my youngest child in a few days.
    The seventh one was a wonder to behold. It was exactly right. I trembled a little when I slipped it off the needles. The charming peak was perfect. (I had to remember to call it charming, because that’s what Kelly had said it was. I had come up with other adjectives that I shall not repeat here.) The shaped crown in the back was shaped like a head, and a human one at that. Yes. I wiped away a tear of joy. This one was just about right, except for the part where it was so much bigger than a newborn’s head that any pregnant woman who received it at a baby shower would have fainted dead away at the prospect of what lay ahead for her. Number eight sadly swung the other way and would have been at home on an orange rather than a infant. Too small, much too small. That one would have only raised the pregnant woman’s hopes and given her false confidence.
    Number nine, number nine looked good. Really good. Really beautiful, really the right size, really almost perfect.Almost perfect, except the shaping at the crown wasn’t quite right. It didn’t match the notes I’d made about the original, and I wasn’t sure why. Another decrease, maybe? Sew it up another way? I was so frustrated, I wanted to walk away. I probably needed to walk away, but the more I thought about it, it felt like giving up, and when I had 99% of it licked that just wasn’t right. Moreover, it seemed a shame to have developed this nervous tic, the lip chewing, and the heart palpitations the doctor said were stress all for nothing. That was this morning, and that’s when I decided that this was going to go my way. If I was going to come out of this a changed and shattered knitter, I wanted Kelly to get a pattern that was as perfect as the original. I could meet this challenge without quitting. The trouble was, I was at a loss. The strategy I had at that moment, thinking up revenge strategies against the wool, was hardly going to be productive. Whoever came up with this little hat in the first place clearly had more mental resources than I did, especially since I’d taken to drinking in the afternoon since about hat four. I needed help if I was going to pass this test of character.
    I dragged myself upstairs to my pattern library. I have half a million knitting books, magazines, and leaflets; one of them I thought, has to have some help in it. I began thumbing through them, making piles around me, sitting on the floor. I hadn’t brushed my hair in a while. I had little wisps of cream baby wool stuck to my pants. By the time I’d pulled about half the magazines and books off the shelves hoping for evena shred of inspiration, I had developed a tremor in my right hand that was probably caffeine withdrawal, and not even the cat would make eye contact with me. I toyed with the idea of “good enough” and imagined the moment that I showed my reverse-engineered heirloom baby hat to Kelly and gave her the pattern that was almost right. I imagined her dejection, and then I picked up another book. I’m not good at much, but I could be good at this.
    As nighttime came, I was beginning to lose hope. I’d been through all the magazines and read all the articles with promising titles, and I’d started to feel as if the only solution to this was going to be changing my name to Lola, moving to San Francisco, and taking up papier-mâché to erase all shreds of my previous identity. (I probably would have felt less strongly about that in the morning.) I pulled another book off the shelf and started flipping through it. On page 38, I stopped, and suddenly I could hear the blood pounding in my head. My heart was beating irregularly, I’m sure of it—and if there was ever a time that you could apply the word “ashen” to someone’s complexion, I feel it was mine. The air rushed out of my lungs in horror.
    The pattern for the heirloom hat, the