Free The Yarn Whisperer by Clara Parkes

and aimed them at a stitch on the ankle.
    Snip.
    This normally innocuous sound suddenly became loud,like the open-mouthed crunch of a tortilla chip in a church. There was no going back. I carefully extracted the strand from its row until two shivering, opposing rounds of stockinette stitches stood before me. I turned the foot around so that it was in the proper position. Using my grandmother’s darning needle for good luck and the surrounding stitches as my guide, I began slowly and carefully weaving the yarn back through the opposing loops, re-creating the arch, dip, swoop, and dive that forms each stitch.
    Toss a person into a pool, and he’ll either sink or swim. Chances are, if he manages to swim, he’s going to be so busy staying afloat he won’t have time or awareness to yell, “Hey! I’m swimming!” Likewise, I didn’t yell, “Hey, I’m Kitchenering!” to the world. I just quieted my mind and did what the needle wanted to do. It worked. By the time I finished stitching up the second ankle, I felt positively invincible. Like I’d been forced to take apart an entire Volkswagen Bug and put it together again, and the car actually started. I still hadn’t taught myself the science behind the why of what I was doing, but that was beside the point.
    The outfit was promptly wrapped and shipped to Jeanne, who offered suitably enthusiastic praise. She slipped Nadiya into it for a picture, and I suspect that was the only time she ever wore it. That’s okay. Only you and I know what
really
went into that outfit, and why I have not knit another one since.
    The final nail in Lord Kitchener’s coffin came several years later. I was at the Interweave offices in Loveland, Colorado, putting the finishing touches on a magazine I’d been hired to edit.(I only edited one issue, which is all I’ll say about how well
that
went.) Across the room from me sat Ann Budd, formerly managing editor of
Interweave Knits
magazine, creator of several
Knitter’s Handy Book of
… books, knitwear designer, and one of my personal heroes.
    She was rushing to finish a sock for a photo shoot that afternoon, and I apologized for distracting her (which I was). “Oh no, I’m almost done,” she said. “I just have to finish the toe.”
    I gave an agonized groan, knowing just how hard the last few hundred feet of Mt. Everest can be.
    â€œOh, toes are eeeeeasy,” she said.
    I groaned again, and this time her head popped, groundhog-style, over her cubicle wall.
    A minute later she was by my side, needles and yarn in hand, showing me how Kitchener was done—on a real sock that was just hours away from being immortalized on the glossy pages of a book. More than that, she explained the
why
of Kitchener. She showed me how all that convoluted threading nonsense boils down to a simple concept. You thread each stitch first in the opposite direction of how you’d go into it, and then you come back and thread it in the same direction as you’d go into it—at which point it’s safe to drop off the needle. Once you get that idea, the rest falls into place.
    Just imagine Mario Andretti showing you how to down-shift on a curve, or Julia Child in your kitchen demonstrating the proper technique for flipping an omelet. When a hero teaches you how to do something you’ve struggled with for a long time, and you really
get
it, you feel fantastic.
    Ever since, I’ve embraced every opportunity to use Kitchener for toes or anything else that requires the same level of seamless connectivity. Every time I work it, I feel clever and strong. Kitchener serves as my gentle reminder not to give up on things quite so easily. I used up far more energy finding ways to avoid this stitch than I did finally facing it head-on. Kitchener has shown me that when life unravels you, when things don’t work out quite right, there’s usually a good stitch waiting to put you