Flint Knits

I thought I hated Noro. I started working with it pretty recently, and was especially irritated by the knotted joins, which tend to include an abrupt color-change that makes a cruel mockery of whatever intensive math and wool-winding one has done to match up the stripes on two socks, mittens, or sleeves.

The Lover requested a pair of fingerless mitts last week and, with no guidance from me, picked out a ball of Noro Kureyon amidst the cotton and novelty of a south Florida yarn shop.

I unwound and re-wound the whole ball, finding two perfect matching lengths to begin each mitten with. I was thrilled by both the serendipity of it (finding a color repeat in a single skein of Kureyon) and by my own clearly magnificent skills as a master knitter. Of course such arrogance must be punished: one inch up the second cuff, I found a knot that I had missed before. It cut off the creamy beige, skipped three colors in the stripe pattern, and picked up again in the middle of a dark grey bit. I was livid pissed.

Then I put the mitts down, got out of the car and spent the afternoon at Letchworth Canyon State Park in central New York. The muddy, brown, rocky beauty of the waterfalls and surrounding cliffs, gulches, woods, etc. reminded me that the cool thing about Noro (in addition to its “knitting nature” aesthetics, which happened to match this natural environment to a creepy degree — see photos) is its unpredictability and wildness. Those irritating knots may simply be a money and time saver for the manufacturer, but for the knitter, they’re a sticky reminder that (in spite of our sexy and valient efforts) we can’t — and probably shouldn’t — always be in total control.

The finished mitts don’t match perfectly. The Lover adores them anyway, and together we decided on an asymmetrical black edging to make the most of their uniqueness. So besides being warm, attractive, and made with love, they’re a reminder for this control freak of the exciting and creative things that can happen when we give up control (willingly or no).

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