137. Knitting, Romance and Women Who Love Both: An Interview with Elyse

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 137 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Elyse, also of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.  Today we’re talking about knitting!  Drunk knitting, yarn buying habits, yarn buying while you’re drunk, book buying habits, knitting patterns, and how knitting and romance fans have similar origin stories and similar habits.  Plus, I don’t know if this was intentional on the part of Elyse’s cat, but not only is Elyse’s cat making an appearance during this episode, but you can hear her birds in the background, so there is all kind of pet awesomeness going on, which makes me really happy.

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Aflame, a new novella in New York Times bestselling author Penelope Douglas’s Fall Away series.  It will be on sale on April 21^st.

The music you are listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater, as usual.  I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is and where you can buy it for your very own.

And as always, in the show notes or the podcast entry, however you want to refer to it, I will have links to the books that we discuss, but also some of the charities and yarn stores – I apologize – that Elyse mentions as well.

Thank you very much for joining us, and now, on with the podcast!

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Sarah:  Let’s talk about books, ‘cause that’s what we do here.  No, you actually wanted to talk about knitting and how that and romance are both of the inheritances you have acquired from your family.

Elyse:  Yeah, I think one of the really cool things about knitting is that a lot of women who knit kind of learn from another female family member, whether it was their grandmother or their mother, their aunt, and that’s kind of the same way a lot of people get into romance; you sort of inherit it.  So, you know, I learned to knit with my mom, probably would it be, like, five or six years ago?  She had always been a knitter and then stopped for quite a while and wanted to take a refresher class, and so she asked me, would you go with me, and I, I did, and I just fell in love with it, and I’ve been knitting kind of obsessively ever since.

Sarah:  What are some of the things that get you really obsessed and excited about knitting?  Like, I happen to know from talking with you over the last couple of years that when there’s a sale on yarn, it’s almost like a book sale.  Like, if we had –

Elyse:  Oh, it’s to –

Sarah:  [Laughs] If we had a, if we had a store where we sold books and, and yarn, you would be broke.

Elyse:  Basically.  I own more yarn than – like, if I stop buying yarn today, I could probably still have enough yarn to knit with, I would think, for, like, 10 years maybe?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  It’s insane.  It’s, I’ve got boxes and boxes and boxes of yarn in my basement, and every time I bring home more yarn, my husband kind of looks down towards the basement, like, where all those boxes of yarn are, and I’m just like, shut up.  I can stop whenever I want to.  It’s not a problem.  Yeah, people buy yarn the way they buy books.  It’s, you see it, and you haven’t seen this color before or all of a sudden you get an idea for something you can make with it, or it’s just so pretty, and so you have to have it.  I kind of have, like, a dragon’s hoard of yarn.  I could just make a big pile of it in the room and lie on it like a dragon.

Sarah:  And it’s not like, much like books, unless there’s some sort of accident involving water, none of these things go bad.

Elyse:  Right.  Well, that’s the nice part, and –

Sarah:  Yarn doesn’t spoil.  It’s not like you’re, you know hoarding ice cream.

Elyse:  Exactly.  And, or, you know, it’s not like, it’s not a fad.  I’m not buying a bunch of Beanie Babies or something, right?  So –

Sarah:  Dude, I just, I just want you to know –

Elyse:  ‘Kay.

Sarah:  Years ago, my mother-in-law was Hard.  Core.  Into the Beanie Babies.

Elyse:  Okay.

Sarah:  Like, there are levels of Beanie Baby addiction, and I think that she was at least level ten, possibly level eleven, out of twelve?  And when McDonald’s had Happy Meals and they came with mini Beanie Babies?  She would pay for people in her office to go to lunch and get the Happy Meal.  She would buy them Happy Meals if they would give her the mini baby, mini ba-, mini Beanie Babies so she could have all of them.

Elyse:  Does she still have them though?

Sarah:  Well, no, then she moved.  She and my father-in-law moved from Connecticut down to Virginia, and one of the things that had to be gone through was a multi-year, multi-bin collection of Beanie Babies with individual Lucite boxes and tag protectors, ‘cause if the tag wasn’t on it, it wasn’t worth as much, so she had these little plastic tag protectors to keep the tag on that tiny little sliver of plastic hanging from their ears.  And she kept insisting, no, no, no, they’re worth something!  They’re worth something!  And as you know, the minute you say that something is a collectible, no matter how old it is, it’s probably not going to be worth anything.  So of course I was like, no, no, no.  And then I was truly evil, and I opened up the eBay app on my phone, and I started randomly scanning Beanie Babies, and they were all worth less than seventy-five cents.

Elyse:  Awesome.

Sarah:  And she was so aghast.  Like, (a) that I had burst her bubble, and (b) that she had collected them and, like, protected their tiny little ear tags, and they were all worth seventy-five cents.  That did not earn me mother-in-law points, I must say.  That was not my finest moment, but yarn, absolutely no question, better than Beanie Babies.

Elyse:  The thing I like is when you buy yarn, a lot of times I buy it and I don’t know what I’m going to make out of it?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  And I put it in my stash, and then one day I’ll see a pattern or I’ll come up with an idea, and I’ll be like, [gasp!] and then I know it’s perfect for the yarn that I bought.

Sarah:  So –

Elyse:  So it does get used eventually.

Sarah:  – you remember what you have!

Elyse:  Oh, oh, yes.  Not perfectly; sometimes I go down there and I have to dig through, and then I’m like, I forgot I have this.  But there is a website that I use called Ravelry –

Sarah:  Yep!

Elyse:  – which is incredibly cool, and it’s for knitters, and what you do is you enter your stash into Ravelry.  So you can take a picture of the yarn, you can put where you bought it, how many skeins you have, how much you paid for it, what colors you have –

Sarah:  Holy hell.

Elyse:  – and – but the cool things is, when you’re looking at patterns on Ravelry, it will suggest yarn from your stash to use with that pattern.

Sarah:  You cannot see my face right now, but holy hell, that’s brilliant.  Whoever came up with that, that’s, that’s, that’s a – oh, my God, that’s amazing!

Elyse:  Isn’t that genius?

Sarah:  That is totally genius!  That’s like the, the, the, the – it’s like the book algorithm that we’ve been wishing for where you finish a book and it automatically suggests books that are almost exactly the same to the conflict and angst level that you just read, and then they’re right exactly what you want?

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  Because yarn is, yarn is very personal too, but it’s already drawing from your stash!  Ooh!

Elyse:  And the other thing about having your stash on there, it takes a little bit of time to do it initially, but people can also browse your stash, or if they’re looking for a specific yarn that they can’t find, they can find it on Ravelry, and I’ve had people contact me and say, hey, are you using this yarn?  Can I buy it from you?  So, if there’s something that you’re having a trouble, trouble finding or they’re not making that color anymore, you can search on Ravelry and find people who have it and a lot of times buy and sell from each other.

Sarah:  That’s really cool.

Elyse:  It is.  The other thing I like about Ravelry is you can keep patterns in a digital library, because I have so many knitting patterns – I, I have four binders’ worth of –

Sarah:  Holy cow!

Elyse:  – of just loose patterns that I’ve printed off and put in sleeve protectors and all of that, but you can keep them online as, as .pdfs or however they’re formatted so that you don’t have to have that giant, you know, binder box pattern sitting around.  So yeah, Ravelry is a really, really awesome site, and if you like knitting or crocheting, ‘cause they also do crocheting, or if you are a person who spins your own yarn, dyes your own yarn, it’s completely worth joining.  It’s free.  It’s also a really good site for when I have random knitting questions or I get to a pattern and I just cannot figure out what in the hell they’re talking about.  They have a lot of different message boards and groups, and you can ask a question and a million people will pop up and, and help you out, and it’s just a very nice community, so I really enjoy that.

Sarah:  That sounds a lot like the romance community.

Elyse:  It is!  The nice thing about the knitting community, like the romance community, is that it’s incredibly supportive, and it’s a diverse and – you know, the, the thing I love is you can post a picture of something you’re making and absolutely no one, no matter how crappy it is, will say, oh, my God, what were you thinking?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Everyone is just going to, everyone is just really supportive and very, very helpful, and they love to answer questions and help you figure out a pattern or if you have a question about a certain type of yarn or I’m allergic to wool, what could I use instead?  They’re right there, and they’re very, very awesome, and it’s, it is a community mostly made of women.  I do know –

Sarah:  Again, very similar to romance.

Elyse:  Yeah!  I do know men who knit, but it is primarily women who do it.  And that’s, I think, the fun thing about knitting groups too is that, it’s kind of an excuse to get together as a community, and ostensibly you’re going to bring your knitting or your crochet and work on it, but really what you’re doing is you’re just having a community gathering and you’re talking, and it’s an excuse to hang out for a few hours and have a cappuccino and, and really just have this kind of warm community chat time that’s, that’s really, it’s really lovely.

Sarah:  One of the things I find fascinating about the ways in which women have traditionally gathered is that it’s almost always with a purpose.  Like, the subversiveness is we gather with a purpose, we’re going to get together and we’re going to knit, so we’re not just sitting around doing nothing, ‘cause women are not permitted to sit around and do nothing.  That’s unacceptable!  So we, we’re not allowed to do that, so we’re going to gather and we’re going to knit!  And we’re going to have a sweater at the end of it, or we’re going to go to book club and we’re going to, you know, discuss a book, and we’re going to, we’re going to do a thing, and then beneath the activity is where the interesting and more subversive conversations come up.  For me –

Elyse:  Oh!

Sarah:  – I, I don’t, I don’t actually knit.  I am aware of how to do it, and I have this wonderful children’s book that I’ve used to teach myself how to knit five times, but it’s not a thing that I am into.  It’s not a thing that I – it doesn’t grab me the way it grabs you.  But I do cross stitch –

Elyse:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and the store where I get a lot of my cross-stitching supplies, especially the, the different colors of floss, which come in a zillion shades of red and then another zillion shades of green, that is actually owned by a husband and wife duo, and the husband is a world-famous cross-stitch pattern designer.

Elyse:  Oh, that’s awesome!

Sarah:  And you walk in there, and there’s this big, friendly, bearded guy, and these women are in the back doing silk work, where they take really narrow strips of silk and then twist them into flowers and – one of them was sewing a, it was basically a bodice on a piece of mesh, but the bodice was, like, three dimensional.  It had ruffles and flowers all made out of strips of silk and ribbon work, and he’s back there showing them how to make, like, this one type of rosette versus the other type of rosette, so it’s definitely not exclusively women?  But it’s more rare to see men.  And of course everyone is sitting in the back talking about their children and their nephews and their in-laws and everyone who’s – you know, it, it’s your typical conversation while they’re doing something.

Elyse:  The knitting group that I go to is primarily made up of moms who have children of a similar age, and actually, it kind of was birthed out of a breastfeeding group.  I don’t know what you would call it, kind of – I think everyone sort of had kids at the same time, and there must be, like, a class or something they teach about breastfeeding.  It’s this group of similarly aged women, and we go to, you know, like, Panera bread, or there’s a café downtown we’ll go to, and it’s kind of like a support group of we’re going to knit and have our tits out and screw you if you want to look at us.  Right?

Sarah:  I like this plan!

Elyse:  With pointy needles.

Sarah:   This is brilliant!

Elyse:  So, so it’s a lot of fun, and you’re right, you talk a lot about kids, but then you start talking about marriage and you talk about sex and you talk about books that you’ve read, and it, it, it becomes less and less about knitting as you, as you’re there, and that can be tremendously fun.  I know a lot of groups that do, like, wine and knitting, which you have to be careful with because as you get further and further along, you’ll wake up the next morning and you’re like, it looks I just tied a bunch of knots together in my yarn and I don’t know what I did, and then you have to tear everything out and go back to where you started from.

Sarah:  Drunk knitting, man.  Drunk knitting is risky.

Elyse:  Yes.  But the guy I know who knitted, his wife was a knitter, and he was quitting smoking, and you know, smoking, it, it’s a lot of –

Sarah:  Hand movement.

Elyse:  – routine.  Right.  And always having something in your hand, and he was really struggling with that, so she was teaching him how to knit to keep his hands busy, and during the period of time that he was quitting, he knit, like, shit for everybody, man.  It was like –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – it was like, we now have forty-two scarves, a hat, you know, sixty pairs of socks, because his hands were always going ‘cause he was jonesing so bad for a cigarette.

Sarah:  Oh course!  ‘Cause quitting is hard!  It’s not just the addiction, it’s the physical movement of your body that you miss the, the, the, having a thing to do with your hands, and it’s a –

Elyse:  Oh, absolutely!  You know –

Sarah:  Yeah, it’s, oh, it’s hard!  Well, let’s talk about your patterns!  ‘Cause you’ve been designing patterns for the site for fun, which have turned out to be very popular, because every, every time we post a pattern, someone will comment, I just found this site and you have romance and knitting, and it’s like you can see into my soul.  Yes, we can actually see into your soul.  It’s very nice in there!  You’re very well organized.

Elyse:  So when I started knitting, I did everything from a pattern, and then you reach a certain point where you’re just very comfortable with it, and you start looking at yarn and being like, I’m just going to do something with this and see what happens.  So that’s where my patterns come from, and I am not an advanced pattern maker.  Everything is, you know, knit and purl, and maybe if we’re getting exciting there’s a knit two together and a yarnover in there.  Right –

Sarah:  Woohoo!

Elyse:  [Laughs] Right now, I’m making pat- – because I’m super cool, as RedHeadedGirl said, and a delightful nerd – I am making patterns inspired by the women of Game of Thrones, so they’re all going to have their own cowl, basically, or infinity scarf.  So that’s what I’ve currently been doing, and I just finished one that I will send you the pattern for soon that’s actually finger knitting, so you don’t know, you don’t have to know how to knit to make this.

Sarah:  Ooh!

Elyse:  I don’t know if you’ve ever done finger knitting.  It’s, it’s a fun thing to do with kids if they’re old enough to be kind of dexterous and pay attention, where you wrap the yarn around your fingers in a certain way, and then you pull loops over, and it creates, like, a, a long braid or a long cord –

Sarah:  Right.

Elyse:  – and if you use really chunky yarn, it can be pretty big.  There’s also arm knitting, which is similar.  So I did finger knitting for this, this cowl, and it takes, like, maybe thirty minutes to make, tops.

Sarah:  Cool!  I know I did, I did something similar, not finger knitting, but I had a, when I was really little, I had a knitting tool that was a mushroom with four little half-circle hooks at the top –

Elyse:  Yep!  Yep!

Sarah:  – and I would –

Elyse:  Spool knitting.

Sarah:  Spool knitting, that what it was, but it was a mushroom, and I thought the mushroom part was the best, the best part of it, ‘cause I had the cool mushroom with the red top.

Elyse:  Spool knitting was act-, it’s actually very, very old, and that’s – they think knitting originated in the Islamic world, like somewhere around the twelfth century?

Sarah:  Right.

Elyse:  But spool knitting was how people knit for years and years and years and years and years before, I think, needles really came to be.  You can go online and look at, like, very old knitting spools from, you know, the Middle Ages and stuff, and it’s pretty cool.  There weren’t any mushrooms, though, I don’t think.

Sarah:  There should be, there should be more mushrooms involved in knitting, I think.  I mean, if drunk knitting is one thing, imagine, imagine ‘shroom knitting.

Elyse:  You would make some pretty wacky shit, that’s for sure.

Sarah:  [Laughs] That would be pretty cool!  So when you’re making cowls and scarves and infinity scars inspired by the women of Game of Thrones, are you varying the pattern and the weave?  Is there, is there a color choice that you’re making?  How are you –

Elyse:  Oh, yeah.

Sarah:  – how are you inspired by these different women?

Elyse:  I’m using Malabrigo Rios.  So my two favorite brands of yarn are Malabrigo and Noro, because there’re just so many color options and the colors are so beautiful, and – so there’s different colors that make me think of the different characters, but then I’m also using different stitch patterns.  I’m working on one now, and I have to start over because a certain cat who has no regrets tore my knitting off the needles.

Sarah:  Oh, no!  Dewey!

Elyse:  [Laughs] Yeah, and my husband took a picture of him, like immediately after he did it to send it to me at work, and the look on his face is totally like, YOLO, I would do it again.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  But I’m trying to, for the character Daenerys, make a cowl that’s got, like, a scale pattern to it, so it looks like dragon scales when you’re wearing it?

Sarah:  [Gasps] Cool!  I would wear the hell out of that.

Elyse:  Yes.  If I, if I get it to work, I’m probably going to wind up making, like, a million of them, ‘cause I think everyone wants a dragon-scale cowl.  But there’s, there’s different –

Sarah:  Yeah!  Yeah, they do!

Elyse:  – different, different stitch patterns that, that make different things.  There’s one I really love; it’s called Star Stitch or Daisy Stitch, and it, it looks like little flowers –

Sarah:  Right.

Elyse:  – when you do it, and so if you have, like, a really pretty variegated yarn, it’s just absolutely gorgeous when it knits up.

Sarah:  The yarn that you’re using varies in color, right?

Elyse:  Yes, yes.

Sarah:  Like, it changes color; it’s all variegated.

Elyse:  Yeah, I really love variegated yarn.  I love color in general.  Like, I’m obsessed with very bright, very pretty yarn, and that’s why I do a lot of cowls and scarves and stuff like that, because it would be almost too much to knit a whole garment in it, but as an accessory, it’s really pretty, and if you’re just wearing, you know, a black sweater or something, it can really make it pop.  But yeah, I love really, really brightly colored, variegated yarns, which is why I like Noro and I really like Malabrigo.

Sarah:  Cool.  Have – and you’ve, you’ve written, you’ve done some knitting patterns that were inspired by books and characters too, right?

Elyse:  Oh, absolutely!  I did the Outlander cowl.

Sarah:  Yep.

Elyse:  Big, chunky cowl that Claire wears, which I love watching that show, because it’s got so much amazing – not only just the, the costumes, but the –

Sarah:  The knitting!

Elyse:  – the knitting!  Yeah, it’s really, really neat, and it –

Sarah:  That show was made for you.

Elyse:  It was.  And there’s a podcast that the creator, Ron Moore, and his wife, who does all the costume design too, and you can synch up the podcast with the program, so you start the podcast when you start the episode –

Sarah:  Ooh!

Elyse:  – and it’s the two of them talking, like a commentary.  And they talk about –

Sarah:  So it’s like a podcast that’s like a, like a bonus feature.

Elyse:  Yes.  Yes.  And so they, she talks primarily about set design and, and all the different outfits that they made and how they made them, and are they historically accurate, or how they got them to be historically accurate, and she talks about the knitwear and how that had to be historically accurate and, to be something that people would have been making at that time, and it’s just, it’s a really, really neat podcast to listen to if you’re, you’re interested in that kind of stuff, and she had a quote that I loved, where she’s talking about, she doesn’t understand the term bodice ripper, because yeah, you could rip open the bodice, then there’s, like, four layers you still have to go through underneath it –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – so – and they talk about, do you remember Claire’s wedding dress, the one that looked incredibly painful on her boobs?

Sarah:  Yes, the, it, yeah.  That was, that was more than double boob, that was, like, triple boob.  It was horrible.

Elyse:  To g-, to get it to have kind of a shimmering effect, they actually used, like, shaved pieces of mica –

Sarah:  What?

Elyse:  – and applied them to the fabric, and she was talking about just how incredibly arduous this process was, and they would, the costume department would have to take turns because it was just so repetitive and tedious and – so it’s a really, really interesting podcast.

Sarah:  Oh, that is really cool!  Are there knitting podcasts that you listen to?

Elyse:  There are knitting podcasts.  I really don’t listen to any of them.  For me, knitting is, is very visual, and so I need to be able to see patterns or tutorials.  I use YouTube a lot when I don’t understand how something is written or something’s meant to be constructed.  YouTube is awesome for knitters because you can watch someone doing it in slow motion.

Sarah:  Yes, of course.

Elyse:  Yeah, so there’s a lot of knitting stuff on, on YouTube, but there aren’t, I don’t think, as many podcasts, ‘cause it’s hard to listen to and really understand.  It’s, it’s more visual.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Yeah, I don’t think I could listen to somebody saying, okay, knit two, yarnover, purl 8.  I, I’d, I would never be able to keep that in my head.

Elyse:  Right.  And there are podcasts that just talk about knitting in general and yarn and, and kind of – again, it’s that community where, you know, the, the idea is you talk about knitting, but you wind up kind of talking about everything –

Sarah:  Of course.

Elyse:  – but knitting.

Sarah:  Of course.  Do you get the same sort of feeling when you see yarn on sale and books on sale?  Is it sort of the [gasp!] yay!?

Elyse:  Yeah, it’s definitely kind of a mania –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – and I go into a fugue state.  And it’s, it’s absolutely like – you know, and I do this with books too – I need to buy it because I’ll get to it someday.

Sarah:  Of course!

Elyse:  Right.  It might be five years from now, but I will get to it someday.

Sarah:  Of course.

Elyse:  One of the things I think is interesting about knitting – ‘cause I read a lot of historical romance – is that it was absolutely kind of a classist hobby, right?

Sarah:  Really!

Elyse:  So, you know, if you, you read Regency romances, the heroines or the mother of the heroine or whatever, they’re always working on embroidery, right?

Sarah:  Yes, they embroider, they, they stitch, they needlepoint.

Elyse:  Right, but they don’t knit unless they belong to kind of a lower servant class, I think, because knitting – and I, feel free to, to comment on the podcast if I’m way wrong on this, but knitting was, you’re, it’s functional.

Sarah:  Right.

Elyse:  You’re creating a garment that, that’s going to be worn –

Sarah:  Right.

Elyse:  – and so it’s kind of beneath the aristocracy in that respect, and I was reading a book by –

Sarah:  Make their own clothes!  What are you smoking?  Yes, exactly.

Elyse:  I was reading a book by Manda Collins, and I think it’s Why Earls Fall in Love.  It’s the teal book, that’s how I remember it, and –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – the heroine in the book is a companion to the hero’s elderly aunt, and there’s a scene where they’re all at a house party, and they’re all sitting around chatting, and all of the upper crust ladies are doing their very delicate embroidery, and the heroine pulls out her bag of knitting because she’s not, you know, upper crust.  She’s a servant, right, and she’s there to be a companion to his elderly aunt, and so she’s working on her knitting.  And it was kind of a way of showing, the author showed, like, she does not belong to this group, without actually overtly saying it, and later on in the, the scene, some of the ladies who are of a similar age to her who are part of the aristocracy start getting kind of shitty and just making very backhanded comments to her, but I thought it was really interesting that Manda Collins chose the way that they were using, or, or crafting to show –

Sarah:  The class difference.

Elyse:  – the disparity between the hero, heroine and, and the rest of the group.

Sarah:  Yep.  That is really very subtle, but it’s also something that they would, they would all instantly notice.

Elyse:  Right.  Because you wouldn’t be, you wouldn’t be, you know, a duchess and be knitting.  I’d always, I always think it’s really interesting – I can’t imagine having to knit to actually have things to wear, like warm socks, or gloves.  Because if I don’t get it finished or it comes out really bad and I have, like, gloves with seven fingers on them –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – I, I can just go to the store and buy gloves, but I can’t imagine living in a period of time where it would get really cold in winter and you damn well better finish your knitting, because otherwise you don’t have a hat.

Sarah:  Well, I have a whole box – my, my mother knits, and when I was born, I was born in June, and I think she spent my, her entire pregnancy with me knitting, because there, I have an entire box of bundling knit dresses where the bottom is sealed, so it’s like a, basically, a –

Elyse:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – a big bag with sleeves, and hats and jackets, and they’re all sized for newborns, but I was born in June, so the, the, the, the time at which I was the right size to wear them was not a time when you had to wear knitting, ‘cause it was warm –

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  – so I have all of this handmade, knit, gorgeous baby stuff.  I think she spent most of her pregnancy knitting.  ‘Cause I had a wardrobe, and I’m sure that that is a very functional and common way that women spend maternity, knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting.

Elyse:  Oh, absolutely.  Oh, there was a website I wanted to tell you about –

Sarah:  Please do!

Elyse: – that is very cool.  It’s called Knit A Square, and it is a charity that I love, and I send them boxes of stuff all the time, and it is in South Africa.  So I don’t know if a lot of people know, South Africa gets very cold.  And they make, they construct garments and blankets for AIDS orphans, and I think there’s something like two million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa –

Sarah:  Good gracious!

Elyse:  Yes.  It’s very sad.  So what they do is you, you knit or crochet or whatever you do eight by eight inch squares, which that is very, very easy to do, and the reason I like doing it is because you wind up with, like, leftover yarn that’s not enough to actually make anything?

Sarah:  But you can make a square.

Elyse:  But you can make a square, or make two squares, whatever.  So you, you knit or crochet these eight by eight inch squares, and you mail them to them, and they take them and they assemble them into blankets that they distribute to the different crèches and orphanages and even, in some case, they just go into villages where these very, very poor families live, and you know, they have pictures on their website of the, the distribution of the blankets and stuff, and they showed one orphanage that was kind of supposed to be this state-of-the-art great orphanage, and all of the beds for the kids, they had no, no blankets –

Sarah:  Ohh!

Elyse:  – because they just, they just didn’t have any.  And so, you know, they went in and contributed the blankets to them.  So if you enjoy knitting and you’re not comfortable making something that’s really big, or you don’t have the patience for it, or you just have this leftover yarn, you can, you can easily make an eight by eight inch square.  They also take hats, and they have a couple of patterns on their website for really easy pullovers?  Like, sweaters that you don’t have to know how to do a lot of seaming or making sleeves.  It’s basically just knit in one big piece.  So it’s, it’s just a really neat charity, and I’ve, so I ship from the United States, and what I do is I’ll make a bunch of squares and I’ll put them in, like, a giant Ziploc bag and squish all the air out –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  – and then put them in a box or a big envelope, and I think for me, shipping comes to about a dollar a square, maybe a little bit less, so it’s not horrific, but it’s, it’s a fun thing to do, and I think it’s a pretty cool charity.  If you, if you want to, to knit something for a charity.

Sarah:  That is very cool.  I know, I know there’re some people who, when they’re looking to do a craft, there has to be a purpose to it.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  Like, I do a lot of very small projects from subversive cross stitch –

Elyse:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – but I almost always do them in, with, with a person in mind.  Like, when I used to work in an office, my, one of my bosses, his son also worked in the department, and he was diagnosed with cancer.  It was treatable cancer, but it was not the diagnosis that anyone wishes to have, and my boss was understandably very upset, and so I cross-stitched, one of the subversive cross stitch patterns has these beautiful pink rabbits and blue bunnies and, and it’s super cute, and then it says FUCK CANCER.

Elyse:  I’ve seen that.

Sarah:  Right, so –

Elyse:  I love subversive cross stitch.

Sarah:  So I cross-stitched it, and it doesn’t take long, ‘cause it’s not that big of a pattern, and I mounted it and framed it, and at the time I worked with a very, very religious woman.  She was very devout Christian, and I had covered the frame with a, like a big Post-it note, so he would take the Post-it note off and see it on his desk.  ‘Cause I didn’t know him that well, and it felt like, well, if I wrap it up in wrapping paper, that’s weird.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  You know, cross-stitching a curse word for you, that’s normal, but putting in wrapping paper, that’s weird, ‘cause this is how my brain works, so I stuck a Post-it note on it.  And my, my very religious co-worker saw me and was like, well, what, what, what does it say?  And I was like, I, I don’t, I don’t want to show you.  I think you’ll be very upset.  And she’s like, okay, well, now you have to show it to me, and I am preparing for the mother of all lectures, right?  So I take the Post-it note off, and she’s like, [Gasp!] I think that context is appropriate; I have to go now.

Elyse:  That’s awesome.

Sarah:  I was like, oh, my God!  I just got away with, like, you now, broadcasting the F word at work.

Elyse:  Yeah, I work in, in transportation –

Sarah:  There’s cursing.

Elyse:  – basically trucking, and I –

Sarah:  Would you please create a curse jar, just for fun?  I want to know how much money you get in a day.

Elyse:  Well, we do, I do work with a woman, she works for me, who does not appreciate cursing, and we’ve got it kind of down in the office, like, keep it quiet, you guys, but my office is attached to the shop where they repair some of our equipment, and every now and then you just hear one of the guys, like, God damn, motherfucking, cock-sucking son of a bitch!  Like, throwing things.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  And I can’t, I, I just look at her like, I am not going out there and telling him to watch his mouth.  Like, you’re just going to have to, we’re going to have to pretend there’s a wall of, like, sound-dampening that there isn’t, ‘cause –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – it’s going to happen; sorry.

Sarah:  I think, though, in your, in your particular office, you could have a fundraiser where if you curse, you have to contribute, and then whatever’s in the jar is donated.

Elyse:  Well, we could do that, but we’d all be broke.

Sarah:  That’s true, that’s true.  It would be a bit of a challenge.

Elyse:  I recently found that my employees are motivated both by cash bonuses and by my humiliation, so we have done, you know, different –

Sarah:  [Laughs] Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!  You mean you humiliating them or you being humiliated?

Elyse:  Me being humiliated.  We have –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – we have, you know, every now and then we’ll have something that kind of comes up, and, and we’re having a hard time covering it or whatever, and I’ll throw out an email, you know, you guys, whoever manages to get this done, I’ll, I’ll give you a $20 gift certificate to whatever, you know, something like that, and it was just not working, and finally, I threw out there, I will sing the “Muffin Top” song from 30 Rock to the group.  We got that motherfucker covered, like, immediately, so I had to stand on a desk and sing the “Muffin Top” song from 30 Rock.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Okay, that’s brilliant.

Elyse:  Yeah, so I’m actually thinking of developing, like, some sort of Wheel of Humiliation that they can spin –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – if they do really good that involves different, different scenarios that I have to act out.  There’s –

Sarah:  Isn’t life fun when you give no shits?

Elyse:  It, it is!  We have, so one of our issues is that we have – I, I refer to it as a campus, but it’s basically an industrial park, and we have two offices and then several warehouses in different facilities, and when you walk from one office to the other across this big parking lot, you are supposed to carry this bright orange baton, ostensibly so that trucks don’t hit you.  Well, I found out the reality behind the baton is actually to fend off the feral geese that we have nesting on our property because we’re right by the river, and we get all these Canada geese who lay their eggs there, and they are mean as shit.  The other day, they turned –

Sarah:  So you have to have a baton to beat them off.

Elyse:  Now before anyone writes in, I have never actually touched a goose with the baton.  I think it’s more there for, like, emotional security?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  But the geese will chase you.  They will hiss at you.  I saw the other day a truck, like a semi truck trying to get into our parking lot, and the goose standing in front of it hissing and flapping its wings like, no, truck, this is my parking lot.  You’re not coming in.  They give no shits.  So one of the suggestions from my employees was that I, I go out and pretend to be a goose and see if I could somehow get my way into the herd of feral geese, like if they will accept me as one of their own –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – and I put the kibosh on that, because I said, look, I could see them all attacking me simultaneously.

Sarah:  [Gasps] Oh, no!

Elyse:  And then I –

Sarah:  But what about the “Muffin Top” song?  Would that work on the geese?

Elyse:  Probably not.  The geese, the geese are very mean.  They hiss at you; they charge you; I guarantee they will bite you.  I have seen grown men run to their cars in our parking lot because the geese are chasing them.

Sarah:  Oh, God!  [Laughs]

Elyse:  [Laughs] Yeah.  I, I came home from work, and I told –

Sarah:  I wouldn’t fuck around with the geese, I’ve, I’ve been bitten by a goose.  I would not mess around with that.

Elyse:  No!  They’re mean!

Sarah:  Yes, they are.

Elyse:  And, and they’re very large.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  They’re surprisingly large when you see them up close.  So knitting and feral geese; that’s the podcast for today.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Okay.  One question: if someone is thinking, all right, this sounds cool.  I want to learn to knit.  And they don’t have a female adjacent, or a person who knows how to knit – forgive me for being sexist – adjacent to them to say, well, here is how you do it.  What are some resources you recommend to teach people how to knit?

Elyse:  So you can go to a, a box craft store like Jo-Ann’s or, or wherever, and they usually have classes.  I recommend looking for an independent yarn store or a little yarn store and there’s, there’s a lot of little yarn shops throughout the country, and they almost always have classes, and the cool thing about little yarn stores – there’s one in my town where I learned to knit – is that the people who work there absolutely love what they’re doing, and they’re really good at it, and so they really want to take the time to show you how to do this, and this is really all that they do.  The other cool thing is when you fuck up a project or you’re stuck, you can go in and be like, help me fix this or fix this for me, and they totally are happy to do it.  So –

Sarah:  Can I interrupt you for just a second?

Elyse:  Yes.

Sarah:  Is, is that Dewey?

Elyse:  [Sighs] I was wondering if you were going to hear him.

Sarah:  Is, is that Dew-, ‘cause you know, the cat who always appeared on my podcast has since gone to the Great Rainbow Litter Box in the Sky, so the fact that there is a cat on the podcast is giving me all of the feels right now –

Elyse:  Ohh!

Sarah:  – so would you say thank you to Dewey for me, ‘cause this is just totally making my day.

Elyse:  Thank you, Dewey.

Sarah:  This podcast isn’t right without a cat, and now there is one!  Thank you!

Elyse:  I thought you were going to hear him.  He’s coming in the office and meowing at me because I’m not in the right room.

Sarah:  Why are you in here?  Go in the other room.

Dewey:  Meeww!

Sarah:  Oh!  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Did you hear that?  [Laughs] Hi!  We’re talking about you!

Sarah:  Oh, God!  I’m having all the feels right now, people.  I beg your pardon.  Oh, my gosh, that is just so great.  Thank you, Dewey!

Elyse:  Yeah, he’s, he’s big on schedules, and I am not where I –

Sarah:  Most cats are.

Elyse:  Yes, I am not where I am supposed to be, so he has to come and herd me in the right direction, which at the moment involves biting my big toe to motivate me to get up off my ass and go where I’m supposed to be, right?

Sarah:  Yes!  Sounds like a perfectly adequate motivation.

Elyse:  [Laughs] Hi.  Hi, why are you biting?  Why are you bad cat?  He says, I’m not bad cat; you’re just not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.  So yes, we have a cat on the podcast.  Now he’s sticking his tongue out at me.  We couldn’t, we could talk about knitting from cat hair, ‘cause when I vacuum, I’m pretty sure I have enough Dewey hair that I could spin it and make, like, an actual cat-hair sweater.

Sarah:  Are you going to spin his hair into yarn?

Elyse:  No.

Sarah:  ‘Cause I know that that’s a thing that can be done.

Elyse:  That is a thing that can be done.  No, I, I have no intention of spinning his hair into yarn.  I could, you know what, you could make a cat-hair sweater and then put it on your cat.  Imagine that.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  I, my, my cat, my, I have, all right, I have two dogs and one cat.  I now have a normal number of pets in my house, which is really weird, ‘cause when we moved here I had one dog and three cats, then we had two dogs and three cats, and now I have two dogs and one cat.  My one solitary cat who is young at 15 years of age, he’s not as vocal, but he is a long-haired Maine Coon.

Elyse:  ‘Kay.

Sarah:  I could probably knit a boat cover out of his hair.

Elyse:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  If I spun it into yarn, I could winter over a sailboat.

Elyse:  Now I’m picturing, like, cat-hair sweaters for hairless cats, right?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Like some kind of charity organization.

Dewey:  Mew!

Sarah:  Dewey, Dewey does not like that idea.

Elyse:  No.

Sarah:  He says it’s a terrible idea.

Elyse:  But you, you’re going to laugh at me.  I do knit things for greyhounds.  My dad has greyhounds; they’ve always adopted former racing greyhounds, and they are very skinny dogs – although his, his are very fat by greyhound standards?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  – but that’s still pretty skinny – and we live in Wisconsin, so they don’t have a lot of padding to make it through the winter, and so when you take them out for walks or they go outside, they really need some kind of, like, sweater or something.  And so I knit them snoods, ‘cause they have –

[Laughter]

Sarah:  That’s adorable!

Elyse:  They have these jackets that they wear that look like big horse blankets, but then it’s, basically, I just knit them a long ribbed tube that you slide down their necks – they have long necks – and then you pull over their head and tuck their little ears in, and they go outside with their little snood on when it’s very cold.

Sarah:  Okay, that’s seriously adorable.

Elyse:  Snoods for greyhounds.  I could start a business.

Sarah:  You could totally start a business!  They don’t have a lot of body fat.

Elyse:  No, they, they do not.  Although, as the vet likes to tell him for, my, my father’s very, very talented at making greyhounds fat.  He’s very good at that.

Sarah:  That’s a good skill to have, ‘cause for the, the life that a greyhound has, they deserve to be fat and well looked after and spoiled –

Elyse:  Oh –

Sarah:  – for a period of their lives.

Elyse:  Oh, absolutely.  They – you know, it, it is sad.  A lot of them come in, like, they have, most of his greyhounds are missing a lot of teeth because they feed them canned fruit before races to give them a sugar high, and so, unlike most dogs –

Sarah:  Their teeth rot.

Elyse:  – their teeth rot, right.  So they have to have lots and lots of teeth removed, and you know, they have all kinds of other issues, ‘cause they’re really, they’re kept in these, in not great conditions.  But there’s a greyhound, like, for this, this rescue group that they adopt from, every year they do kind of like a barbecue, and you can bring your dog, and they do have, like the, the kind of rabbit on a lure or whatever, ‘cause a lot of them, you know, they still run.  And so, he will, he will bring his greyhounds and stuff, and some of the dogs really like, you know, chasing and running around, and his dogs look at him like, yeah, I chased the rabbit for a while.  Like, fuck you, you go get it now.  I’m going to lie here.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I am a, that phase of my life is over.  I’m here for laziness.

Elyse:  I, I am retired, and I’m just going to sit here on the couch, thank you very much.

Sarah:  I think that’s a perfectly adequate retirement.

Elyse:  I agree!  I agree.

Sarah:  So, another question I have for you:  what are your favorite places online to shop for, for yarn?

Elyse:  I shop a lot on Jimmy Beans Wool.  B-E-A-N-S.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  And they’re actually out of Reno, Nevada, and they have a giant store that I’m trying to go there.  I need to go to the Jimmy Beans Wool store at some point.

Sarah:  You need to, you need to make the pilgrimage to, to visit the giant yarn store.

Elyse:  I’m, I’m thinking about, RT next year is in Vegas, right?

Sarah:  Yes, it is!

Elyse:  Like, can I get enough people together that we, like, get a bus and go to Jimmy Beans in Reno?  How far is that?  Can we make that trip?  I don’t know.

Sarah:  I think that’s totally doable.

Elyse:  I don’t know distances in Nevada, so it could be really far.  I’m not sure.  So Jimmy Beans Wool is a big one.  There’s a website called Webs, W-E-B-S.  I think it’s like yarn.com is that –

Sarah:  Oh, I’m sorry, Vegas to Reno is a six-and-a-half-hour drive.

Elyse:  Oh, that’s not going to happen.

Sarah:  Yeah, you’d have to fly.  You’d have to charter a plane and then fly.

Elyse:  And then fly?

Sarah:  Yeah.  Average air fare –

Elyse:  So that’s not happening.

Sarah:  – average air fare is $200.00.  So you could do it.  I mean, you could do a round trip, trip from Vegas to Reno, go yarn shopping, and get back on a plane the same day.

Elyse:  That’s entirely possible.  I think that would be a level of crazy I’m not comfortable owning up to yet?  So, I’m like –

Sarah:  Oh, please!

Elyse:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I almost –

Elyse:  Wait ‘til next year!

Sarah:  I almost went from Sydney to Melbourne in Australia – I didn’t say that right:  Melb’n – I almost went from Sydney to Melb’n when I was last in Australia because there was a DreamWorks exhibit in Melbourne, and it had a whole section on How to Train Your Dragon, which is my favorite movie, and I almost flew to Melbourne for the day, which Australians do, like, all the time, just so I could go to this exhibit of How to Train Your Dragon.  I did not end up doing it because I missed my flight in California to get me to Australia, so I missed a whole day, and I did not get to go, but if I had made it, I totally would have done it, and I totally own that that this is a doofy, ridiculous thing to do, but I would have been very happy!  So I think you should go and make your pilgrimage to visit the wool!

Elyse:  I’ll see if, maybe I can get, like, FishWithSticks on board and we can, we can get a whole thing going.

Sarah:  Yeah.  I think you totally should.  One thing I do want to do next year at RT, at R, at RT, especially because it’s in Vegas – as you are as well, I am very much an introvert?

Elyse:  Yes.

Sarah:  And RT is an enormous amount of fun, but it is also a very extraverted exercise in a lot of ways?  So next year in Vegas, I want to set up a quiet room, like the Introverts Quiet Room, in the hotel.  We’ll have, dim the lights, we’ll have snacks, we’ll have music, we’ll shut the door, you can bring your knitting, you can come hang out, but it’ll be a quiet space.

Elyse:  Oh, that would be amazing.

Sarah:  Right?  And so everyone would bring their knitting and stitching, and we would have this quiet place to just hang out.  And, and I feel bad, because part of the thing about being at RT is that everyone’s together, and you’re all in the bar, and so you’re hanging out in person with all of the people you talk to online all day, which is so much fun, but there gets to be a point where I cannot handle the crowd noise of the lobby anymore.  Like, it physically feels like it’s hitting me, and I need to go hide.  That is when I would need a quiet room, be like, can we go to the Quiet Room?  I want to talk to you, but I can’t hear you, and the noise is hurting my feelings.  [Laughs]

Elyse:  No, I, I am absolutely the same way, and I have to go to different conferences and stuff for work, and I’m good at doing that for work, but it’s, it’s something that does not come naturally to me, and I have to be on, and it’s very, very exhausting, and you know, it’s interesting because I don’t think my co-workers always understand, when you’re introverted, you know, I’ll go to one of these, these conferences or a dinner or something like that, and afterwards my co-workers will be like, oh, we’re all going by the bar, or we’re going to go do this, and I’m like, well, I’m going back to my room, and they’re like, well, it’s 7:30 at night.  It’s like, you guys, like, I, I need silence now.  I cannot be around – [laughs] – I cannot be around people and be making polite conversation any longer.  I have used up my well of, of being social for the day.

Sarah:  Oh, no, I hit, when I hit that limit, it’s like, it’s like when your phone battery meter starts blinking red and you’re like, yeah, I have expired, and it’s time for me to go to bed.

Elyse:  Yep.

Sarah:  I have expired at this time, and I should no longer be around humans.

Elyse:  And I’m absolutely that person at a party that will find the person’s pets or very small children and glom onto them, because their expectations of me are fairly small, and I can just, like, make friends with the cat –

Sarah:  Yep!

Elyse:  – while holding my glass of wine, and we’re cool.

Sarah:  Yep.  And the thing is, when you’re a knitter or a stitcher, that’s something to do that’s very comforting and repetitive, but there are a lot of situations where you can’t just whip out your knitting and stand there.

Elyse:  Oh, absolutely.

Sarah:  And I wish it was more acceptable.  I would love to be able to just take cross stitch out and stand in a room with people who I’m sort of marginally interested in talking to but also exhausted to talk to?  Like, I would, I would have loved to have cross-stitched my way through the Seder on Passover, ‘cause that was, like, that was, like, thirty people.  That was a lot of people.

Elyse:  Did I tell you about my cross-stitching while on Percocet story?

Sarah:  Nooo?

Elyse:  So this summer when I had my, my ovary out, I had kind of gotten into cross-stitching, and I had bought – actually, I have, like, a shitload of patterns because I, I, I go big or go home with my hobbies.

Sarah:  Well, of course!

Elyse:  And I had bought two patterns that were, they were, like, beach chairs overlooking this beach scene, and I thought, I’m going to do that, and I’m going to hang it up somewhere.  So I was taking Percocet at the time and trying to cross-stitch, and I think my husband still has the photo of it.  I will send it to you.  I don’t know what in the hell I was doing, but clearly, counting small squares on a grid was not, not high on the list of things I was capable of –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  – and I was using, I was using bright red floss, and I showed it to him, ‘cause I had to start completely over, and he’s like, it looks like you’re summoning the devil with that.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  It’s like I’m getting chills looking at it.  It looks like some sort of weird Satanic symbol you’re making.  So the moral of the story is don’t cross-stitch or knit while on heavy pain medication.

Sarah:  Or if you do, it’s going to look awesome!

Elyse:  Right.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s episode.  I want to thank Elyse for joining me.  I hope you enjoyed our discussion of knitting, and if you have suggestions or ideas or comments or questions or you would like to become very upset that we have introduced you to these terribly addicting yarn stores, you can email us at [email protected].  We love your email, ‘cause it’s awesome.

The music this week is provided by Sassy Outwater, and you can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is called “Forgotten,” and it’s by an artist named Jason Hemmens.  It’s on sale as an MP3 at Amazon, and you can buy his album, Welcome to Reality, at Amazon or iTunes or wherever you like to buy your music.

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Aflame, a new novella in New York Times bestselling author Penelope Douglas’s Fall Away series.  This book will be on sale on April 21^st.

Future podcasts will include me, possibly also Jane, talking about romance.  Next week I have an interview for all of you to enjoy with historical and contemporary romance author Beverly Jenkins!  If you’ve never heard Beverly Jenkins talk about just about anything, it’s amazing, so you will not want to miss that episode, ‘cause she is tremendously smart and super fun.

But in the meantime, on behalf of Elyse and Jane and myself, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[smooth music]