“Thanks, I Made it Myself”: a queer knitting glossary

Like the slow, rhythmic stitches of a knitted garment, I have made the expression of my gender by hand. My portal was a classmate’s bedazzled jean jacket on the first day of kindergarten. In a single moment, I learned I was queer and had the capacity to create beauty. I was in love with her—in the sense that I wanted to rest my head on her shoulder during silent reading time—but even more in love with the limitless possibilities of her BeDazzler.

When I learned to knit, the summer I was ten, I simply wanted to be in proximity to that handmade beauty, that individual volcanic expression, from somewhere deep beneath the surface. I learned that the yarn and fiber and fabric, the color, the way it felt in my hand, and the weight all mattered.

We use our clothing to make our gender—and ourselves—legible. The exterior expresses (to some extent) the interior. The clothes my mother chose for me in elementary school did not seem to be capable of capturing my vocabulary. I wanted to color on them, and to take them apart and put them back together. I wanted to make wings from a tablecloth. I had to make up a new language to become visible as my true self.

Cast On: the beginning of a knitting project that creates loops on the needle that will become the first row of stitches. See also: Bind Off: the end of a knitting project that resolves the existing loops on the needle to create a finished edge.

The first time I knit something, my grandmother did the cast-on and bind-off for me. After she died, I needed YouTube to teach me the cast-ons and bind-offs that had been her gift. I could perform the knit and purl stitches, but I couldn’t begin or end the piece without her. I wanted smooth edges with enough stretch and give.

I needed to illuminate my own beginnings and endings. This is what knitting does: in a sea of uncertainty and inquiry, and (Oh, my god) so much therapy, I can point to a beginning, middle, and end. In knitting, these are the cast-on edge, the body of the piece, and the bind-off. A human life is never quite as linear, but I can show you the ways that I have settled into a life made by hand.

There is something to show for myself: a round-yoke sweater with stranded colorwork feathers that is woolly and light and lets me move with ease and lightness. I made this. If they are kind, people act suitably impressed. You made that? From raw materials into a finished piece, from (almost) nothing into something. To make my clothing is to opt out of the compulsory, to be visibly against the grain. I walk through my life pointing to my vibrant expression of being. I made this, too. This is something that is mine alone.

Colorwork: knitting with multiple colors of yarn in the same project, such as stripes. e.g.: Mosaic colorwork: a technique for working multiple colors of yarn, but working with a single color in each row, accomplished by slipping stitches of the color not in use. See also: Stranded colorwork: a technique for working multiple colors of yarn in the same row.

My gender is rarely monochromatic. The complexity of it is more like a prism held up to the light. In knitting, my true joy is watching colors play together to make patterns spring to life, to create a new picture, row by row.

That first summer she taught me to knit, my grandmother took me to a yarn store for the first time. I probably touched every ball of yarn the way only a synesthete can, smelling the color through my fingers. The way the colors melted together, the endless possibility, was a kind of gender euphoria. I didn’t need to wait for a color to be in season. The yarn did not long to be hip like ready-to-wear clothing. It did not style itself into outfits programmed to be palatable but longed to be made and worn and loved by the maker.

On cold days, I will make a cup of nettle tea and spread textile books around me: two different Japanese knitting stitch dictionaries, a book about color in India, and interior design books (for my home is also a part of my gender now). I will page through them, letting them remind me of the expansive possibility in my queerness. On the days that my gender is seasonal affective disorder, a gray sludge permeates my mind and being. My knitting reminds me of something more vibrant than gray sludge. Something that offers comfort, joy, laughter, nourishment—like my queerness.

After I gave birth to my son, none of my clothes fit me. I am the same weight as before, but my geometry is entirely different: my hips are in a different place, my ribs have relocated, my tits reside at a different latitude. If my clothes cannot accommodate my life as a part-time train conductor and architect of magnetic tiles—and full-time purveyor of snuggles—it’s a nonstarter. But there is a different fit issue as well.

The way colors would appear each season sparked nothing but aversion in me: the way someone in a corporate lab could hold power over how I would present myself to the world, could manipulate a trend at the expense of my vibrancy. I am not interested in the color of the season, but in colors that melt into one another. I do not want to be splashy, bright, patterned; I am no longer the glittering city of my youth. I yearn for moss greens and caramel-sauce browns and bright halos of chambray or mint or lilac. I want the colors that smell like the richness of soil and sound bright as bells.

As I now reside in motherhood, I yearn to be the desert at dawn and the jagged mountains that strut across the horizon like the teeth of a saw. My gender is a Joshua Tree, leaves like spires that split the sky. And on cool mornings, I pull my long, wool sleeves over my hands to cradle my cup of coffee. There is a permission in queerness.

Construction: the technical methods applied for creating a finished garment or piece. e.g.: In the round: knitting the front of the work without turning to the “wrong” side of the work, creating a round or cylindrical shape for hats, sleeves, socks, etc.

The needles dance with the yarn: sometimes light and airy, sometimes dense and close like a secret. I am a mere facilitator. Knitting in the round (to make a hat, for instance) is not a circle, but a spiral. Gender does the same thing, lapping back on itself while springing forward. Queerness never does the same thing the same way twice.

When my son was born, my body was a stranger. Nothing fit—figuratively or literally. I found myself copy–pasting my style, my self-expression, like a meme or a bad photocopy. I heard, This is what every mom is wearing this season. The maternal archetype to which I was supposed to aspire seemed strange: consumer, follower, Target-wandering trend-swallower. But I do not need to wait for anyone anywhere to decide to make a dress that makes me feel like a thunderstorm or a pair of pants that are built for the day in April that we put in the tomato starts.

I baby my garments: soaking them in wool wash, gingerly laying them flat to dry, folding my sweaters neatly in a cedar drawer. In bed before sleep, I darn the worn elbow of a shirt and the pinholes in a store-bought merino camisole. I carefully comb the pills from my clothing, forming a cloud of discarded fiber on my bedside table. It is painstaking, time-consuming. It is a kind of preening, maybe. My clothing is ostentatiously loved and preserved. This is also my gender: an old-growth forest. It is a rich ecosystem that takes time and energy and decomposition and fire.

When I gave birth and for those first years felt invisible, I wanted to scream. I am a maker. Look at the miracle I made with my body! What else could you call him if you looked into the galactic brilliance of his face? A person who could not have otherwise existed, had I not made him. It is humbling to make your favorite person.

My body made a miracle from nothing but blood and longing, knitting together feet and a liver and his shining face from the tiniest raw ingredients. In early motherhood, I spiraled back on myself, seeing my footprints from a new perspective. I remember what it was like to become a person. It was decades ago, and yet it feels immediate. Each year, I mark my son’s height on a door frame and know I will never carry the smaller versions of my child again. There is only forward.

Gender requires certain accommodations, and knitting is happy to offer them. Even the patterns for knitting and sewing lend themselves to interpretation. A longer sleeve, a deeper neck, gentler waist shaping. I want a deeper yoke, more positive ease, sometimes a denser gauge. I want bracelet sleeves that display my stainless-steel watch, a hulking thing with blue hands that makes me feel strong and useful. Sometimes, a cropped length to graze the top of wide leg trousers. Others, luxuriously long, covering my hips. Rarely anything in between.

Knitting my own garments allows me to aim for something to fit my architecture. If I want to take up more space, to bring more fabric or drama to the moment, all I have to do is keep knitting, to keep making something tangible from the raw materials I’ve gathered. All I need is the drive to use my hands for something generative.

My goal is to never again be a stranger to myself. I will never again wear the too-small sweater to prove that I am little, and therefore palatable. I will wear the one that has kept me amply warm at protests outside of oil refineries before daylight. I am Hecate and Hermes. I am the coyote I once saw in Santa Barbara, and the hummingbird that lives outside my dining room window and the elk in the Sawtooth Mountains.

Drape: the way a fabric hangs and moves, but more specifically with knitting, it’s the way the stitches sit and move next to each other. Refer also to: Swatch.

Generally speaking (but not universally), larger needles are used with thicker yarn, and smaller needles are used with lighter yarn. But sometimes we combine these in new ways to create our desired fabric: one more like gossamer or one more like armor.

Store-bought clothes, on the other hand, beg to be fussed with. The buttons are always sewn too loose. The fit requires tugging at necklines or hoisting sleeves into shape. I try to make them last. Refashioning them and repairing them, until they are dust. But they will never be my creations until they’ve fallen apart entirely and allowed my hands to put them back together. My wardrobe is like the ship of Theseus.

But homemade clothes yearn in a different love language: to become a part of the daily life of their maker, to experience the world through their eyes, and to feel the warm proximity of the body that made it. A knitted sweater molds to the body: some warm organism that becomes a part of us, as we were part of its creation.

Ease: the difference between the finished garment measurements and your body’s measurements. See also: Positive ease: positive ease offers extra room inside the garment for your body to move or to layer underneath. The garment circumference is larger than your body circumference. See also: Negative ease: negative ease offers less room for a tighter, body-hugging fit. The garment circumference is smaller than your body circumference.

In winter, I slide in two directions. First: tough-looking boots and giant worsted-weight sweaters with at least ten inches of positive ease. A hardy fisherman of a gender. Second, but no less worthy: tiny cropped hand-knit sweaters (with little to no positive ease, with worn-down clogs and worn-over goddess-like flowy dresses). A cozy swamp witch of a gender. Both options have their benefits: for freedom of movement, to wear subversion like armor. The archetype of each outfit points to a part of myself like a child’s finger reaches for a star.

My gender is thrifted and homemade and rough around the edges. It is a pie that needs to cool before we cut into it. It is the swat on the back of your hand. Just wait. It says.

Fit: How the measurements of the finished garment exist in relationship to the human wearing it, and their unique measurements. See also: Drape.

Fit has to do with drape and ease and geometry and composition. My gender is movement and fresh air and getting rumpled sitting on the wood chips at the playground and the splatter of dinner on the stove. It is kinetic.

My criteria for a garment are rigorous. Beauty, utility, and lived reality commingle with archetype and myth-making.

My gender is anarchist; Frog and Toad–core; mother; forest-witch poet; eighth grade, queer art teacher (smeared with paint instead of makeup); cat wrangler; ski bum.

I spend my days working from home and mothering my child and making dinner and playing jazz on the Bluetooth speaker and returning books to the library. My clothes are an act of reverence for how my life is, today, as it is. I am not longing for a coastal grandmother's cream-colored home, or a wardrobe I will never be able to keep clean. I want a sweater that feels like home no matter where I go. I show up to train activists in blockades the same way I got dressed in the morning to take my child to a playdate. Which is to say, in a giant handknit shawl which has been armor and napkin and warmth on any given day.

Gauge: the number of stitches that fit into rows or rounds per inch, measured by the number of stitches horizontally and the number of rows vertically. See also: Tension: how tightly or loosely one holds the yarn, wraps the needles and/or pulls the working yarn to resolve the stitch, which affects the gauge of the finished fabric.

I have not always been a maker. For too long, I chose ease over autonomy. I outsourced my aesthetic to the fashion industry, to Vogue, to television, to influencers, to my peers. There was a tension: a longing to reach a shore on which I would feel at home in my clothes. And then, in my thirties, I began making garments in earnest.

At first, they were not for me. The first sweater I knit was for my son. But after that, I was hooked on the possibilities of the sweater I could make to fit every part of me. These sweaters could fit not just my newly rearranged body, but the parts of my soul that always nervously tugged at my sleeves and hem.

My gender used to be poor mimicry, a collage of impractical, beautiful things. I wondered what was wrong with me that I couldn’t keep a shirt crisp and white or that I never ended up wearing those dozens of pairs of heels. I couldn’t figure out why such beautiful things felt so wrong on my body. Mimicry can be useful when you have only ever understood what you do not want, and begin to break free of what constrains you.

My closet in high school and college, full to bursting, was a mold into which I would pour myself, hardening into someone else. Fretting over outfits based on who might see me, the setting, the weather, the mood, the audience. First: This is how girls dress. Then: This is how queer people look. All of it felt like a costume or a uniform, the reigning principle was the same: This is what you do. It was second-guessing and devoid of play. It was unironic. It was try-hard and embarrassing and an abdication of the power and autonomy that is my birthright.

A hand-knit sweater hangs a certain way. Its gauge is intentional, its tension human and sometimes imperfect. It doesn’t grab under the armpits or pucker after rolling around on the floor with a child. It is of me, not a reflection of what I’ve tried to imitate.

Lace: holes in a piece of knitted fabric, arranged in a pattern or design, often created with an increase stitch, by looping the yarn over the needle (a yarn over).

This is where the light gets in. This is how we make space. This is how we intentionally create glimmers of the skin underneath the thing, to fashion a pattern spreading like leaves over our shoulders. We create openings for ourselves: to explode the denseness and offer ourselves to the wind and the changing climate.

Lace is drama and drape.

Lace is delicate, but it adds life and texture and buoyancy. Fragility is the price we pay.

Repeat: a knitting instruction that describes a pattern of stitches that are to be replicated a set number of times (or for a set number of inches of knitted fabric).

Do I repeat myself? My gender is a cat’s paw twitching as she sleeps in a sunbeam. My gender and queerness are wind. They are feral and in love with the sky. Sometimes, I need to unravel the piece: to pick up something I missed or repair my mistakes, the clicking of the needles rocks me like a lullaby. The pattern of stitches gives my mind a place to settle itself.

Ribbing: a textured vertical stripe stitch pattern created by alternating knit and purl stitches in the same row. See also: Brioche: a distinctive knitted ribbing technique recognizable by its squishy, doughy texture.

The knits and purls in quick succession open themselves wide. The fabric stretches generously to accommodate all of the subversive ways I want to exist. Around the hips, the wrists, the collar, all the delicate places where my bones yearn to assert themselves.

Shaping: how the garment’s geometry exists in three dimensions. e.g.: Increase: to add one or more stitches in a single row; Decrease: to subtract one or more stitches in a single row.

Something from nothing. A new stitch where none was before. One stitch becomes two. Three stitches huddle into one.

Some people talk about coming out as a destination. For me, it was more like polishing sea glass into a smooth talisman.

One Christmas, home from California shortly after college, I came out to my mom while we were waiting for our drinks at a strip mall Starbucks on Rockville Pike.

“Mom, I need you to know that I’m queer,” I said.

Her reply was curt, embarrassed. “No, you’re not, and don’t use that word. That’s a slur.”

There’s not a whole lot of space for rebuttal in a response like. There was no way to soften a rejection like that except to knit my own shape of being. I never used the phrase “gender-expansive” or “non-binary,” especially after “queer” was so roundly dismissed. For some friends, I never “came out.” I was always out.

But what I lacked in affirmation in that moment, I made up for later with sweaters that were euphoric in their daring shapes and allowed me to be courageously myself within their safe cocoons. To make the garments fit, we need addition and subtraction.

Steeking: a shortcut used to knit garments such as sweaters in the round without interruption for openings or sleeves until the end. After completing a tube, a straight line is cut along the center of a column of stitches in order to make room for an opening or place to attach another piece.

Steeking is the holy grail for many knitters.

You knit the whole thing: every precious stitch, every tedious row.

And then. You cut it open—can you imagine? To make something even more beautiful.

Which is what I did. I knit my whole self from scratch with both hands and then split it right down the center, like cracking open ribs to repair a broken heart.

Swatch: a rectangular piece of fabric knit prior to starting a project as a test.

I have a basket of swatches that, together, form a history. The sweater I knit for my child on the trip to Lake Tahoe, the silky magenta yarn I bought myself for my birthday one year, the special hand spun skein from a tiny shop in the mountains. Each swatch is an artifact of how I have learned to make a gender. Every scrap of a swatch is evidence of what I have made and from what. Of where I have been and who I have become. Knit your swatch as you mean to knit your garment: you want an accurate understanding of where you are going before you commit to the whole thing.

The first thing I ever knit was a tiny scrap of a blanket for a stuffed animal, something to hold against my face as I fell asleep. It is not what I would choose for myself today (space-dyed acrylic), but I can see where my younger self was longing to go: toward color, toward joy, toward self-determination.

Yarn: the spun fiber out of which we knit. e.g. Worsted spun yarn: feel smooth and dense to the touch, they tend to drape well and be much more lustrous. They contain less air and may have a sheen to them. Woolen spun yarn: contains lots of air, is light, fluffy, and will often have small ends of fiber poking out of the yarn structure.

One of my most worn and most euphoric sweaters is living on borrowed time. She is made of a cashmere-merino-silk blend that I knit together with a silk-suri alpaca blend. She is light like a cloud, warm like a woodburning stove, dramatic as the storm over the sea on the horizon.

(I do not need the reminder: all of it is impermanent.)

Yarns that contain more air are warmer but more fragile. Yarns that contain less air are not quite as warm, but sturdier and longer lasting. My gender loves those airy, scratchy wooly-wools. The ones that look spun by hand, with bits of twig and hay among the sheep. Some glow: a halo around a saint.

My gender knows that a sweater is an ecosystem: this is where the rain fell and the grass plumped itself against the sky and the sheep nursed their babies and called to each other from across the creek.