Knitting with Sari Silk

I sat for three quiet hours last night knitting a scarf from recycled sari silk. It wasn’t on my to-do list, wasn’t planned as a present for anyone, wasn’t practice intended to make me a more skillful knitter. I cast on and knit for the sheer pleasure of working with this yarn, of feeling its softness with my fingers and watching its unexpected colors reveal themselves in the scarf flowing from my needles.

This was the yarn that had made me a knitter again after a decade long hiatus. Discouraged because I didn’t have time to knit, I didn’t know how to knit the things I wanted to knit and my knitting didn’t meet my standards, I had given all my knitting needles, yarn and unfinished projects to Goodwill. I remember looking at the back and partly finished front of a silk vest that had sat unfinished for several years and thinking they weren’t as bad as I had thought, but into the Goodwill bag it went. Still, I loved the look of knitted garments, loved the look of yarn in the ball and one day when I happened on a new yarn shop, I wandered in and there, right by the front door, found a basket of sari silk yarn. Soft, colorful with a rich luster. I’d never seen anything like it. I bought three balls and planned to make a shawl.

From the beginning it was a difficult relationship. Even before I left the store, I was frustrated by the colors. There were no color numbers and no dye lots. The yarn comes in all the colors of saris seemingly picked at random and spun into balls. Rich jewel tones, purples, jade and ruby red, and warm autumn colors, browns, oranges and yellow green, predominate. But these are suddenly interupted by the black and orange of Halloween or the red and green of Christmas. I wanted four balls for my shawl, but after pawing unsucessfully through the basket of yarn searching for balls in the same color way, I settled for three similiarly colored balls, enough I thought for a smaller shawl.

When I began to knit I alternated between love for the colors of the yarn, the softness of its feel and exasperation at what seemed to me to be the yarn’s poor quality. It varied in thickness from a single thread to heavy worsted weight, it twisted and kinked as it came off the ball, very difficult for someone who hadn’t held a knitting needle in many years. Unrefined furry puffs of silk marred the smooth appearance of my knitting. And when I finally learned to catch all the varying textures of the yarn in my needles, all of a sudden the colors changed mid ball from rich jewel tones to the warm colors of autumn. I put it away in frustration until I found more of the yarn at another shop and after again searching for a ball in the jewel tones and finished the shawl. After much frustration I finished the shawl only to immediately discover a hole where a thin thread had broken. I mended it with a piece of wool and decided the yarn simply didn’t work.

No matter, I was knitting again. I found internet sites to teach me what I didn’t know about knitting, about tension, gauge, and stitch definition. I collected skeins of wool, organic cotton linen and hemp and made more shawls, scarves, sweaters and hats. I kept the little parts of the balls of recycled silk I had left over in a bowl, beautiful to look at. There was a quality to the yarn I could not resist. Every now and then I’d pick it up, feel it and look at it. I knit a little into a wool scarf and some into a hat. And then I decided to try it alone again. My knitting skills had improved. I felt able to handle its flaws. I started a scarf. And as I knit I understood this was a yarn without guile, its flaws were not flaws, they made the yarn what it was.

Recycled sari silk isn’t really recycled and it isn’t made from old saris. It is made in Nepal from the ends of warp threads remaining on the loom where the new sari was woven. After the sari has been cut from the loom, the threads are gathered, teased and spun by hand on drop spindles. The yarn I buy is fair trade. I am assured my money goes to women’s cooperatives where the women who work in their homes earn enough to support their families.

As I knit with this yarn I wonder about the women who spun it. I know very little about them or the distant part of the world where they work and make their home. The land of Everest, Three Cups of Tea and a Nepalese man I met some years ago who had turned his home in Katmandu into an an orphanage. I imagine these women with a quiet dignity going about their work, kneeling on the floor with the colorful silk laid out before them working their drop spindles. Sometimes my fingers touch a little bit of their lives, pieces of grass, splinters of wood, twisted into the yarn.

There is a quality to this yarn that brings to mind two very elegant elderly sisters who were my neighbors in South Caroline thirty years ago, one a widow, the other never married. They welcomed me into their apartment, furnished with dark wooden furniture with clawed feet, perhaps inherited from their parents, heavy upholestery, drapery, oil paintings and china. And while I would have set such things aside, packed them up to protect them, bringing them out only for special occasions, these were the things with which the elderly sisters were comfortable, the things making their apartment their home. A small crack in a tea cup, wear on the upholstery. These made me comfortable when they invited me in for a cup of tea and freshly baked cookie.

I imagine the women who wear the saris cut from the threads that will be spun into my yarn. These women will have chose their saris for the intracies of the patterns and rich rich colors woven into the silk. When they put on their sari they will study themselves in the mirror and apply a bit of paint to their faces, in a self conscious effort at beauty.

There is no self consciousness to this yarn as their was no self consciousness to my elderly neighbors. Still useful. Unpretentious. And beautiful.