Knitting for my one wild & precious body

A new collaboration is in the shop ... Kittenish Tank kits, yarn preorders & summer shopping days

This photo reminds me of Anne of Green Gables: puffed sleeves, crisp linen top and crisp knit stitches, looking out the window — perhaps to see a friend coming to visit.

I am fond of sharing my age—I am currently 54—because it makes a tiny chip in the unhelpful cultural norm that says a woman’s age is something to be hidden, reversed, and fought against.

I am also fond of talking about this season of my life, which is menopause. For some women, this season can last as long as 20 years if you include the pre-menopausal run-up, the point of menstrual cycle cessation, and the transition to a fully post-menstrual hormonal body. I find that hardly anyone talks about the longevity and impacts of menopause, aside from whispered jokes about hot flashes, and I wish we talked about it more. I wish there were more accessible information and stories about women thriving and glowing and being their beautiful authentic selves in this season of life.

Content warning: in the following essay, I talk about my body and body changes. I use neutral language.

Starting a few years before my menstrual cycles stopped (which, for me, happened at the average age of 51), my body started changing, and it continues to shift. I have curves in different places, and my overall shape is different than in my 20s and 30s. I am also warmer than usual—not just from hot flashes, which I also have, but a general overall warmer temperature. All of this has impacted my wardrobe needs and my knitting desires.

My early menopause years also intersected with really high stress hormones (thanks global pandemic), and as a result, my body shape and size changed quite a bit over what felt like a really short period of time. I found that most of my clothes and handknits didn’t fit in a way that made me feel comfortable and beautiful, which is what your clothes should always do.

Maybe because we were in a pandemic, maybe because I had so little control over anything, maybe because old trauma felt new again, I felt a sense of grief and ennui and need for novelty. And so, in summer of 2020, I rehomed every single piece of my wardrobe that didn’t fit me. I’m incredibly lucky, as everyone should be, that I could live with just a handful of clothing items and that I have the resources and ability to remake (or buy) clothing that fits my changing body. (I also like to think about the knitter who found my handknit sweaters in premium natural wool while thrifting.)

Since then, I have been slowly working on a fully handmade wardrobe, with just a minimal number of sustainably purchased items.

Here, I am wearing a new handknit item, the Kittenish Tank. I’ve styled it with two staples in my wardrobe: a handmade linen tank top, for breezy layers that cool my body, and thrifted men’s relaxed fit jeans, baggy and with a comfy boyfriend fit and hand-embroidery on the pockets.

How my knitting has changed

Learning to sew garments has been transformational for my knitting because I am intimately aware of the exact measurements of my body (and how they are changing) and I know specific numbers for specific garment features. For example, because my body is now extra warm, I like a deep enough armhole so that my clothing won’t ever touch my armpit. (I don’t like the feeling of bunched armpits, and because I sweat more than I used to, I really don’t like trying to remove armpit stains from my clothing.) I want a 9-inch armhole depth, from top of my shoulder to bottom of the armhole.

I also wear layers, because they help me adjust my personal temperature. I wear a lightweight tank top most days, maybe with a cardigan, or a vest (like the Kittenish Tank I’m wearing above), or a pullover with generous ease. All of these give me easy on-easy off adjustments if I have a hot flash or if I’m just moving around and getting warmer.

My current fit preferences have come together in a beautiful way in my most recent project—the Kittenish Tank—which I test knit for the talented Tina Tse, and for which I hand-dyed the yarn.

Let me tell you about the Kittenish Tank & how I modified it for my body

The Kittenish Tank is a special collaboration of mine with designer Tina Tse. It is a statement piece: a whimsical, joyous faux gingham tank top.

The pattern was created by Tina using the same stitch motif she created for a shawlette for my Beatrix Box series last year. It’s inspired by Beatrix Potter’s nursery story The Story of Miss Moppet where a cheeky kitten tries to trick a mouse by wearing a gingham dusting cloth. It can be worn as a tank top to bridge the seasons, or as a layering piece, as I like to wear it here in foggy San Francisco.

I made a few modifications when knitting my own Kittenish Tank, and I’d like to tell you about them!

1. I modified the gauge. I didn’t worry about getting pattern gauge, but rather got a fabric I liked and adjusted the size I knit with a handy percentage system. The pattern is written for a gauge of 24 stitches over 4 inches. But, my favorite fabric was 21 stitches over 4 inches. That means the pattern gauge is 85% smaller than my gauge. Which means I chose a pattern size that was about 85% smaller than I wanted my finished garment to be. I knit pattern size 3 (intended chest circumference of 34.5 inches) to get a finished tank that is about 39 inches. Which gives me 1-2 inches of negative ease at my full bust.

2. I made the armhole 9 inches deep. Above, you can see my armhole preferences clearly outlined against my sewn tops. I modified the pattern (which calls for a traditional 7-inches-and-a-bit armhole for my size), added extra pattern blocks, and my tank now fits all of my favorite sewn garments, which have that lovely extra deep armhole.

3. I kept the v-neck separation at the same point, for an extra deep vee that looks great with a layer underneath.

4. Because my shoulders are still narrow (my skeleton hasn’t changed with menopause), I kept decreasing my armhole to match the numbers of the size below what I was knitting (so, decreased to a size 2 at the shoulders).

These small, but important, changes help this tank fit me exactly as I want it to for this season of my life: ease around the middle, slight stretch (negative ease) at the fullest point of my bust, deep armhole that won’t touch my armpits, and narrower shoulders so that the silhouette is clearly a vest and looks fitted, not oversized.

Would you like to knit your own Kittenish Tank?

Tina released the Kittenish Tank pattern today (you can buy it in her shop), and in coordination, I am opening up my shop right now for a full week of shopping days.

• I’ve created all-sizes, one price kits. These make shopping so easy: you get enough yarn to knit any size, plus an extra pattern in case your particular size means you’ll have yarn left over, and all the notions and extras to make this project a truly joyful experience. If it’s in your budget to buy a kit, I’d love to put one of these together for you.

• My favorite baker’s dozen of colorways on Harvest Sport yarn, the yarn Tina used for this pattern. They are preorders, and will be next in my dye queue.

• More yarn and kits, all for shopping and enjoying for the next week (shop open from now until Wednesday, July 27).

A note on well-being

If you’ve been around my social media spaces for a while, you know that I’ve been more concertedly working to improve my well-being and that of my family’s, as we weather a global pandemic and the terrifying impacts of racism, white supremacy, and climate change. My shop updates and public creativity have been more limited, but my private creativity has been thriving. Creativity is solace and balm and a bottomless source of energy for me.

I am doing better, coping better, and feeling more grounded—and I hope you also are able to find a bit of solace and balm in this strange and often scary world. (Is it just me who feels like so many threads of so many scary things began to intersect and combine forces all at once? Like, I know it didn’t happen all at once, but it sure feels like it started to gain a logarithmic scale all at once.)

A phrase I keep turning over is this:

Maximum well-being with minimum consumption.

This has become the new organizing principle of my making, of products in my shop, and of life in general. More flowers, more time in nature, more knitting, more color on yarn, fewer “extras” that aren’t needed (no thank you to cosmetic samples I won’t use or kit “accessories” that don’t make my heart sing like plastic measuring tapes). One of some things is enough. A well-curated stash of yarn and project kits is enough. You are (and I am) enough, just as we are right now.

One beagle is also definitely enough. I am planning to add a new sweater to my wardrobe this fall. I’m contemplating a new Bandit cardigan, out of one of these two favorite colorways: Foxtail (the gold ochre) or Meet Me on the Hill (a moody green, which can come out of the dyepot in any of these shades, but which I will dye all at once in sister pots for a better-matched set of skeins).