Part 2: Life in the Sweatshop

Anya had asked when she'd given me the job of knitting a Peggy whether I had the right needles. Of course I thought I did -- I have two sets of needles specifically for hats -- but after knitting swatches with each, I realized I've have to buy a third.

If you've never knit before, you might imagine most of the cost of knitting supplies is in the yarn. In fact, the yarn is a small cost compared to the price of needles. In seven months, I've amassed over a dozen sets of needles. For the Peggy I was to knit, I needed both a pair of circular needles and a set of double-points. This cost more than twenty dollars.

When I returned home with my new needles, I found two e-mails from Anya in my inbox. The first read something like this: "I talked about the price with the knitter who was in charge of production earlier this year, and the hat you're working on pays 'by piece,' and it's $26."

She'd told me to keep track of my hours, implying I'd get paid by the hour. I remembered how she'd said, "We pay our employees very fairly," then did some mental calculations. I figured that, if I took five and a half hours like she said, I'd be making $4.75 an hour. Not so good. If it took longer, I was screwed.

Still, the hat looked pretty easy, so I thought I might be able to make it faster than her estimate. All I needed was the pattern.

The pattern Anya had sent, though, was barely in English, and what I could understand was flat-out wrong. Normal knitting patterns are written in a very specific shorthand, but this was ridiculous. I immediately saw that I'd need to cast on more stitches than it told me to, and the increases and decreases in the pattern didn't correspond to the hat at all. I called Anya.

Me: "The pattern's wrong."

Anya: "Oh, really? It's the one the last knitter gave me."

Me: "It says to decrease instead of increase, tells me to cast on the wrong number of stitches, and --"

Anya: (laughing) "Well, I don't ever use patterns. I just looked at the sample and improvised, and my hat turned out better than the sample anyway. Could you maybe do that?"

I was furious. Not only had she given me an incorrect, incomplete pattern, but then she insulted me for needing one in the first place.

Me: "I'd rather have a pattern, so I don't mess up and have to redo the hat."

Anya: "I'll try calling Ellen again. But can you look at the hat and see if you can figure it out yourself?"

Me: (exasperated beyond belief) "Sure. Yeah. Thanks." Click.

Now I had a day and a half to finish this hat, and no pattern. Wonderful. I set to work, drawing out the hat as if it were a problem on a geometry test. I decided to knit the neck on my circulars, transfer about fifteen stitches to a double-pointed needle and knit the rest back and forth to form the back of the head where the face-hole would be, then knit another tube for the face on the double-points and join it to the top of the hat, which I would finish as any normal hat. If that sounds complicated, it was.

This sort of mathematical calculation is my favorite part of knitting, and as I immersed myself in it, my anger dissolved. In a way I was glad that I didn't have a pattern and could figure all this out on my own. Of course, this took an extra hour or so, not to mention the time it took to undo and redo parts of the hat to get them to look right. I didn't keep a careful record of my time as Anya had suggested, but I probably spent about fifteen hours knitting up the hat, and that was without the bill or pom-poms, which required separate patterns. With the $26-per-hat pay rate, I was making less than $2 an hour. This must be what it's like working in a sweatshop.

I also ran into a snag. When I started knitting the back of the head back and forth, I found that my stitches looked different from what I'd done knitting in the round. Stockinette stitch is the classic knit stitch, used for sweaters, socks, and everything in between, and it's made by knitting the front and purling the back. But my purls didn't look like backwards knits, and that was making the hat look funny. I attributed this to my relative lack of experience and reliance on circular needles, something I couldn't easily remedy.

I returned to Eugenia's several days late, hat in hand. I was generally proud of my Peggy, even though it was a little spotty in places. Eugenia hated it.

"Are your stitches a little loose?" she asked. "And look at those holes."

Yes, Eugenia met with me herself to examine my work, which both pleased and distressed me. She was the boss, of course, the big-name designer whose picture had been in all the big women's fashion magazines I never read. But she didn't know how to knit, and thus didn't have the vocabulary to communicate her problems. She could eyeball the hat and tell that something was wrong, but all she could say was, "Make it look like this." She had no idea how long it would take to make the changes she considered simple.

Eugenia wanted me to rework the hat, but couldn't let me keep the sample. She traded the white pom-pom Peggy for a baby blue version with a mohawk.

I looked closely at the body of the hat, which was supposedly identical. Of course it wasn't, but there was something very familiar about this pattern. It decreased in the neck, cast off stitches around the face, and …

It was the pattern Anya had sent me! I showed Eugenia the difference in the neck between the white pom-pom Peggy and the blue mohawk one. She didn't know what I was talking about, but proceeded to pull mine over her head.

"It's kind of loose in the neck, and the back is too short," she said, switching to the blue.

"Which do you like better?" I asked, excited. "They're different patterns, see?"

She looked at herself in the blue Peggy. "This one. It's a better fit." She took it off and gave it to me. "Will this one be harder to make?"

I pored over the hat, savoring all the ways it matched the pattern I'd puzzled over for so long, feeling like I'd solved a mystery. My brain flashed TWO DOLLARS AN HOUR, but I assured it I could knit a second hat in half the time.

"Actually, I think this one will be much easier." I could hear my voice, knowing full well how eager I sounded. I'd toiled all week over this hat, only to get slammed by Eugenia, and here I was begging for more. What was my problem? "Would you like me to do another one?"

I'd already bought the needles, after all.

Part 3: The job that wouldn't die
(1, 2, 3, 4)