The Slow-Cooked Sentence

Purls of poetry

Rachael Conlin Levy

A snipped summation
Of summer’s cessation:
A sweater knitted.
Hurray, it fitted!
Timed to the temp’s recalibration.

Purls of poetryNear completion three years later.



11 responses to “Purls of poetry”

  1. Linda says:

    Oh, it is lovely…as is your poem. The sweater is your own design? I’m so impressed. Three years is a short time to complete a work of art. I know.

  2. Rachael says:

    I followed Elizabeth Zimmermann’s instructions for creating a custom sweater, and at the urging of my friend Heather, I added a cable. It fits exactly how I wanted it to fit — not too snug, a little long in the sleeves. It will be perfect for the damp days ahead.

  3. kyndale says:

    That’s funny. I’m finally finishing up my sweater! It’s been a long, long time since I started this thing! I just have to finish my sleeves, then done!

  4. A sweater! Bravo! I’m a little jealous. I started one, once. It just wasn’t working out. I wasn’t understanding the pattern. Perhaps I need to read Elizabeth Zimmerman.

  5. Rachael says:

    Zimmermann’s humor and wit shine in her book “Knitting w/o Tears.”

  6. Andrea says:

    Beautiful! Beautiful sweater, beautiful poem, beautiful notebook pages–I love how you combine lists and sweater notes and personal thoughts and doodles in one page. I tend to compartmentalize notebooks–this one for projects, that one for thoughts, scraps of paper (easily lost) for lists. This way, you have a complete picture of your days.

  7. Emily B says:

    Sweet, sweet poem. Captured something exactly right about how I’m feeling this early September eve.

  8. Beth says:

    Your sweater is beautiful, Rachael. Bravo!
    Once I wandered into a yarn shop on NYC’s upper west side- Knitty City, (which has the nicest people, by the way). The shop owner sold me on Zimmerman’s book when she said that Knitting Without Tears was what liberated her from knitting patterns and gave her the courage to stretch into her own designs.
    Can’t wait to see what you come up with next!

  9. Rachael says:

    Thank you, Beth. Knitty City sounds lovely. As for my next project, I think it will be something a little more manageable. By the end, I was hauling that sweater around in a backpack, it was so bulky!

  10. Rachael says:

    Emily, this is my third autumn in the northwest, and I am surprised at how quickly summer departs. In two short weeks, the window fans have been stored in the garage and we were reaching for the comforters.

  11. Rachael says:

    Andrea, our notebooks are a peek into our brains, aren’t they? Unfiltered and raw.

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