TaylorMade: Of Etsy and the Elves by Heather Talty

Order from TaylorMade's Etsy shop today!

All hats come specially wrapped in a secret...

1.

So I'm at this party, wearing the hat I allegedly made, and things are getting weird. I've had maybe four drinks, which is totally okay because it's not like I have to knit when I get home or anything. My Etsy shop, TaylorMade, is making so much money now I don't need to stop buying drinks, maybe ever. Plus, my friends keep introducing me as an entrepreneur and a self-made millionaire (hardly...is thousand-aire a thing?), so people I don't even know keep buying me drinks and touching my hat and telling me congrats, you're so talented, this is so impressive, on and on. And all I can think is, they know, they know, they must know.

I don’t know how they know, but they keep saying things like “The stitches are so small and tight, it’s like it was done by little tiny hands,” and “I knit but I could never make so many hats quickly enough to sell them,” or the best, "Where's your factory?". I smile and nod and try to return to my friends, but they’re just buying more drinks and eventually I just take off my hat and go home without saying goodbye.

As always, when I get home I half expect to see my little helpers, maybe scaling the skeins of yarn in my giant tote as if they were mountains, or working in concert to heft the needles in their tiny hands, knit one-two-three, purl three-two-one. Really, I have no idea how the elves make the hats. I’ve never actually seen them. In the morning, though, I know I’ll find a little less yarn in my bag and a few more hats laid out on the coffee table. And, of course, they’ll all be perfect.

I know I should be grateful, but I can't help but feel like things have gotten worse since the elves started coming.

2.
Here's the short version. I learned how to knit about a year ago, picked it up at work during a charity thing my office was doing. I found I loved it right away, the feel of the yarn twisting under my fingers, the way different strands came together to make actual items actual people could wear. I started making hats, really terrible ones at first (I made one for a newborn that fits my sister's five year old great), but I got better. About two months ago, I finished one I really liked, a cloche with wooden buttons on either side. I wore it to work and a co-worker said she'd buy one and that here sister would, too. Someone said I should put it on Etsy because it would be a good way to make some extra money. Suddenly, I had 20 orders and no time to work on them.

So, I went out for a drink with a friend instead, and she made this joke:  like, maybe you can get the elves to come help you like in that story about the shoemaker. I laughed and called her ridiculous and she laughed and made me buy her another drink. When I got home, though, I laid out the yarn and my needles and went to bed a little hopeful.

And the next morning, there were 20 hats. All were made with precise stitches, no variation in the gauge. The wooden buttons were sewn perfectly to the side of the cloche, until the buttons had run out - a few hats had seashells sewn on tightly in their place. So I sent them off, collected the money in my Paypal account and waited while more and more orders poured in. There have been sort of a lot, but nothing the elves can’t handle.

Everything is working perfectly.  I just can’t stand it. I go to pick up some yarn and realize I need to leave it for the elves, and probably buy some more for them soon.  It would be wasted in my hands - whatever they make will be far more precise, more pristine, more perfect. Now that I’m peddling their products, I can’t imagine anyone wanting something I could produce. Still restless, I flip through channels, scroll Netflix, read a few pages of a book, look at Facebook on my phone again, but it isn’t the same. Every night, I’m bored all over. Every night, I think I guess I'll go out tomorrow night. I just don’t know what else to do with myself.

3.
The drinks in this place are strong. Stronger than the place I was last night. Maybe that's why I'm feeling better tonight. I like this place, with its high wood booths and low lighting. I like this crowd, a few friends from work and some people they know. I like my hat, another cloche with purple lining along the brim and a set of three plastic pearls in place of the button. I like it, even though I know I didn't make it myself.

I’m feeling really comfortable until someone mentions my Etsy shop. Then I suddenly I'm breathless, like my insides are being wrung out, wrenched tight. “I have a confession,” I announce, hearing the lilt in my voice that only comes after quite a few drinks. “I didn’t make the hats. The elves did.” My friends look at me incredulously and laugh like it’s some kind of joke, but I insist. They laugh and I insist and then I realize there is no way they'll ever really believe who made the hats. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, but slip out the door and go home instead.

Home again, I sit on the couch and stare at the yarn. I don’t want this anymore, I think, with sudden, stunning clarity. I want to make my own stuff again, perfect or not. I’m not really focused, but I pick up a handful of red yarn and start fiddling. The elves have made so many things for me -- maybe I can make something for them. The time ticks by as I work as small a stitch as possible, finishing off hats smaller than my hand. I make a few different kinds, caps and beanies and berets. Some of them have loose stitches, or little jumbles where I caught the yarn or skipped a stitch. I fix them up as best I can, and leave them laid out on the table by my yarn bag. The elves can choose what they like.

Part of me wants to stay up to give them the hats, maybe finally meet them, but I fall asleep on the couch sometime after the sun comes up. It’s weird -- my yarn bag is nearly full. The little hats are gone, and in its place is a full sized hat, a slouchy beret made of a shimmery bronze-black yarn I didn’t know I had. It nearly slips through my hands when I pick it up, but I put it on and pick up my bag. Etsy can wait - I want to try making something new, something just mine, even if it takes me awhile to get it right.  It’s time to get back to work.

Heather Talty is a speculative fiction writer from New York. Her work has been featured in Nonbinary Review and Curiosity Quills anthologies Gears of Brass and Cast No Shadows, as well as in a previous issue of Enchanted Conversation. She is the managing editor of Newtown Literary. 

Follow her on Twitter: @heathertalty

STORY Art by Amanda Bergloff

Guest Post: Fracturing Fairy Tales For Fun And Profit, By Heather Talty

Editor's Note: Fracturing fairy tales is one of the most amusing and enjoyable ways to recast the stories. Heather Talty does a terrific job of explaining fracturing in this guest post. Find out more about her on her Goodreads page. 

n some ways, fracturing a fairy tale is just like fixing a car or performing surgery (though the stakes may not be quite as high): you take some things out, put some things in, or just tweak what’s already in there. When you’re done, you’re left with something that looks and acts like the original but isn’t entirely the same.

Of course, this act of altering a traditional story has been done for centuries, by oral storytellers, collection building folklorists, and enterprising animated mice alike. But why fracture a fairy tale? Why take something that clearly works and break it apart and rebuild it with the risk of getting it wrong?

Well, for a laugh. That’s one reason.

Here’s another. Fracturing fairy tales can be a way to engage in a sort of dialogue with the story itself, and of course, with other readers. Just as a scholar might analyze a story, the writer of the fractured fairy tale might write a new one precisely to question interesting or baffling elements of the original. As a writer of fractured fairy tales, I often find myself writing stories to answer questions I have. If the princess of "The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body" knows exactly how to defeat the giant, why does she need the prince to carry out the task? Isn’t it interesting that a “true princess,” a la "The Princess and the Pea," must be very finicky, sort of like a cat?

Let’s take a look at this idea in action. In the introduction to The Rumpelstiltskin Problem (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Vivian Vande Velde writes that the book emerged out of her realization that the original tale made no sense. Why, she wondered, did the miller make such an outrageous claim about his daughter’s ability? And why did the king believe him? Why did Rumpelstiltskin need a baby, anyway? Each short story in the book is an attempt to answer one or more of these questions. Maybe Rumpelstiltskin wanted to eat the baby. Maybe the whole spin straw into gold thing was just a metaphor, and things got out of hand. Maybe the miller’s daughter was in on it the whole time. Vande Velde also recently released Cloaked in Red, a similar approach to "Little Red Riding Hood."

Gail Carson Levine, too, wrote a few books out of a desire to understand why. Her series of fractured fairy tales, The Princess Tales (Harper Collins, 1999-2002), often work to explain or flesh out fairy tales. She explains her motivations on her website in discussing her book, The Fairy’s Mistake.

It isn’t likely, she posits, that a prince, coming upon a girl “blessed” with an inconvenient habit of spitting up valuable gems, would fall in love with her. More likely, he’s in it for the gems. The Fairy’s Mistake tells the story from that point of view. Her stories often attempt to explain how characters fall in love in fairy tales, or why they decide to undertake various quests (think the Prince’s long trek through the briar patch in "Sleeping Beauty"), giving them back-stories to make more sense.

Through reading these books, and others like them, readers are exposed to both the questions the authors have about fairy tales and possible answers to those questions. But it’s always worth it to try it yourself. Take a fairy tale you love and rewrite it. Then take a step back and read over your own work. You might be surprised at what you learn about your favorite tale, and of course, yourself.