My local world has just opened up! Hermetaceous moi had the distinct pleasure yesterday of joining Ann Shayne and company for their monthly knit together at the Nashville Public Library. The group meets in a large, well lit room in a far corner of the library where we could be loud and even eat! Everyone brought knitting of course and there was loads of cool stuff. Margot had started a log cabin blanket out of vibrant reds, oranges and pinks. Something happened in the progress of the piece and it puckered into....A BAG! The most awesome hobo bag. Wow. Then someone brought a tunisian gauntlet in progress. I can remember her name because I couldn't take my eyes off her knitting. The three dimensional slip stitch pattern looked like little flames flickering in a deep weblike grotto of black alpaca. GOT to try this. She knit it on zero needles ...we decided to call them oooooooooooos as in oooo scary.
Ann had brought a load of fun yarns to raffle off. Many went home with new stuff to try, including the newest knitter who had just learned Saturday..and moi, who am now the proud owner of a cool skein of Lorna’s Laces Swirl Chunky in Sherbet. A delightful young woman sat next to me an announced she was my husband's distant cousin Francie. Turns out that Francie was the artisan of my favorite stitch markers. A couple years ago I'd bought two of Francie's sets of fimo markers at Yarn Company in Cookeville, Tn, a cool and ever growing shop co-owned by our cousin Ruth Rhea, her friends Diane and Cynthia . One of these sets I always keep at hand...black and white milifiori style...easily my favorite stitch markers. So this was a great meeting. Also got to meet Meredith, owner of the Knaughty Knitter in Murfreesboro who carries not only yarn but FIBER as well and a whole lot of other things. (This marvelous shop had escaped me until I heard about if from Murfreesboroan Jan, who traveled all the way to New Hampshire from Tennessee to take my Harrisville class.) Meredith had the funnest felted bag, complete with some crazy handspun detail that absolutely made the piece.
Last but not least, Meredith's friend Anne spoke to the group of a bad pattern experience she'd had recently. She said she'd always been a pattern knitter (and I"m thinking, hmmm, maybe she could use my book). She'd knit a sweater from a pattern only to find that the pattern had been misprinted. All the while she was knitting what she thought was a girl's size 6, she was knitting an adult woman's medium! With cables no less. So she said her friend showed her a great book that made it so easy for her to alter her pattern and reknit it in the girls' size. She went on and on about this book, calling it THE book. I'm crocheting away thinking, hmm…did someone else write a book like mine? Then she said that that book was MY book. And she just beamed at me. I got all misty. We all cheered. A new thinking knitter! And they said it couldn't be done. LOVE IT. So I asked her more about how she used my book to solve her prob. She said she just read the chapter on the basic sweater, glanced around at the other variations, then went for it. Reading TSKS she found she didn't have to make all her decisions at once, but could manage them in stages as she worked and this was most helpful of all. Great feedback.
