Take Two

OK, I haven't posted anything in most of a year. Let's try this again. It seems approriate since it's NaPoBloMo.

Two years and two weeks ago, I took up knitting. I’d crocheted for years and really enjoyed it, but I’d never really gotten into knitting, though I’d taught myself years before. About a year before I’d discovered the difference between chap yarn and really great yarn. One Sunday morning I was at my local yarn shop, Knitting Arts (now sadly closed), picking yarn for a crocheted sweater that I had designed in my head. The knitting doctor, Gunilla, and I were the only ones there early that morning,. She was helping me pick the colors and heckling me good naturedly to learn to knit.

I told her I could, but it was slow and boring. But she wouldn’t give up and cajoled me into taking her sock class. Eventually I gave in and bought a couple of extra skeins of yarn to do a pair of socks. That turns out to have changed at least two years of my life.

[sock picture coming soon – when I find the cable for my camera]

It’s not that I really liked knitting those socks, and I probably would have quit again, but one day a woman came into the shop with the beginning of an entrelac blanket made from Rowan’s Big Wool. It was so cool, the texture was rich combined with the color. I oohed. I aahed. And when Gunilla said she could teach me, and that there was a free class that weekend, I was hooked. I took that class and it’s been hard to separate me from my needles ever since.

Gunilla has become a friend, and is now the knit doctor at a second LYS, Green Planet Yarns. She has taught me enormously, and I can now occasionally return the favor.

In two days or so my first pattern to be submitted to an on-line knitting magazine, Knotions, is going to be published. The owner of Green Planet Yarns asked me to do a sample of my scarf so she can display it in her shop. For now, a preview picture.

[Sharkey’s Crossover Scarf pic coming].

Two. It's a very good number.