Shhh….approach closely, for here in the knitters wildlife reserve (um, my house) we have spotted a young knitter away from the pack demonstrating remarkable spontaneous knitting action.

Careful now, don’t startle her. In this rare photograph the adolescent knitter is exhibiting “swatching” behavior, and is actually doing “math” to figure out her “gauge”. It is worth noting that not more than 6 minutes before this footage was shot, the mother of the herd was observed with that big vein on her forehead pulsing again following a completely futile attempt to get this same youngling to perform mathematics for the purposes of a high school education.

Here the cub casts on…this is incredible Bob….just incredible, so rarely do we see knitting in the wild without the parents intervening. It could be that the mother is unusually distracted at the moment, we did hear the young one call out to her about how to use DPNs, but the mother replied “Are you kidding me Megan? I’m writing a book…use your head!” The young seldom enjoy this push out of the nest, but mama was right…the cub has seen DPNs used virtually every day of her 14 years on the earth, and despite her protestations, (and the fact that she’s wearing a tee shirt that reads “I dress this way because it bothers you”) it turns out that she did indeed know how to knit circularly.

When we returned to the scene this morning, the young was no longer knitting, and we assumed the moment had passed. Imagine how delighted the camera crew was when we spotted this….

in her coat pocket.

(We did not shatter the moment by asking her what she was making. If she thought we liked it….she would stop.)