November 8, 2007

Three things

Even if I am boring...it turns out that Knit Night is always going to bring me blog fodder.

1. Remember how we had all those pregnant knitters? Here's the latest delivery. (Well, there's one more, but she was too young. Maybe next week.) Mel (the Mama on the right) brought us Liam, and it's pretty easy to tell that this is a baby cherished by knitters.

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The wee dude is just covered in knitwear. (He appears rather bored right there, but he'll get used to it.)

2. Hey...Cari? I know you were worried about your friend Anneliese and her moving to Toronto from far away and not knowing anybody. Frankly, we were worried about her too...I mean, you were sending us a non-knitter to play with. How would we relate to her? What would we do with her? What would we talk about?

Anneknits0711

We figured it out. She's fine now. No worries.

3. Also at Knit Night last night, we met Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton, in town and visiting Village Yarns. She's lovely, but gave all of us a little bit of a brain melt. She didn't have any knitting with her (shocking thing the first) and so she picked some nice yarn and some nice needles and cast on for a sock. Well I'll be darned if we didn't all turn around and see this:

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Just look at the expression on Amy's face.

She's got the whole skein just draped over her knees. It's HOW SHE KNITS. Several knitters just reeling in shock offered, nay, practically insisted that the skein be taken to the ball winder, but Cornelia declined. She doesn't wind the yarn into a ball because Cornelia thinks that the cakes of yarn that come off a ball winder are ugly. She prefers the aesthetic of a nice hank just draped on her lap. She gracefully unwinds as she goes. We were stunned.

I stared at her like an antelope had just walked into the shop.
I don't know about you, but in the life I lead, that set up there is a one way ticket to the land of crazyville. It would last about 14 seconds before I had the whole thing canked up into a big whack of maddening tangle. What happens if you take that on the bus? What happens to it in your purse? Cornelia shrugged all of this off. It works for her. Totally works. I mean, she knits, she designs, she owns a freakin' yarn shop, so obviously it's not just like she hasn't hung out with yarn enough to see the peril that she's in. I thought Denny was going to knock her down and take the skein to the ball winder by force. Rachel H. was practically sweaty on Cornelia's behalf, and the whole time she was sitting there I think I had a vein standing out on my head as I looked at that skein, just lying there. It was like waiting for a time bomb to go off.

One time, she had to go to the loo, and she just picked up the skein, re-twisted it into a hank, went away, returned and unfurled it on her lap again. Just like that. I asked her if she would do that if it were a thousand metre skein of laceweight, and that time Cornelia looked at me like I was an antelope. "Sure" she said. Just like it was the most normal thing in the world. I asked her what she would do if she was doing colourwork. What if there was two skeins?

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In that case, she puts one over each shoulder.
I asked about cats, I asked about children....she had an answer for everything. It made me twitchy as all get out. She seems pretty smart, and she' s certainly charming, but I'm a little disturbed by this.
I've been working all day on acquiring some perspective and an emotional version of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" but I can't quite shake the persistent urge to fly to Sweden, break into her house and wind all her yarn.

I'm not saying that's right, or legal. Just a persistent urge.

Posted by Stephanie at November 8, 2007 3:47 PM