Knitting Group

I went to my local yarn shop yesterday because I needed a refresher on casting off and what to do with those pesky strings. I sat down with a very nice woman and after a few hours of knitting together, she invited me to her Tuesday morning knitting group.

I nervously showed up fashionably late and the group of six women made room for me at the table as I sat down with my straight-knitting (no purl stitches) scarf. They were all working on sweaters and I was the youngest one at the table by 30 years. In spite of both of these differences I felt very welcome and was even inspired to try some new stitches on my next scarf. It was the first time that I had sat down with more than one person in a social setting since I moved here and, I have to say, it felt nice.

They talked about so-and-so getting engaged to the hip (and other parts of the anatomy) replacement parts salesman, how handy it is to know him, and about one of the lady's experience with using name brand versus generic parts in a hip replacement surgery. One of the local high school's (where several of them went and all of their children - who are my age - attended) art collection was another topic. My favorite part, though, was when one of the women, we'll call her Barbara partly to respect her privacy and partly because I have forgotten her name, reported about Sally's voting decision this morning (Sally is a regular in the knitting group, but missed today). Apparently it was the first time Sally had ever not voted the same as her husband. She voted for Tony Knowles, the democratic former two-term governor, rather than Sarah Palin, the republican former mayor of Wasilla. She had a litany of reasons that she laid out for Barbara as a way to convince herself that she made the best decision. One of the reasons she gave for voting for Tony was experience. Sally cited Palin's promise to trust the legislature and surround herself with people who know what they're doing as not a good plan. Sally's reasoning was that if she hires someone to clean her house, she has to know how to do it herself in order to determine whether the housecleaner is doing a good job. Once Barbara completed her story, she made a statement about how much she loved a housewife's way of relating her life to her civic duty.

The bottom line is that I had a lovely time and they invited me to come back next week. The woman who invited me even suggested that we work on making a tea cozy for our next project so we'd be able to help each other out and talk through the pattern. You know where I'll be next Tuesday at 10.