Yarn stores and such

So here's the thing, sometimes I get bored. I know I know, shocking, right? Anyway, when I get bored I knit. Well, usually I knit just in general. But when I'm bored I do it more. When I first moved to Texas, I was bored a lot. So I taught my step-siblings to knit. All three of them. The oldest boy and the girl got bored and quit pretty soon, but the 9 year old boy took a real shining to it. I had assumed he'd get bored soonish, so I had just given him a cheap red acrylic I had on hand. Well, he kept at it. Every time he was here since the first day he just kept on at it. I finally took him to the LYS. Primarily because once he found out it existed, he begged for a week. He had a great time. There were a few moments in time where I probably could have traded him for a nice sweater. I was sorely tempted.

He was actually the only child I saw there who was actually knitting. There was another little boy who was picking out yarn for a hat, but my step-brother was the only one who was actually sitting and knitting and looking at patterns he could make. He also helped me pick out yarn for my mother's birthday present. So I came up with a pretty cool scarf pattern I'll be posting as soon as my camera is working again. It's a scarf, because my mother actually went to Denver last week and didn't bring any winter clothes at all. She's brilliant.

Knitting in public

Alright, I'm going to come out here as being a public knitter. I knit in public. At the doctor's office, in line at the bank, in the middle of the grocery store, I knit wherever and whenever. I banged out a huge stripe on the Doctor Who Scarf in the middle of the new Batman movie. Now, I know a lot of people don't KIP because they get worried people will stare. I'm here to tell you that people DO stare. But usually, they ask you what you're making. Occasionally, someone will ask you if that's crochet (yeah, I don't know. I guess they pick the more obscure term because they think it will make them sound smarter?). Once in a waiting room I had a woman come across and sit next to me to watch what I was doing. In general, though, most people don't seem to notice. There are starers but if you make eye contact they'll either ask a question or stop staring for awhile. My former GP used to tell me stories about friends who knit whenever I'd come in.

I think it's odd that my experiences with the noble act of public knitting vary so far from the accounts I've read online and in books about knitting. In the book Stitch n Bitch (excellent and you should read it right now) the author says she's stared at like she was "churning butter on the midtown bus." The Yarn Harlot had a woman insist she was crocheting and after being corrected the woman insisted she knew the difference. I wonder if perhaps the fact that until recently I lived in a small conservative town (I have recently moved to another small conservative town but I digress). I do wonder why it might be and if knitting's exposure has really been increased so much in recent years or what. Maybe when I'm less tired I'll really examine that.

Bad Dreams

So I had a nightmare last night that woke me up at 2 am and kept me awake until 10. The nightmare? Terminators were coming to kill me and I had to get to my car and escape but I kept going back in the house to get my yarn and I didn't make it out before he showed up to kill me.

That really says something about me as a person, but I'd much rather think about making socks than try to figure out when I became the kind of person who has dreams where they die because of all their knitting crap.