January 17, 2012

vogue, vogue, vogue, vogue

Vogue Knitting Live was, well it was delicious, wasn't it? Spending half the day wandering through yarn booth after yarn booth, familiar yarns, unfamiliar yarns (Possum yarn. Yes. Possum. And yes, I bought some, how could I not?) Crazy hexagonal needles, giant crochet hooks and even bigger knitting needles to work yarn thicker than my thumb, seeing The Crochet Dude swarmed by admiring ladies, finding a booth where the yarn is named after the sheep whose wool it's made from.
Or to laugh, belly laugh, at the Snowmen vs. Gnomes art exhibit. All done in teeny tiny knitting.
Don't tell the gnomes, but I think the snowmen have the advantage there.
And then spending the other half listening to a goddess of knitting, the protege of Elizabeth Zimmerman's own daughter swear up a storm while at the same time casting off pearls of wisdom I wouldn't have learned from a lifetime of trial and error. It was that kind of day. If your not a knitter, I give you full leave to roll your eyes and be bored by the though, if you are a knitter then, well, you understand.
I've often thought that, for such a social person, and I am a social (ahem, chatty) person, it's strange that my hobbies tend to be very solitary. I'm not a team sports person. I don't really love parties unless they are with my closest friends, I don't like to go clubbing or even venture into crowds of people that I don't already know. I like to read and write and knit and bake and am generally a great big homebody. This means that, unless something drags me out, I tend to get into the habit of being on my own (with my family, of course). And while I love "hunkering down", I can get a little down when I have too much alone time.

Knitting has, unexpectedly, provided a social outlet for me. I go out to knit. I hang out with knitters. It's my team sport, except instead of numbered jerseys and strange mascots and ESPN, we have different yarn blends, sheep and Ravelry. I realized, not long ago, that I have progressed from someone who knits to a Knitter with a capital K. It may seem like a strange distinction, but trust me, there's a difference. This realization came, I should add, when I found myself trying to stuff my yarn swift, five projects and ten extra skeins of yarn into our suitcase to take to my parents house. Because what if I finished all four projects and had to start a new one and there was no ball winder in the whole state of Missouri? That would be tragic! I did come to my senses and only brought two, ok three, knitting projects with me in the end.
So it's no wonder that spending the day with a swarm of like minded ladies (and a few guys) had me all in a dither. This, by the way, was not the best shirt I saw, but it was close. The best was on a man who was very gallantly escorting his wife (or perhaps he was there to restrain her from buying up the whole marketplace) I only saw him for a moment and didn't get a chance to take a picture, but the back of his shirts read "I work so that she can crochet." Which, you know, is probably pretty true. True love that.