Know what’s great? When you learn that a friend/family member/colleague or similar has decided to take up knitting (or crochet, spinning, etc…).
Why? A couple reasons.
The first is frankly probably the most important: I genuinely believe fiber and textile arts/crafts to be really fullfilling and fantastic pursuits. They involve artistry and creativity as well as engaging your mind in planning, mathematics, geometry, physics and more. And, depending on your project, it can be highly portable as it uses, at it’s core, a fairly small set of tools and doesn’t weigh much. Really, it’s a pretty great combo. Bonus: at the end, you often get something very usable, even extremely practical.
So, I love hearing somebody else is starting the journey to explore something like knitting because I sincerely believe it can be an extremely meaningful and rich journey.
But, more selfishly… it means I can go shopping. Because, let’s be honest, there’s a limited amount of yarn, roving and other fluffy related tools and accessories I need to buy for myself. So I enjoy having a list of folks I think are yarn-worthy in addition to my list of knit-worthy peeps (there is definitely some overlap).
Thus when somebody near and dear let me know that they’ve been to their first knitting class, I knew a little online shopping was coming up.
First, I decided to check out a store I haven’t been able to visit myself, but has been on my list: Neighborhood Fiber Co*. Baltimore is where I grew up and the new knitter grew up, so supporting a local dyer seemed a nice choice. I picked out three skeins which could be used separately or together: an orange, a blue, and a blue-green. They are headed to Hawaii soon, so I went for a tropical theme.
But, they don’t do much in the way of knitting supplies (totally normal for an indie dyer website). And I want to help this person get started. So my next stop was The Loopy Ewe, which I’ve ordered from before and carries various knitting supplies. I purchased: three sizes of knitting needles appropriate to the yarn, stitch markers, measuing tape, yarn needles and needle point protectors. I thought about getting a project bag, but their current stock didn’t speak to me. And I decided it was time to call it quits on buying from more places.
Hopefully they like their getting started kit and will soon be a dedicated lifelong knitter.
On my own crafting front, I’ve been making a nice bit of progress on the singles destined to be part of the 3ply brioche:
I have been taking it with me as we go on walks to spin as we stroll along and it’s starting to add up. I love watching how the colors change depending on the time of day and amount of cloud color. I can see the most variation in the colors in the softer light of dusk than in the bright sunshine of midday. This picture was taken under the shade of an umbrella at a cafe.
*They are also running special Pride Month colorways, so if you like rainbow yarns, hop on over. Even when I don’t need yarn (or not the yarn part of a companys’ charitable promotion), I learn about some great charities checking out what people are supporting. They are supporting Casa Ruby for LGTBQ people of color.