I blame it on Beatrix Potter. Specifically, I blame the library copy of “The Tailor of Gloucester” that fell into my pudgy hands when I was five years old. That book, so far as my infantine taste was concerned, had everything. Pretty language. Pretty type. Colors so inviting I wanted to–and once did–lick them. And…
My first sock was the product of peer pressure. Everyone else was knitting socks; they felt that I, too, should be knitting socks. By way of encouragement, they began to give me skeins and balls of beautiful, expensive sock yarn. I hadn’t been knitting seriously for very long, so I didn’t have much of stash…
I had intended this month to continue the series of little knitting memoirs that began with my first scarf, then continued with my first yarn shop, and the first (and last) time I was held captive by one of my own projects. But life had other ideas. Instead of firsts, I’m thinking about lasts. I’ve…
My first visit to a yarn shop was discouraging, but not so discouraging as to keep me from knitting. I had no knitting teacher, and after commencement scattered our class to the four winds, I no longer had friends who knit. It was more than a decade before I went back to the shop in…
(In which I continue the reminiscences that began here.) At nineteen years old, I stood at the door of a yarn shop for the first time. I was alone. I had put on my best hat and coat and my good shoes. It was a short walk to the shop from my room in Lowell…
I was preparing for an upcoming teaching engagement when a file (an actual paper file–how quaint) hit the floor and the contents flew across the workroom. Most of them were what should have been in the file–class notes. But there was also a name tag, my name tag, from the first year I taught at…
It happens every year. The Thanksgiving turkey isn’t yet cold on my plate, the parade hasn’t even passed by, and here come the questions from friends-and-relations of those who knit and crochet. “What sort of holiday gifts,” they ask, “ought I to get for this delightful, but odd, person in my life? I feel it…
I’ve had a spell of time–an entire summer, really–where the Ugly really got to me. That’s not quite right. It wasn’t one Ugly, it was all the Uglies. A torrent of Uglies. A cascade of Uglies. When the Uglies rally, they form a tight circle around me and lock arms so I can’t get out….
I was prowling through an antique shop in Vermont recently, on the hunt for the perfect dollhouse piano (another story); and between a shelf full of novelty salt and pepper shakers and a pile of vintage ads for milk of magnesia was a rack stuffed with old table linens and afghans. Most agreeably disheveled, lower-end…
Recently a friend of mine who is not knitter (I know all kinds of people) asked if I would mind offering advice to a friend of hers, who is a knitter. “She just finished her first hat,” said my friend, “but I guess she’s not happy with it, and she said the woman at the…
To Read Ply the First, click here. The violent storm that had flung the young woman and her knitting bag across the moat was no quieter the next day. Driving rain pelted buds from branches and drove green shoots back into the ground. Howling wind toppled the spire on the highest turret, and blew the…
The Princess & the Purl: Ply the First There was once a prince–nice enough, if not exactly charming–who was in need of a wife. As he was both a prince (as I have said) and nice enough (as I have also said), more than a few would-be brides came to the palace to present themselves…
