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…
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…
