Friday, February 25, 2011

The em word...

It happened again!! I was in the grocery store yesterday, going over to the  fruit and veggie section - there was a log-jam of people trying to get by this old gal who thought she was the only person in the store. The lady behind her, coming toward me, was rolling her eyes and making weird faces at me - I thought she was just expressing her exasperation at being held up. Amused, I stepped aside to let the old gal by and stayed there to let this lady go - she abandons her cart in the middle and comes over to me and grabs me!! I was shocked - she started blabbering about beautiful colours and sock yarn and as I got over being accosted, I realized she was a hand knitter who was attracted by my sock yarn scarf - you may remember, back in No 46 of KNITWORDS, Ev McNabb had made the ‘Two Left Feet’ scarf using leftover self-patterning sock yarns. Ev’s was done on the Passap and I thought it was cute, a real novelty and I liked the fact it had a lot of teaching techniques and I did have a ton of leftovers myself so I made my own version and wrote the pattern for the Japanese machines. I did wear it in the magazine - Lindsay and I modelled them together - at the time, it looked okay with a jean jacket, for the magazine, and like I said, it was a novelty item. Afterward, I did put the scarf on a few times to wear it in cold weather, because it is actually nice and warm, but it was a little too out-there for me and I couldn’t go out in regular public with it. Since then, I revamped my scarf, cut out the heel and toe, and grafted it back together to make it just plain and straight -and I have worn it quite a bit - it’s still long enough to fold in half and draw both ends through the loop on one side.
So, anyway, here I am in Safeways and this woman is acting like I’m Nicki Epstein or whoever - she’s saying how she’s used that stuff for socks but hadn’t thought of making a scarf and she’s yanking at it and going on about all the different colourways and then she says, that must have taken you ages to knit and, without thinking, I said oh no not really I used a machine. You’d think I said the ef word - she dropped her hands, turned, went back to her cart and dashed off. I felt like I should have been ashamed of myself...

4 comments:

Lynne said...

Sorry you were accosted. :) Love the scarf. I'll have to see if my guild has this issue.

Anonymous said...

You can still buy that issue:

http://www.knitwords.com/bookstore.html

Petra said...

Lol! That happens to me all the time! I'm actually ashamed of myself: I mk a Dale of Norway "Polar Bear" jacket that has been languishing in a box for several years due to my inability to sew in a zipper. I took it to Madrona last week-Anne Berk was teaching a zipper installation class, and I was resolved to finish it. It got a LOT of attention, and lots of compliments on the regularity of the stitches, and the perfection of the color work. I just smiled, nodded, accepted the compliments and said thank you. I did assuage my guilty conscience a bit though; I took my LK 150 down on Saturday to just set up and knit. I wrote about it here:http://sweaterhagslair.blogspot.com/2011/02/madrona-2011.html

TracyKM said...

When someone has a reaction like that, it's not about YOU :) She probably felt embarassed about assuming it was handknit and just didn't know what to say. It's a great idea for a scarf.