back in the day...

The other day I was chatting with favourite grandson Nate – we were talking about his family going to Edmonton for the March break, next week. I told him the last time I was in Edmonton was like 2003, maybe, and I went there to be on a TV show. I gave him a very quick snippet, said that I was pretty sure it was on YouTube. Before I knew it, he had it dialed up on his screen! He was thought it was pretty cool that his Grama was on YouTube! Wow, a blast from the past! I figured, what the hay, may as well tell you too!

Wa-ay back, we’re talking 1996, pre-Knitwords magazine. I made this gold and white baseball jacket to go with my pair of high-top sneakers and it made the cover of Canada’s Fashion Machine. I used Linda MacPhee’s Crazy Jacket pattern, knit up a pile of fabrics in various stitch patterns using ‘Starlight’, a gold fingering weight hand knitting yarn and white Yeoman’s Cannelé, cut’n’sewed them into this jacket and sent it off to CFM, along with my shoes.

A few years later, my friend Vickie sent the magazine to Linda MacPhee who was doing this TV show about sewing – I think it was airing on PBS at the time. Anyway, Linda called me and invited me to Edmonton to be on the show. I went, thinking it was a good opportunity to get some airtime for knitting machines - she had promised me we could show a machine on the program. Packed up my trunk show and an LK150 and flew off to Edmonton. Went to the TV studio, had my make-up done and chatted briefly with Linda. She said we’d do a little run-through, get the feel of things and then do it for real. I said a couple of things that sounded totally dumb in my ears, said to myself, no worries, we’re gonna do it again and next thing I know she’s saying, that’s all the time we have! See ya later! Knitting machine still in the case! Here’s the link, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=linda+macphee+workshop+Mary+Anne+Oger  - it was season 1 episode 3 in case you’re interested, my part starts at about 8 minutes in.

I wanted to show more and had prepared a new cut’n’sew project, Faded Glory – later featured in Knitwords #29, Summer ’04, which is on the Knitwords back issues cd http://www.knitwords.com/previous.html as an unadvertised extra…

I did get to the mall…