Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Take me out!

Don't call in the professionals with the little white coats on me, gentle readers, but sometimes, I imagine my knitting speaking to me. In the oh-so-inimitable words of Alex Kapranos, it sings from my lovely gray pinstriped Ann Taylor purse-cum-knitting bag: "I say don't you know, you say you don't know... I say, TAKE ME OUT!!" Just to take this anthropomorphic thing entirely over the top, I think it needs to go out now and then -- to get a little sun, take in a rugby match, enjoy a glass of pinot with my friends, watch the world pass by on a roadtrip. And I find that I'm increasingly inclined to oblige it.**

That's right, people: I may be new to this scene, but I'm a KIPer. Knitting in public. It's the new black.

The first time I K'ed-I-P (because KIPed is grammatically all wrong), I was by myself. Sitting in a favorite coffeeshop on a frigidly cold January afternoon, killing time before my dinner reservations, I pulled out the cabled scarf I was making as a gift for my sister's birthday. I can't say if it was the live music, the skinny latte I was sipping, Leigh Radford's enchanting pattern or the dusty blue Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk, but I suspect it was synergy of all these things that made for a truly lovely afternoon. No fewer than five random strangers stopped to ooh and ahh and pet the yarn. You see, I live in a community that is both remarkably cosmopolitan for its size (being a University town) and very arts-friendly. Open-minded, free-thinking people who value other people doing their own thing helps with the tolerance factor. I've read and heard a lot about the responses knitters get when they're out among the muggles, but I guess what I'm saying is that in my own city, I (very thankfully) generally don't get the strange stares or the cloyingly back-handed compliments grounded in stereotype, e.g. the whole "knitting grandmother" thing.

"I care less and less what people think..."
But you know... even if I did, I'd knit on.

Here are a few places my knitting bag has visited lately.








I'm going to Las Vegas to visit my sister in June and you better believe the knitting is going with me. It can't wait.


I finished my Noro scarf a few weeks ago. But, as I've been blogless, the wider world has yet to see its loveliness. This project was a sort of Knit-Along with my friend Tiffany (you can take a look at her work in progress here) but I promised that I'd wait till she finished hers to post full pics of mine. :) So here's a sneak peek of where I was with it on a roadtrip to Waco, Texas, last month.




Postscript

It's occurred to me that I'm so copying my darlingest dear Kathy with the whole song-lyrics-as-blog-entry-titles bit. Well it's an old habit -- both the song-title-ness and the imitating of K :) -- and, hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Consider yourself flattered, sister woman!

** Okay, you realize I'm kidding of course. My knitting doesn't really speak to me. It seems my ironic (Alanis Morrisette definition) devotion to a lyrical blog title knows no bounds. Even to the point of making me sound truly nuts.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's the collective subconscious.
Or, in my case, unconscious. Wait, wasn't that it? I don't know. Jung, man. Unless you're talking Vygotsky or Piaget, I have no use for Psychobabble. Unless you're talking about the song, and see how we've now come full-circle?

tiffelie said...

I heart Franz Ferdinand!! And I started my blog with a name of a song as well as my first post with lyrics from that song. We are soulmates my lovelies!!