Fun with Young-Uns and More Trouble for Bridget

In the midst of some rather trying knitting times, there was a nice highlight or two this week.

On Friday my work ended early so I spent some time at the yarn shop. One of the women who works there and I spent about an hour watching little Miss T., of whom I have written before. She is 4 now, and pretty much talks incessantly. She decided to build a bird house, and nothing was going to stop her, certainly not lack of proper materials. She busily cut and taped pieces of paper and some sort of plastic stuff together until she was satisfied, all the while maintaining either a constant monologue about her progress or a stream of questions for Andrea and me. We found ourselves trying to explain to her how sound waves worked, and I realized even my undergraduate and graduate work in phonology, phonetics, and audiology didn't help prepare me for the mightiness of Miss T.'s questions. But. as much as I complained, I think we enjoyed it.



What you see above are two of the slightly older crowd of young people we had at the shop on Saturday. These are members of the Vista Ridge High School (in Cedar Park, Texas) knitting and crochet club, who took over the shop for the day in a Knit-a-Thon. Mr. President here is also a member of the football team, and was hard at work on a pink gerter-stitch blanket square. Magic Fingers is one of the many members with clever nicknames on their shirts. The fronts had a big VR on them, with knitting needles jauntily piercing the initials.

Mr. President's big accomplishment of the day was spraying cheese in a can down his throat, and learning that it isn't as fun as you might think. But, at least they captured it digitally to treasure forever.


Here you see the giant inflatable boom box they blew up. It also actually works as an MP3 player. Nice touch, isn't it? The young man in black spent about a half hour blowing it up. He's sitting with the Knotty Knitter. All the kids were knitting or crocheting with one degree of success or another. Most were doing garter stitch or double crochet squares from the least expensive possible acrylic yarn, on really big aluminum needles, which looked like torture to me, but seemed fun enough to them.

I helped a couple of them improve their technique, such as the girl on the far left who had some interesting ideas. The one labeled "Jade" had found some rather pretty thick-and-thin stuff with a slight sparkle that someone donated and was making an attractive scarf from it--another girl found some fuzzy ribbon and was doing well on that. The star pupil was the boy next to Jade's head. He was "Head Knitter," and one of the founders. He was at that stage where he was a total sponge for knitting knowledge. I showed him how to do cables and he asked all sorts of really good questions about that. Then he wanted to know where to get yarn and needles of good quality like mine, so I wrote down all the resources he would need. I really liked how the club had boys and girls, a nice mix of "types," and tons of enthusiasm. A bunch of them had to leave for an overnight vigil in support of the poor little child soldiers in Africa--that was touching to me. The advisor (next to Head Knitter) was a very nice art teacher and she told me how much she has enjoyed working with such a really good group of kids.

I enjoyed it too, and hope to do a sock class for the more advanced ones, after Head Knitter teaches them to purl. I've been a bit down on teenagers and how they treat each other lately, so this positive experience perked me up a lot. I'm glad Pat could open up the shop to these kids.

Yesterday was made even more fun by a visit from Store Baby #1, Abigail. We all got to hold and coo over her, and enjoyed that at almost 6 weeks, she is more alert now.

Poor Bridget

I worked very hard on my Bridget cardigan Friday and Saturday. I worked hard on her today, too. Until something became very obvious. I do not have enough freakin' YARN!!! Gosh darn it! I am now 9 rows before the bind off on the sleeve caps, and have only enough yarn left to sew the sleeves in. After working so hard on this, even knitting an entire back and frogging it, this is so disappointing!

I looked on Ravelry and found a woman who had one skein of the right colorway. I wrote to see if she is interested in selling it. If that doesn't work, I'll call the people who make the yarn, who are here in Texas, after all. But now I have to set it aside until I can get just a few more yards! I guess I will do fingerless gloves or a headband in what I have left. That yarn is just too lovely to have sit around and not be made into something.

So, I will pout and work on finishing Fit and Float. I also hauled out my skeins of Poems yarn and will get going on the vest I have picked out for it. At least this will be a quick project, and I am fairly certain I have MORE than enough yarn for this project.

Oh, I wore that grass green pullover I made out of the slimy yarn last year or year before last. You know what? With the right black top underneath it, that piece of knitting looks mighty fine. I no longer will consider it one of my less successful efforts!