At Knit's End Read Online Free PDF Page B

have room left in my suitcase to bring back souvenir yarn purchases. Then I met a brilliant woman who was shopping wholeheartedly at a sheep and wool festival, and I kidded her about needing to buy another suitcase to get it all home. “No way,” she said. “Tomorrow before I get on the plane I’m going to mail it all to myself.”
    Respect your fellow travelers. They have much to teach you.
    Â 
    They’re here for a long, long time.
They’ll have to make the best of things,
it’s an uphill climb.
    â€” S HERWOOD S CHWARTZ
AND G EORGE W YLE ,
“Ballad of Gilligan’s Island”
    I magine this: You are shipwrecked on an island with only the knitting that you had with you on the boat.
    When you are done knitting it, and have nothing more to knit, do you unravel the work and start again, just to have something to knit? If so, you are a process knitter. You knit for the pleasure of knitting.
    If you imagine that, upon finishing, you put on the sweater and go look for wild grasses that you could knit into a tent or a hammock, you are a product knitter. You knit for the pleasure of the finished item.
    I will respect my type and pack for boat trips accordingly, because you never know.
    Â 
    Just say no to drugs.
    â€” N ANCY R EAGAN
    N orth America spends billions of dollars each year giving us the message that some drugs are a slippery slope. One taste of a seemingly harmless substance can lead to wrack and ruin for some people. Yet, no one ever tells a knitter that one taste of the luxury fiber qiviut can lead to an unreasonable desire to stalk the wild musk ox under the Arctic moon, trying to get just a little bit more.
    I will be careful to limit my exposure to exotic and fabulous fibers. It’s a slippery slope.
    Â 
    Your best teacher is your last mistake.
    â€” R ALPH N ADER
    I cannot count the number of times that after using the “long-tail” method to cast on, I have picked up the tail and begun knitting with it instead of the working yarn. Luckily, this is a mistake that you realize pretty quickly. Once, however, after finishing one ball of yarn and intending to begin another, I very, very carefully spliced the working yarn to the long tail. You don’t forget that as quickly.
    I will remember, while I am undoing my mistake, that the ability to make a really sturdy splice is a double-edged sword.
    Â 
    People seem to enjoy things more
when they know a lot of other people
have been left out of the pleasure.
    â€” R USSELL B AKER
    A t my favorite yarn shop there was the best yarn ever. It was soft, it was cheap, and it moved through a range of colors in each skein, providing me with endless entertainment. I made a shawl from it, and the shawl became one of my favorites. I was very proud of it, but I showed it to no other knitters. The yarn had been discontinued and I couldn’t afford to buy it all, but I knew that if my knitting friends discovered it, they would buy it and there would be less left for me. I purchased the remaining stock over the course of a few months, then showed off my shawl. I’m not proud of what I did, but the important thing is that I got all the yarn.
    I will strive to be a more generous person, but I might not start with this yarn.
    Â 
    I have noticed that the people who
are late are often so much jollier than the people
who have to wait for them.
    â€” E.V. L UCAS
    I f the world were run by knitters, then it would be laid out with bars and libraries next to yarn shops so that your mate would be happy to pop next door and wait for you.
    Until knitters run the world, I will accept that asking my mate to drive me to the yarn shop might not be to my advantage.
    Â 
    You know you
knit too much when …
    You discover that the
airline you booked your
flight with does not allow
knitting needles on board
and you seriously consider
changing carriers, because
you don’t know whether
you can sit for seven hours
without