women and addiction

Happy International Women's Day !

In celebration, this work by my friend, the artist Julie Fraenkel. Its doubly appropriate since in this entry, she's the other main knitting character.

Julie & I meet early most weekday mornings to exercise. In decent weather we hike, in spring through fall we also kayak and in summer we can swim in the 'hood. In the winter we go to a gym, where we are bored to death.

Anyway, lately I've bullied encouraged Julie to pick up her needles again, after a long knitting hiatus. First she did a bear for The Mother Bear Project . Then she got the Interweave Folk Bags book. Julie's making a string bag with a tight basketweave stitch at the top and an open stitch below. She's having trouble with it, so brought her knitting to the gym the other morning to see if I could give it a go.

After working out & showering, we sat down in the locker room to knit. I don't know if this is normal in your gym, but in ours its definitely not. Strange looks, a couple comments on the pattern and the wonderful greenish yellow cotton yarn, sort of the same color as the items on the shelf in this piece Mostly the gym women stepped around us to their lockers.

She ripped back, she cast on, I taught her a different cast on , we tried both of the stitches in the pattern on different size needles. As an aside, I think there's a mistake on the basketweave gauge listed in the book. Buts its a bag, not a sweater, so no biggie. Soon we'd been sitting there for close to an hour. We were happy. We deserved the strange looks we were getting.

Then, a woman came slamming in, looked us over and shouted "You know what you knitters are? Yer all addicts!" .

I got me some shiny needles and some killer Noro, wanna split a kilo?