One of the challenges of owning a small business is explaining to your friends and family exactly what it is that you do. Once they really understand that, you then want them engaged in what you do. If I owned a clothing shop, I would hope that my friends and family shopped with me. Since I own a yarn shop, I am constantly trying to get my friends and family to learn to knit. I have not been super successful at this. Until recently…
Some of you have probably seen “fibre mom” around the shop restocking shelves. My mom moved back to the area to take on the inventory management and some book keeping functions here in space. Mom taught me to crochet when I was younger. She learned to knit from the same person who taught me – my grandmother. But she has pretty much refused to do it since she was a child. Blue Sky Alpacas recently shipped us a pattern for a yarn that we don’t carry, on accident. It is the Shawl Collar Vest project, worked in skinny cotton (a DK weight cotton):
Apparently my mom fell in love with this pattern and decided to relearn how to knit so that she could own the vest. I suppose this is a good enough reason to learn how to knit. It certainly happens quite a bit. We usually give folks a giant speech about taking it easy and not signing up for a beginner class hoping to knit a sweater..but my mom would have ignored that speech anyway. She chose Louisa Harding Ianthe for the project – a wool and cotton blend that we have in our DK section. It is a very similar ply and feel to the Blue Sky Skinny Cotton used in the vest. I thought it would be a good fit for the project. She sat in the lounge and learned to knit and purl with Sam. Micah was threatening to charge her so he didn’t last long;) Becky taught her how to bind off. She got her swatch made in a day or two:
Not bad eh? So now she has started her vest and walks around asking us what a WS row is and whether she has to measure from the start or from the end of the ribbing. It is hilarious. By next week she will be designing cardigans. I guess I know where my obsessive personality comes from. Hopefully this first project will be successful, and she won’t give up on all future knitting endeavors.
