New York Minknit

I’m a little worried I might have a stinker on my hands. When I bought the yarn, I was hestiating at Knitty City between a lace-weight Dream in Color in a wine color and this vareigated Fleece Artist yarn. The Dream in Color yarn was actually cheaper, yardage-wise, and a semi-solid. I had actually planned to buy a solid or a semi-solid color. But buoyed by the success of my other vareigated shawl, and lured by the splotches of hot pink in the Fleece Artist skeins, I bought the variegated. I fear that it may turn out looking like a ground-up Rainbow Brite doll, but even so, I’m going to wear it around, because it’s taken quite a lot of work to knit. Plus, I hate ripping.

My boss found this shirt in a package of stuff sent to our office last year and dropped it off at my desk, and now that it’s finally hot, I can wear it. It says “Needle Dudes.”

On another note, Adam and I were talking about how local yarn stores can compete with the internet, and he wondered if they had tried teaching knitting in schools, to breed future customers. I started laughing because I had recently read a David Sedaris article where he talked about visiting tobacco factories as a school field trip (complete with free cigarettes), and I remembered that a friend (and occasional commenter) had mentioned going to the local bread factory as a child. I don’t think we went to anything as super-branded as a tobacco factory as a field trip when I was kid (though I do remember visiting some television show which starred someone from Laugh-In, which was way before our time, and thus, not very impressive). It seems a bit intense to try to sell yarn (or tobacco) to kids through school, though I do remember during a crochet phase in my youth, sending away for some sort of yarn newsletter that came with sample cards on their newest yarn. (I have no idea how I found this company or their address, since this was years before the internet, though I suspect it may have been through this book I had, which had the addresses of many weird clubs kids could write to and ask for membership. I remember being particularly taken with the idea of joining a sugar-packet collectors club, which speaks highly of my coolness factor in elementary school.) We had a sewing class in junior high, which required buying fabric, and I know many Waldorf schools teach their students to knit, so maybe knitting in the schools is a good way to create future customers.