Knitting meetup

[celticdragonfly]

Last night I went to the Knitting Meetup. It was down at the Borders Books off the 30, next to the Central Market, a place I know and is reasonably convenient for Karl to meet me there after work to take the kids off my hands. And bless the man, he actually beat me there, and was easily findable. The meetup went reasonably well - knitting and conversation - which is good, because I really needed some time away from home that went reasonably well. The last few days, especially yesterday, have not gone really well, and yesterday I was dealing with some pretty nasty anger management problems.

I was noticing the spread of people there. All women, a couple grandmother-age, three clustered in their early 20s (one was a daughter of one of the older women, our organizer), and one I couldn't say for sure, maybe mid20s. And me. I've noticed this before. There seem to be knitters in these groups that are 10-15 years younger than I am, who are the new wave of knitters now that it has become trendy and is all over the place, and then there's ones 10-20 years older than I am, who've knitted for a long time, usually. And there's me. I am certain I can't be the only knitter around in my age group, but I do seem to be in a bit of a statistical valley. I'm a bit surprised to find that age seems to make a difference in trying to get to know people in more mundane situations. When I've been around SCAdians and Fen and such, age has made very little difference, I've had multigenerational friends with very little notice taken of it, but I feel the age gaps more in the other situations. Part of it may also be that most of them were lifelong residents of the area. (The organizer's daughter had been off in northern California with her Air Force spouse, but was now staying with her grandmother while he was back in this state. I was mindboggled to hear her talk about staying at the training base in California, and that she apparently considers 6 months plenty of time to have made deep friendships. Well, I knew I wasn't good at finding friends quickly.) I haven't had that kind of stability.

I got as far on the Stashbuster Spiral socks as I could without the pattern[1], then I moved on to working on my other pair of socks, a K3P1 pair of Magic Stripes socks, which have been turning out nicely. As it happens, I started them last Wednesday, and they're stripes of purple, gray, and blue, so I'm referring to them as the "Lenten stripe socks". I'm carrying the ribbing down through the toe decreases. I finished the first one last night, and I think it came out nicely.

Anyway, I think I'll go back to future knitting meetups. It gave me a couple hours kid free to knit, and got me out of the house, so this was good. Left me with more ambitions to get more knitting done, too.

After that I wasn't terribly smart - I hadn't had dinner, hadn't had anything proteinish all day, and should have just gone to eat right then. But I was thinking of how I had to go get the printer cable - so drove up to the store I was aiming at in Lake Worth, which had closed when I got there. Leaving me in an area with no great dinner options, having left behind the several good options next to the Meetup. Gah. I went home and had some ravioli.

[1] And why didn't I have the pattern? Because of the Great Printer Debacle. Which I won't go into here, because I'm just about over being furiously mad about it, without even breaking any crockery. Although I seriously thought about it.

Comments

[castiron.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a lot of fun!

That's an interesting point about knitting & age; thinking about it, most of the knitters I know in RL are also either early-to-mid-20s or over 50; the few women my age who knit seem to have gotten into it because of the fad. Fifteen years ago I was weird for having knitting around all the time; now it seems like everyone does it.

Age and meeting people -- so far, in folk dance, I'm not noticing age as a factor in meeting folks; sure, the people who've been dancing in this group for 30 years do tend to cluster, but on the other hand, the sixteen-year-old who's been gung-ho about folk dance since she was ten is in the same cluster!

Generation gap in knitting

[bkseiver.livejournal.com]

Actually, I, your mother, find the same situation when I go to the knitting guild out at Jones Creek Library: There are a lot of people 20+ years older than I, then there's me, then there are some teenagers. Talk about a gap! But the interesting thing is that everybody is willing to share their knitting knowledge. It seems so funny to be referred to, and deferred to, as the sock guru, by ladies who could knit sweaters, er....rings, around me. They have never fooled with socks, or socks on 2 circulars, though, and are fascinated. They also are amazed to discover self-patterning sock yarn. This from ladies who wouldn't blink an eye at knitting a Dale of Norway sweater. Go figure!