Yarn Harlot

I love to read crafty blogs and diaries. It's neat to learn from other people's mistakes and to find out about possible frustrations that await you in a project. When I picked up Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's The Secret Life of a Knitter - Yarn Harlot I didn't realize I'd chuckle so much. I loved it. Only funny if you knit, I guess. Even though I'm a beginner and have no experience to relate to much to, I was entertained. I particularly liked her list of ten ways to anger a knitter.

She wrote:

Ten quick and easy ways to make a knitter angry:

1. Consistently refer to her work as a "cute hobby."

2. When the knitter shows you a Shetland shawl she knit from handspun yarn that took 264 hours of her life to produce and will be an hierloom that her great-great grandchildren will be wrapped in on the days of their birth, say, "I saw one just like this at Wal-Mart!"

3. On every journey you take with your knitter, make a point of driving by yarn shops but make sure you don't have enough time to stop. (This works especially if there is a sale on.)

4. Shrink something.

5. Tell her that you don't know why she knits socks, that it seems silly when they are only $10 for five pairs and they're just as good.

6. Tell the knitter that you are sorry, but you really can't feel a difference between cashmere and acrylic.

7. Tell her that you aren't the sort of person who could learn to knit, since you "can't just sit there for hours."

8. Quietly take out one of every set of four double-pointed needles that she has and put them down the side of the couch. (You can't convince me that you aren't doing this already.)

9. If you are a child, grow faster than your knitter can knit. Requesting intricate sweaters and then refusing to wear them is also highly effective.

10. Try to ban knitting during TV time, because the clicking of the needles annoys you.