The Studio, Kansas City, Missouri

by

Patti Dickinson

I am a knitter.  

I have been knitting since I was in college, with many knitting-sabbaticals in the interim.  But I always drifted back.  I maybe could be better described as a yarn collector.  I love the quiet of the knit shop that is just a stone's throw from my neighborhood. The colors, the feel of the yarn, the possibilities for creating something homemade. I have taken some classes there...and I know many of the women who work there.  More than one of them has dealt with my catastrophic knitting dilemmas....untangling the yarn, showing me where I even am in the knitting pattern, or telling me if I have knitted my sock in the round inside out. None of them turn white when they see me coming with a wad of yarn in my hand.  These ladies can take it on the chin.

So yesterday I decided that I needed to finish up the five unfinished projects that I have.  These are unfinished because I am stuck.  So I took two of the projects that I had stopped working on and pulled them out of the bag to refresh my memory, because I got stuck a long time ago.  The bags were dusty! I needed to figure out where I was in the pattern and why I had stopped. Once I had that figured out, I was a woman on a mission.  Off to see Jane.  Or Cindy. Or Mary K.  Or Dee Anne. They would know what to do.  

Sure enough, three of the four of them were there.  They got me back on track with both knitting projects, but that wasn't all.  We talked of the new arrangement of the store, Cindy and I chatted about her three boys, and how well they were doing in school.  Jane got me jump-started again on my knitting projects.  Nice to visit.  A wonderful way to spend an hour.  Almost like stepping off life's treadmill for a quiet visit with women that have come to be friends.