January 2010 Activity -- Knitting

Saturday, January 16, 2010
11:30am - 1:00pm
Dilettante Amy's House, Arlington, VA
Cost:  $105 for 1 1/2 hours instruction and all materials                    
(Dilettante Amanda scored a deal on this by betting on the tutorial at a silent auction)

You know how you reach a certain point in your life where you begin to assess where you are and where you've been and wonder what other things you want to try or achieve in this all-too-short time we have on earth?

And then you realize that knitting falls nowhere on that spectrum?

Knitting is one of those things that we know lots of other nice people do, but have never had any interest in doing ourselves. (Kind of like going to church. Or threesomes.) Yet... and this is a big YET...this was a really, really fun activity.

As we've all discussed before, the instructor can totally make or break an activity, and Emmy not only made this one fun, but we also learned enough about knitting that the slightly OCD faction of the Dilettante Club (cough, cough Amanda) is now intent upon knitting until the entire skein of yarn is gone.

Emmy provided each of us a set of new knitting needles and a skein of yarn. (The needles were the training-wheel version of actual knitting needles, which is kind of the next best thing to us wearing helmets while doing an activity.) We learned how to "cast on" to begin knitting a row of stitches, how to "take it from behind" (heh), and how to count stitches, do a purl stitch and take the knitting off the needles when we were finished. Emmy was patient and laid-back and had a way of explaining what was actually some pretty complicated stuff that made it understandable.

Overachiever Amy continued to add stitches throughout the activity...somehow ending up with 26, even though only 12 were requested. (cough, cough teacher's pet)

And get this...Emmy also gave us each a scarf that her mom had knitted. How much do you love that? (And how much enjoyment did we each get out of going home and telling the Dilettante spouses that we knitted those scarves ourselves?)

We followed up the activity with lunch and beer ('cept for Nicole, of course...no beer now that a little Dilettante is on its way) at Dogfish Head.