Dyed in the wool

I'm reading Knitting Rules! and finding good information and more than a few observations that I can relate to, even if I haven't crammed every corner of my apartment with yarn. (That space is reserved for those boxes I haven't unpacked yet.) I took like a duck to water upon learning to knit, so I don't think there was any doubt that the craft was going to catch on with me. Thanks to many of you who have been reading since the early days of this blog, I was accepted as a fellow knitter right away. It's been nice to find a new community of friends along with the hobby.

So it might sound strange for me to say that it's only recently that I realized how much I am, excusing the pun, a dyed in the wool knitter. In her book Stephanie Pearl-McPhee writes, "If you never leave the house without your knitting, and only a house fire would make you think twice, your knitting 'hobby' may have become a lifestyle." I can't confess to taking my knitting with me every time I leave home, but I have it with me more often than not despite circumstances usually keeping me from working on it. This sentiment and the attendant awareness of how closely it comes to describing me drove home what I've felt: I'm a knitter and unapologetic about it.

I no longer get nervous knitting in public on my own. OK, maybe a little bit sometimes, but for the most part I can go anywhere and take out my knitting and not worry about what others might think. (It's harder to be self-conscious when most people act as though there's a bubble around me and avoid coming near.)

I'm even getting somewhat lax in guarding my secret. At work I was using one of the cozies to hold a coffee cup. A student admired it and asked about it. I let slip that I made it. Oops. I did follow up by saying that such information wasn't anything I cared to have spread around, and I trust that this student doesn't see it as something freakish. I acknowledge that I'm probably tilting at windmills, though. We are talking about a small college campus, even if I've managed to keep the secret from practically everyone at work.

You know what? If the secret does leak out, I'm not as concerned about it as I once was. I inadvertently dropped the secret with someone else when talking about getting free things. (I mentioned receiving the gift certificate for a free book, something which I couldn't explain without talking about knitting.) The person's reaction was more of the quietly stunned surely-you're-joking variety, but again, I don't really care if he thinks I'm certifiably crazy. I understand it regardless of if it doesn't make sense to non-knitters. Trust me, I know it doesn't make sense to non-knitters.

If this sounds like the lead-in to an announcement that I'll be posting under my name, you're wrong. I'm still going to keep my nom de blog because of the freedom and minor security it affords me. I don't foresee any switch there. That'll be our little secret as I continue on this journey. After all, who knows knitters better than other knitters?