Knit Theory

I've been knitting for about 3 and a half years now. I started shortly after finishing up my degree and still wasn't out of starving student mode. My sisters have blessed me with 8 nieces and nephews and since I was short on cash, taught myself to knit and made scarves and hats for the bunch. They were a hit and by then I'd whet my appetite for the craft.

One day I mentioned my new hobby to my office mates and it turned out they were knitters too. The only knitting book I'd read at the time was Stitch n' Bitch and I wondered out loud if there was a local group we could join. After much conversation, I suggested that we start our own little group and they said, "If you plan it, we will come." So I did. We started a little group of people associated with the math department at our university and began knitting afghans for Project Linus. Our group is named Knit Theory after the mathematical,"knot theory." About 2/3 of the knitters are mathematics professors and the rest of us just love math people. We've grown from our first meeting of 6 to 22 now. There's a regular group of about a dozen that work on projects together.

I spent a lot of time teaching what I had taught myself, learning from the more experienced knitters and not really branching out. Oh, I made myself a sweater that is quite lovely, but so heavy that there are only about 3 days out of an entire year that I can wear it. I'll have to photograph it for posterity one day.