The Friday Night Knitting Club - A Social Experiment

A little more than a month ago, the restaurant my husband and I managed for my brother closed down. While we look for work, I've made it my personal mission to destash our belongings to make a little money to supplement our enemployment checks.
This is driving my husband crazy because I'm selling most of our books and CDs on Amazon -- I just keep telling him we can always re-acquire when we have work and don't have to pay $800 a month for healthcare.

So I'm standing in line at the post office waiting to mail 2 books and a CD that sold overnight and I'm holding the book "The Friday Night Knitting Club."

The woman standing in front of me asks me if its a good book, and I tell her I haven't started reading it -- that my mother just mailed it to me because I'm a knitter. Turns out she is too! So we discuss our local yarn shop and she's trying to figure out what to do with all those little balls of yarn you end up with after finish a project. I tell her about Ravelry.com -- a great website for the knitting community around the world. I belong to one group called "Scrap Happy" where one member posted a link to her blog, SimpleKnits, where she had amassed a list of 500 knitting projects based on how many yard of yarn you have -- from 1 to 285 yards.

I also belong to the Thrifty Knitters group, which is a great forum where I learned about frogging sweaters for the yarn, and Random Acts of Kindness where users post needs and wishlists that others fulfill as their RAK for the day. I tell her about how when the restaurant first closed, I posted a note about "knitting for sanity" about how we were unemployed and I wouldn't be able to buy yarn for a while and I've since received care packages of yarn from knitting around the world.

Next thing you know, she's asking me for my name and address because she wants to destash and send me some yarn! I'm a little embarrased and tell her that I didn't mean for her to do that, but she insisted. So I took her email address and sent her the link to blogpost on scrap projects. She wanted to make toys for her grandkids and there are plenty of ideas there -- my favorite being the finger puppets.

Then, this man 3 people down the line asks me if the book is any good because his partner is a knitter and belongs to a knitting circle that meets at the local Coffee Beanery on Friday nights. I tell him that I haven't read it yet, but it's supposed to be very good and he declares that he's going out to buy it for his partner right after he mails his packages off.

I used to belong to a knitting circle at my local yarn store, but can't afford the fee for the two-month session. This man points out that the Friday night group is free so I'm going to go check it out this weekend.

I called my mother when I got home and told her that her gift of the book was giving more than she intended and told her about my post office antics and she was delighted. Then she came up with a great idea -- carry the book with me wherever I go and see if it continues to facilitate these unexpected encounters.

We knitters love to talk about knitting with anyone that will listen so I've decided to take up my mom's idea and carry it in the outer pocket of my purse when I go out... we'll see what happens!