Knitting. In Real Life. This is a novelty to me. All of my knitting, so far, has been safely within the confines of my tiny apartment, with tv and audiobooks and podcasts for company. No one judges me here. Well, my friends think I’m crazy for knitting, but I just give them something handknit, and they don’t judge anymore. (They ask for socks, instead.)

Tonight, though, was the start of something new. (Seeing a trend, yet?) Today, I knit in public. Twice. First, primarily with friends I’ve knit with off and on at each other’s homes over the past few years. Now we’ve gathered a few more people, and are meeting at the university. We got a lot of stares today, but that may have been more at the adorable two-month-old baby than it was at our knitting. Tonight, I was finally brave enough to go to Panera and really knit in public. With people I’d never met before in my life. To talk about knitting. With other knitters.

Novelty, huh?

It felt good. It was good. And I finished a pair of fingerless gloves into the bargain.

Pattern: http://purlparables.wordpress.com/Herringbone Mitts

Size: Medium

Yarns: Blue Sky Alpacas Suri Merino & Malabrigo Silky Merino

I think the IRL knitting community has gifts that I never knew would be possible.  It’s neither better nor worse than the online community, but I think it will make me appreciate the strengths of the latter even more.

Today is the first day of the church season of Lent, Ash Wednesday. While I didn’t go to a service today, I did spend a good bit of time thinking about what I would give up, or what practices I would adopt for this spiritual journey of 40 days. Lent is often associated with “time in the wilderness”–withdrawing, moving away from others. That’s been my default for too many years now, and it’s become my safety net. Insetad, this Lent I’m reaching out. I’m making the most of my family, my friends, my acquaintances, and even strangers I pass on the street. That’s the Lenten discipline I will practice this year: caring, on a moment-to-moment basis. And it started with knitting tonight.

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None of us know how stories end. Will it be another “happily ever after”? Or a classic tragedy? A drama, or a thought-provoking assessment of life, now? From the beginning, we can’t see the end.

This is true of life, of friendships, of jobs, and even of blogging. I’ve been reading blogs for more than three years now, and I’ve never wanted to start my own until, well, now. It’s scary, this thing, of putting oneself out there. Of owning our words. Of claiming opinions, even if they are only about knitting. Opinons matter, because they are important to us.

I hope this blog will be a place for me to come and write when I can’t write elsewhere. Writing is my job–I’m writing a dissertation. This means there are good days and bad days, and I have yet to figure out how to make the bad ones good. But I hope this will be a new outlet for me to explore the creativity that has drawn me to writing, and to knitting, and to this online community of knitbloggers, where I have observed, but in which I am now participating. I also hope this will give me motivation to get better at taking pictures, but that’s a different problem altogether.

It feels like a bigger step than it is. But it is time for a new beginning.