So I’m a blogger!  It’s all terribly exciting, even in the absence of another living soul knowing about it yet.

My glee at this moment contrasts with years of wonder at what motivated anyone to author a blog.  It just seemed too exhibitionist, for the likes of the girl next door, anyway, to be an activity undertaken with such gusto by so many people.  Even allowing for the puppy love that struck so many, I couldn’t imagine how the upside could justify the effort in the long run.  Wasn’t this quite a time-sucker for these already busy people, plunking away every day on their blogs?

Ultimately, I stopped wondering. I became powerless to reason.  I fell in love.

The object of my affection made itself known to me quite unexpectedly, as is often the case with such things, one sunny Saturday morning as I was exploring a new neighborhood in the city.  I meandered in and out of little shops along the street, weaving through the happy coffee-holding, dog-walking, North Face-wearing people and landed in front of an endangered species:  the indpendent urban bookstore.

I stepped in.  I wandered through the neatly-displayed tables and shelves until I found myself in the crafty section, as I occasionally do in bookstores.  I picked up Built by Wendy’s Sew U and felt creativity start to tickle my brain.  I’ve dabbled in sewing, fueled partially by the embellished memory of past successes with sweat pants in Home Ec, but mainly by the ubiquitous Bernina of my childhood that churned out many a first-day school outfit by my mother’s capable hands.

I set Sew U aside to accommodate another book that had inexplicably jumped off of the shelf and into my hands.  The Yarn Girl’s Guide to Simple Knits.  Knitting.  It was always such a mystery to me.  How did they get the yarn to hook through with each stitch?  Shouldn’t there be some kind of hook involved?  Mom was a crochet kind of gal (after flirting with macrame in the late 70s), but even then, yarnplay took a back seat to the Bernina’s charms, and the wily ways of knitting were lost on me.

The Yarn Girls had compiled such a pretty collection of pictures.  These projects all looked so do-able!  And just my speed, fashion-wise: designs that were simple yet surprisingly sexy (like me, right?).  Anyone could learn, they said.  Well, I was a crafty person - I may not have hit the domestic mark *quite* the way my mother had dreamed, but there was still hope for me.  

Decision time.  Should I take a chance on this overpriced book, right here and now?  Even though my buddy Amazon could cut me a better deal?  The creative tickle in my brain teamed up with my inability to resist temptation and succeeded in permeating into the thrify section of my brain.  In the end, crafty won out.  I left the store beaming, with the Girls cozied up to Sew U in my shopping bag.

Teaching myself to knit was fun.  Not always pretty, but fun.  I didn’t even think to consult anyone else on my technique, because I was confident in my laser-like focus on my Yarn Girl’s how-to.  My early projects were very gratifying - look what my hands fashioned out of this oddball clearance yarn - a scarf! 

I consulted the internet here and there to seek simple (read: free) patterns and clarify a few things I managed to miss with the Girls (e.g., aha! that’s why my scarf was much bigger than anticipated…there’s something called gauge I need to consider).  In large part, however, I remained oblivious to the ginormous knitting community out there in cyberspace.  

Let’s just say it took me a while to find you.  Even though no one actually knows about me here.  Yet.

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