A fascinating new blog

Take a look at Red Paw's pawmarks - I think this space is very worth watching.

Also worth watching, although not available digitally: my daughter's hands as she figures out knitting. Yes, spontaneous pediatric knitting activity is occurring in my kitchen, and when I see the dimpled hands of a nine year old tension the yarn in motions exactly like my own, I feel connected to the future.

More connected, alas, than to the past - I have no idea who taught me how to knit. It wasn't my mother (she knit English style, I knit German style). Probably a woman at a yarn shop in the small town where I grew up. She used patterns in Burda (in German) and had hennaed hair and not a lot of patience. But she *did* teach the eager 18-year old that I was how to knit, and I am grateful for that.

Rose says that means that the trick memory plays on me means I am an "orphan knitter", not organically connected to a lineage. That may as well be true - but I've adopted lineage from the teachers I've learned from, either in person (thanks Cat!) or via the printer's ink, which makes Elizabeth Zimmerman my knit-mother, as she is for so very many of us in the U.S.

There's a family of choice I can be proud of.