Circles

Earlier this week, I hastily employed a random number generator to select winners of the “thanks for voting for my socks” contest – but I haven’t had time to tell you all about them until now.  PAM (#3) wins the socks and HEIDI (#16) wins the jam!  I’ve been musing on how appropriate it is that they both got prizes, as we share many connections through yarn, knitting, Gettysburg, and libraries.  Will you indulge me as I stroll down memory lane?

I first met Pam when she started working at my library.  She moved to Gettysburg from somewhere in Maryland that was very near the Howard County Fairgrounds, which is how she knew about the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival.  When she and Dave became friends with Sweetie and me, they took us to the next Fest.  I’m pretty sure this was in 2001.  I was instantly smitten.  Sweetie caught me in a booth (which I now recognize as The Yarn Barn booth in the main exhibit hall) clutching a book about teaching kids to knit and some needles (wonder what size they were?).  She laughed and said I wasn’t going to learn to knit.  I wasn’t sure, so I put everything back.  Maybe it was just the wool fumes getting to me.  Anyway, something was triggered inside that day and before the next Fest rolled around, I took a beginning knitting class at The Mannings in nearby East Berlin.  The class was definitely in early 2002 – I was hugely pregnant with Boy 1 and developed an unconventional knitting technique based on resting the end of one needle on my big belly.  We went to the Fest again in 2002 (weeks before Boy 1 was born) but I honestly don’t remember if I bought any yarn.  My scrapbook doesn’t reveal any serious Fest activity until 2003, when Pam and Dave (who had since moved to Cleveland) returned for a visit over MDSW weekend.  Here is one of my scrapbook pages from that visit, when Boy 1 was almost 12 months old:That’s Pam in the red fleece jacket.  The scrapbook also says that I bought some Tess yarn to make Boy 1 a sweater (which turned out to be this one.   (Of course, I gave up scrapbooking at some point in order to devote full attention to knitting and spinning!)

Who knows how I would have made my way to knitting if it weren’t for Pam and Dave?

Heidi is someone I met through my local knitting group.  A mutual friend brought her along once.  She got awfully busy with her kids and homeschooling and stopped coming to group, so I sort of lost track of her.  For a while, I saw more of her husband, who was on the local public library board at the same time I was (actually, he’s now the president!).  Time passed.  Then one day, I saw her in my campus dining hall, and it turns out she started working part-time at Gettysburg College.  Instant reconnect!  We now have lunch regularly and talk about knitting, among many other things.  Here’s Heidi looking pretty excited about her jar of jam (she chose blackberry-peach).  And where is she?  In Musselman Library. Libraries, knitting, yarn, Gettysburg, Pam, and Heidi… these are a few of my favorite things!

Thanks again to everyone who voted for Socks 12 in the Summer of Color contest.  I’ll keep you posted on what type of socks Pam picks and how they come along.  I plan to have them done by Christmas at the latest and hopefully sooner.  First, I need to whip out a hat for Knitters’ Day Out (donating a hat is part of the registration fee), and I can’t lose sight of a pair of Christmas socks for my mom, either.  I might reprise the Pansy design with another yarn.