Friends, partners, and neighbors...

You never know what to expect when you walk into your knitting class and meet a student for the first time. Will they be friendly? Will they have patience? Will we get along? So far, I have been very lucky to have many wonderful students over the past 4 years. In Florida I had a group of regular students that came to class every Friday without fail. They were a such a wonderful and diverse group of women, and I'm proud to call them my friends today. It broke my heart to leave them, when I moved to Tennessee. My classes have been very sporadic since moving here, and I have yet to recreate the camaraderie I had with my Floridian group. Maybe that will never happen again, they say you can never go home, but I still continue to meet some great people in my classes. One of my more recent students is an incredibly interesting woman who always has the best stories to tell. When we first met she told me about how she taught herself to crochet when she was just 8 years old by watching her aunt. Armed with a steel hook and variegated thread, she would make chains long enough to wrap around the house several times. Once she tired of chains she watched her aunt enough to learn how to single crochet, double crochet, and triple crochet. Now this is the part of her story that really tickled me. She didn't know the names of these stitches, so she just made them up on her own. She called the single crochets friends, the double crochets partners, and the triple crochets neighbors. She could make just about anything you can think of just from looking at it, and she said she showered her family and friends with doilies. I swear, the ingenuity of children absolutely amazes me. I always say that children do not know the meaning of the word can't, and they could probably fly if only we didn't tell them that they couldn't.