knitting powers, activate!

I had one of those experiences this past weekend. You know the ones, or maybe you don't, but I get them all the time, when I am asked a "what are you doing these days?" sort of question. After explaining that I work from my home for my husband (acceptable answer, even if it is out of my field of training), then I got the trickier one. "No," she pressed, "For fun. What do you do for yourself?" Like all good moms, she knew that doing something for yourself is essential to your sanity.

I took a deep breath. "I knit."

(Insert crickets chirping here. Note that I didn't blow her mind even further by explaining that I also spin.)

Eventually she recovered. "Like knit one, purl two? I don't know how to do it, but I know what you are talking about," she said, although there was still doubt in her voice that it could possibly qualify. A list of otherwise acceptable answers that I could have given instead:

1. I golf.
2. I shop.
3. I decorate my house.
4. I bake fancy cupcakes.
5. I cook elaborate gourmet dinners. (Now that one's funny!)
6. I go out drinking with my high school friends.
7. I go out drinking with other mothers.

None of which are true, but I think they would have been greeted with more understanding. (I do think I would have an easier time justifying the knitting than the working for my husband to my women's only college professors, however, but I suppose that's another perspective altogether.)

Today, though, today I got the affirmation that I needed! Primo came home from school and asked to go to the craft store. Turns out the FFA is doing a fundraiser selling scarves, and he shocked the pants off his advisor when he said he would bring in a scarf as well. (Kid didn't admit to it for years, but he has known how to knit since he was 8 or so; he learned for one of his first 4-H presentations.)

I was quick off the mark. "Do the scarves have to be knit by someone from your school? Or can they be donated?"

"No," he replied. "Other people can knit one for us."

Did you hear the clarion call??!?! It can only mean one thing. To needles, to needles! Of course we only have one week until the deadline, because he is my kid and that's how they roll. But to his credit, his own scarf in FFA blue and gold is already rolling off the needles (after I cast on for him, because he refuses to do anything other than the knit stitch):

That much hasn't changed from when he first learned, nor has the facial expression while he knits, though certainly the face itself has!