Saturday, November 10, 2007

Cambridge is a knit-friendly city

Cambridge is a knit-friendly city. Or at least my knitting has led to some friendly encounters. Lately they've been happening a lot more frequently. This past week:
  • I saw someone with Lion Brand Big Prints in her knitting bag. I asked her what she was making and it turns out she was bringing the yarn to her friend's house to teach her how to knit. She then asked me if I had made my headband that I was wearing, which I did.
    • It turned out that when I was taking the bus back to campus later that night, she was on the same bus. So there was some other knitterly conversation before she got off the bus.
  • I was working on a ribbon scarf, and someone complimented me on that. Then told me about how she had tried to learn knitting in the past, but never picked it up. So another woman on the bus told her that there were knitting classes in the adult education center in Cambridge (or whatever the place is called. I had never heard of it before.)
I got a bunch of compliments on my possum wool scarf.
And that's all I can remember at the moment.

I'm thinking about printing up some business cards with my name and contact info on them, for one-on-one knitting (or crocheting) tutorials. I can definitely teach beginning knitters, and perhaps some intermediate techniques. (I'm not good enough to be teaching classes on Fair Isle, Entrelac, lace, Intarsia, sock-making, etc. But I can teach cabling, increasing and decreasing, yarn-overs, and working with DPNs.) I could also perhaps teach introductory spinning, but that would be harder to get supplies for.

This would be a fun and easy way for me to earn money.

And maybe it would be an impetus for me to start learning the aforementioned advanced techniques. The more I know, the better a teacher I can be. Of course, I'm afraid to start any of these things, except maybe the intarsia or fair-isle, since those are similar to my kippot in color changingness.