Life's a Stitch

My office, at a local community service agency, is located in a shopping mall. Malls are like little cities with unique environments and people who consider the mall their home of sorts. There are the mall walkers – the healthy heart people who walk the halls for exercise prior to opening; the mall rats – the teens who hang out after school, and the regulars – those whom you see on a regular basis who couldn’t possibly be shopping all the time, but have some other need met at a shopping centre.

I guess I’m a regular since I eat breakfast every working day at the MacDonald’s inside the WalMart at the mall. When the kids were young I found it too hectic to get them and me ready at the same time. Each day I would drop them off at school and head to MacDonald’s for my 20 minutes of quiet prior to work. They know me there and I never have to tell them what I want. It’s always the bacon and egg bagel, no butter, no sauce, half cheese and a medium diet coke. I read the newspaper they’ve saved for me and get in ten minutes of knitting.

One of the other regulars noticed me knitting. He is a man in his 60’s with some special needs, as they say. I’ve seen him in the mental health office on my floor. He is very friendly and told me his wife, who died four years ago, was a knitter. The next day he delivered her stash and pattern library to my office. I was pretty touched. You can learn a lot about a person you’ve never met by their knitting collection. She was very organized, her patterns in binders and plastic sheet protectors. She was smart, you have to have smarts to knit the fair isle patterns she had. I imagined the two of them, he with his disabilities and she, managing their life and happily losing herself in her knitting. When I’m gone I hope my knitting collection goes to someone who will appreciate it.

Alison, from Just Another Day, has designed a button for me. She will do one for you in exchange for something from your stash. What a nice blogger! Now I have to figure out how to use Typepad to get it on my sidebar and we’re cookin’. Once I have that knowledge, I’ll learn how to add other blogger’s buttons as well.

The fey scarf: I’m still not sure this is how it’s supposed to be patterning, the store sample looked quite different, but then again, it was a different colour:

Update: Thanks to Caryn of Fuzzy Noodle Knits for her help in getting my button to my sidebar. I’m not sure I’ve done it 100% correctly, but it’s a start.