I’m posting this to both this and my knitting blog so in the off chance that you read both, you can skip the other one.
This weekend I was in my element: Teaching. All weekend long, from Thursday till Sunday I got to teach and teach and teach. I went to a knitting convention (I am not making that up) called Stitches. It was in Chicago. I work for a company called XRX. They publish knitting books, a magazine called (appropriately) Knitter’s Magazine, and they put on these shows. Four of them per year. I guess it is something like a Star Trek convention in that we are incredibly geeky, passionate and esoterically thrilled about knitting, but because it is more about learning than entertainment, I actually think it is more like a quilting convention or a scrapbook convention or an upholsterers’ convention (don’t laugh, it would be exciting to the upholsterers). There is a big market where you can buy anything and everything related to the subject at hand, and, when they aren’t shopping, people take classes. That’s where I come in. Over the course of the weekend, I get to teach about 15 hours of classes to knitters of all abilities. I teach about yarn and how to get it to behave the way you want, I teach about different styles of knitting, and I teach a bunch of one-hour classes in the market that allow students to try out a technique in a short amount of time.
It is so awesome. For me, teaching is transporting. I forget about everything outside the classroom, I’m completely in the moment, and I just feel so good. It totally does not feel like work and every time they hand me my paycheck I have to pinch myself.
So, that is where I was this weekend. It was awesome. Here I am with my friend and roommate, Debbie Radtke.
She is a talented designer and teacher herself and in the knitting world she is kinda famous because of this little guy.
Ps. I am attributing my HUGE arms in this photo to some sort of distortion from the fact that this is my phone and not a real camera. Good Heavens.
My Red Door Days 