September 2010: The Month of Knitting

This month is a big knitting month for me. On top of the classes I'm teaching this month (beginners, socks, colour, kids), I'll be looking after the yarn shop while Ellie is away. Ellie will be gone this weekend for the Nanaimo Fiber Arts Festival, then to Toronto for a wedding next week. That means I'll be working the yarn shop for ten or eleven full days this month. The classes happen outside of store hours, and with my new gig teaching the girls, that will be tons of knitting work.

I started with the girls the other day and it was lots of fun. Me and little girls, we get along great. I become furniture, something fun to climb on after not too long. Before I left the youngest threw her arms around me. Adorable! I see them today and we'll continue. The oldest will get going on the ball while the other two will just get familiar with yarn in their hands.

On top of teaching knitting and working at a yarn shop, I have also been commissioned to knit five hats. Four for one woman, one for another woman's daughter. I have finished two of four and am almost finished the latter. Lucky for me I'm on a pink kick right now, since all five of these hats are pink or have pink in them.

Someone was in the shop the other day and asked if Ellie had someone who could knit 25-50 hats for his shop in Vancouver. She took his email address and said she pass it on, and she did, to me. It was an interesting proposition. I'm not the fastest knitter in the world, but if I was knitting the same hat ten times over, I imagine I'd get pretty quick with the same yarn and design. Even so, how much to charge? It was an interesting thing to consider. The other day before my class started, some friends were hanging out at the shop as we were discussing this. It's one thing to knit some stuff on the side, but to be working full time on hand-knits - there is really no way you'd get your worth out of it. Even at $5 an hour, that would make any hat rather expensive, when you factor in the price of yarn. And you can't live on $5/hour, at least I can't. The other issue is repetitive strain. That many hats is a lot of knitting, and would crowd out time for knitting for myself. I haven't had much work at the fish job these last couple of weeks so I have been knitting almost nonstop. My arms are protesting...

Because I'll be working so much at the yarn shop this month, and since we were really low on supplies, we were able to steal away for five hours yesterday and drive into Port Alberni. It's about an hour each way, give or take (construction, tourist traffic, etc.) and we had something like eight places to go to in the space of three hours. We had to rush back because Dan had to work. In that time we discovered a newly opened grocery store - and you know that means there will be lots of sales! Then we headed to our beloved Fairways to stock up on our Asian ingredients. In the course of our day I also got 10 lbs of over ripe bananas, 10 lbs of cucumbers, and 20 lbs of peaches. There will be banana bread, mustard pickles, and canned peaches before long. I don't know how we're going to cram it all in. I'm about to leave for Tofino to teach the girls, come back, bake banana bread, then go to an offload at 4pm. Well, being busy is better than being bored...