Published in 2016 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang

An imprint of ABRAMS

Copyright © 2016 Clara Parkes

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948556

ISBN: 978-1-61769-190-4
eISBN: 978-1-61312-939-5

Editor: Melanie Falick

Designer: Sebit Min

Production Manager: True Sims

The text of this book was composed in Archer.

Stewart, Tabori & Chang books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.

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CONTENTS

Preface: In Motion

Chasing a Legend in Taos

From Baseball to Broadway: Swatching in the Big Apple

Perky Skeins and Fast Cars: Los Angeles

Naked Lopi: A Knitter's Journey to Iceland

Big Fleece and Fried Dough: West Friendship, Maryland

Lucky in Loveland: An Interweave Summons

Glass, Grass, and the Power of Place: Tacoma, Washington

Cloudburst over Paris

A Thing for Socks and a Very Big Plan: Portland, Oregon

Mighty Scoops and Pho to Go: Celebrating TNNA in Columbus

On Air in Cleveland: Filming Knitting Daily TV

Autumn on the Hudson: Rhinebeck, New York

Merriment in Minnetonka

Stash-Wrangling in the Mile-High City: Denver

Cashmere Dreams and British Breeds: A Last-Minute Visit to Edinburgh, Scotland

Romancing the Loons: Holderness, New Hampshire

Acknowledgments

PREFACE: In Motion

WHEN I WAS SIX, I went with my mother on a run to the grocery store. Too busy to fiddle with the garage door when we got back, she parked the car in the driveway and went inside, letting me snooze as she often did. Eventually I woke up, unbuckled myself, and came in for lunch. A few minutes later, a man in uniform knocked on our door and said, “Your car is on fire.”

A plume of smoke billowed from the frame of what had been, until a few minutes earlier, our trusty VW Bus. A fuel line must’ve snapped, they said, spilling gasoline onto the still-hot engine until it ignited. All four tires had melted and the windows had shattered into a million tiny pieces. You’d think the experience would have put me off cars completely. Strangely enough, it didn’t. If anything, it only reinforced my desire to set the wheels in motion, as if the real danger were in sitting still.

I grew up with grand road trips, coast-to-coast adventures in unreliable cars, playing Mad Libs and counting license plates. After my parents’ divorce, my mother moved us to Tucson, where we found smaller ways to escape. Some weekends, after giving up on waiting for a boyfriend to call, she’d mutter a curse and load us into the car. Windows open, we chased the sunset down Speedway Boulevard until the streetlights and sidewalks gave way to empty desert and the tall shadows of saguaros.

We snaked our way up, up, up, until a sudden sharp left turn took us over Gates Pass. Ahead, the view opened up to nothingness. Back down the mountain we went, to an empty desert floor. We’d find a spot and pull over. The moment the car went silent, the desert took over. A brilliant city of lights unfolded in the sky above as our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. My mother would lie on the hood of the car; my brothers and I, like rattlesnakes, preferred the warmth of blacktop on the empty road. The desert air smelled sweet and exotic. Lying there, my entire area of vision was filled with stars. At any minute, it felt like gravity would reverse and the sky would suck me in. I’d fall up, up, up into the cosmos.

Eventually my mom would call to us and we’d get back in the car. As soon as we drove back through Gates Pass, the lights of Tucson would twinkle in the distance, like jewels on black velvet, beckoning us home. We hadn’t gone far, but that brief interlude away, even just over the pass, fulfilled my need to wander.

My first “real” job after college was as a travel writer for a pre-Internet publisher. Rarely did my fellow writers and I go anywhere. We called venues and interviewed people who had no idea they were being interviewed. We scoured sources, worked with stringers on location, and managed to piece together fresh, original information. We became masters of the blurb. Colleague John Pinson and I even won an award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation for our work. The year was 1995.

When that job ended and I moved into high-tech publishing, I became a business traveler. From convention center to conference center to major hotel chain I’d go, from lobby to ballroom back to airport, to cover events with names like Database and Client/Server World and DB Expo. I’d sit in product briefings with various VPs of technology, and every second felt like a race to see if I could get out before they realized how little I understood.

I was still working at my day job in high-tech when I launched my online knitting magazine, Knitter’s Review, in 2000. My goal was to be the eyes and fingers for knitters during a time when our world was exploding with new yarns, tools, books, gadgets, and events. That fall, I ventured to my first sheep-and-wool festival. It was in Vermont, and I called the number listed on the program to ask a question. The woman was quite friendly, and before long, she was offering me her home for the weekend. “I’ll be up at the lodge anyway,” she said, “so you’d have the place all to yourself.”

I declined, figuring she might also be the kind of person who kept dead cats in her freezer. But when I got to the show, that same friendliness prevailed. Nobody knew who I was or what I was up to, they were just being—or at least they seemed to be—genuinely nice. They were eager to share their stories, answer my questions, and offer advice. The interactions energized me. I enjoyed it so much that I went to another festival, then another, then another.

Knitting has offered me a perfect lens through which to see the world. During my fifteen years writing Knitter’s Review, I’ve clocked so many miles that I’ve essentially taken off or landed once every two weeks. My destination has never been a shiny skyscraper or boardroom. I’ve been headed to a yarn store, a spinning mill, a sheep-and-wool festival, perhaps a hotel or conference center taken over, even if only briefly, by knitters. The specifics of the trips varied, but my underlying mission was always the same. I have become a yarn evangelist, and I travel in search of my congregation.

The stories in this book follow those years, beginning in 2000, when the Internet was in its relative infancy, when email newsletters such as mine were still a novel way to reach and build community among what we thought was a small group of knitters online. They track the rise—and occasional fall—of our important gatherings, our people and places, landmarks and legends, each of which has played a vital role in the vibrant knitting culture and community that exist today.

CHASING A LEGEND IN TAOS

ONCE UPON A TIME in a Taos, New Mexico, grocery store, a woman named Luisa Gelenter was going about her business buying food. Somewhere in the produce section, she felt a person standing too close. Inching away, she kept shopping, only to feel this person creep up on her again. Annoyed, she stomped off to another aisle. When the lurker soon reappeared, Luisa turned and snapped, “What do you want?” The words were barely out of her mouth when she recognized it was Julia Roberts. The movie star and avid knitter happened to be a big fan of Luisa’s work and was too shy to introduce herself.

Who knows how it really played out, but that’s the story Luisa loved to tell.

In the world of yarn, Luisa Gelenter was a legend. Using nothing more than water and select minerals, bugs, skins, branches, roots, leaves, petals, and powders, from knowledge she picked up in Bolivia in the early 1970s, she could transform natural fibers, such as humdrum wool and mohair, into vibrant, magical yarns for knitting, weaving, and other creative pursuits. Some of her yarns were ultimately spun by a machine at a mill, but in the beginning, all of her fiber was farmed out to a squad of loyal handspinners who produced luminous, lively, color-laden skeins that were truly one of a kind. A complete garment in these yarns cost a fortune and was worthy of any red carpet.

In 1974, Luisa had opened a shop called La Lana Wools, which occupied the old Bert Phillips studio in the center of Taos. As Phillips had helped establish Taos as a hub for artists, so did Luisa for lovers of natural dye. While tapestry weavers flocked to Taos to learn from the legendary Rachel Brown, from the late 1970s until the early part of this century, La Lana was a mecca for anyone interested in natural dyes or fibers colored with them.

Luisa’s yarns were outliers at a time when other yarn stores were selling the spun equivalent of Hamburger Helper. Most were made from small batches of naturally dyed fibers that had been blended and spun by hand, aided by a discerning human eye, into unrepeatable skeins. They were priced by the ounce, like gold. Because of the incredible amount of time and skill each one required—and the appropriately high price tag for such work—she owned this market and had no competitors.

I’d come to town for the Taos Wool Festival when I first set eyes on La Lana. October in New Mexico is chile time, and the air was filled with that distinct fragrance of chiles being roasted outdoors. The leaves were beginning to turn in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, but in town, pink hollyhocks and Russian sage still lingered, striking a lovely contrast against the warm adobe walls.

The festival took place at Kit Carson Park in the center of town. There, a carefully juried group of vendors was assembled in a broad circle, like a wagon train at the end of the day. In the middle, a fiddler and guitarist played tunes while people danced on the grass. The setting was magical.

La Lana wasn’t a vendor that year, I suspect for the simple reason that the shop was adjacent to the park. So I dutifully left and crossed the street, walking through a small courtyard and into La Lana.

The minute I entered the store, I was greeted by an army of finished garments. It was like the wardrobe trailer on an exotic film set, with wildly textured vests and tunics that looked like a cross between native tapestries and ceremonial garb. The clothes would overwhelm a shy person. These pieces required grandeur. Rumor was Julia owned at least one.

Beyond the garments, the room opened up into a space I can only describe as a yarn cathedral. It still had the original massive wall of north-facing windows from when it was Phillips’s studio. But instead of illuminating paint on canvas, the windows now showcased Luisa’s masterpiece on the next wall: a writhing waterfall of handspun skein upon skein of explosive color and texture unlike anything I’d ever seen. Brilliant mohair locks shimmered against matte wool fibers that seemed to be still in the process of twisting together. It was so stunning, so rare and spectacular, that you could only stop and gasp. It was the kind of place that made you talk in a whisper.

I was tongue-tied. All I could do was furtively snap a few pictures, buy some skeins, and sneak out. After I wrote about that visit in Knitter’s Review, I heard from Luisa and we began a cautious, respectful correspondence.

When I next went to Taos a few years later, it was specifically to see Luisa. I was writing The Knitter’s Book of Yarn and needed to know more about the mechanics of yarn. Luisa happened to have a mill at her disposal. In 1991, she’d launched the Taos Valley Wool Mill with two partners. One of the partners was a man named Robert Donnelly, an industry veteran Luisa touted as her guru in all things yarn. “He can tell you everything,” Luisa said. I needed to know everything, so when a family wedding was announced in New Mexico, I emailed Luisa and we made a date.

I arrived with family in tow, depositing them at our hotel before walking over to La Lana for what I thought would be a short visit. This time, I went up to the woman behind the register, introduced myself, and asked to see Luisa. To calm my butterflies, I pretended to study a basket of dyestuff.

A booming voice came from behind. Everyone seemed to step aside—if not physically, then energetically—to make room for the short, stocky, weather-beaten woman who’d just come in.

I took a deep breath, smiled, and held out my hand. But Luisa didn’t take it. “No,” she shook her head. “You’re not Clara. You’re too young.”

I didn’t know her well enough to tell if she was serious or not, but she looked angry. All my confidence drained, and I suddenly felt like a kid, a poseur. She was probably in her sixties, such a legend that she had assistants and protégées to do grunt work. She’d mistaken me for someone on her level when, in fact, I was just starting out.

We recovered with small talk, and she showed me around the shop. Remembering why I’d come, she asked, “Shall we go see Robert?” The mill was outside of town. We would need to drive there, she explained. Did I have a car? I stuttered that mine was parked at the hotel across from the . . . “Oh forget it,” she shook her head, “I’ll drive.”

This was not the start I’d had in mind.

We got into an ancient Volvo, me carefully moving things off the passenger seat. The car was filthy. Not Hoarders filthy but the kind of chaotic filth you’d imagine in Jackson Pollock’s car. Amid the empty plastic tubs and scratched cassette tapes was a sort of barnyard debris from her foraging expeditions. I imagined her screeching to a halt by the side of the road, grabbing the bucket, diving into a thicket, and emerging triumphantly with the very twigs necessary to obtain a rich orange or copper or red. What looked like desert brush to us was, in fact, her paint box.

We drove slowly out of town, making our way farther and farther until there was nothing but desert. Just as I began to wonder if I should’ve brought an overnight bag, we reached Arroyo Hondo and turned off the road.

Amid the single-wide trailers, barbed-wire fences, abandoned cars, and barking dogs was a small, nondescript building. Its doors were open, and an immense noise was coming from within. This was the mill.

The minute we went inside, I was hit by the overwhelming smell of lanolin mixed with spinning oil. The space itself was quite small, about the size of my local garage, just big enough for key pieces of equipment. I remember spotting the bobbins before anything else. Bins of empty ones, bins of full ones, bobbins tucked on shelves and tossed in cardboard boxes.

A man with a beautiful black ponytail was dropping tidy clumps of fiber onto a conveyor belt that led into the drum carder, a huge machine with whirring cylinders. I gasped as a frothy river of fiber poured from the other side of the machine right onto the concrete floor. A sudden urge came over me to lie on that floor and let the fibers spill over me—but I resisted.

The spinning frame stood idle, its long row of bobbins empty and expectant. Nearby, I saw slinky strips of white fiber being pulled into a noisy green contraption, spewing out the other end like soft-serve ice cream into a tall cylindrical bucket.

Something wasn’t working right. An older man in a gray T-shirt flipped a switch, lifted the lid, and pulled away some fiber. Another man, this one with a gray beard and a Miller Racing baseball cap, stood with him and consulted on that little clump of fiber, both of them pointing, nodding, rubbing it between their fingertips, shaking their heads. They must’ve agreed on something, because the baseball-cap man nudged the fiber back into the machine, closed the lid, and flipped the switch back on. Spotting us, he smiled and came over. This was Robert.

He gave me a cursory tour of the mill. I’d seen the carding machine, which, Luisa explained, was at the heart of her experiments with millspun dyed yarn. The more they could control the fibers as they went in, the more unique the results they could get on the other end when it came time to spin. I didn’t quite understand at the time, but I nodded eagerly.

Another spinning frame was in motion, strands of fiber worming their way from tall barrels to bars suspended over the machine, then through a series of rollers until spun yarn wound its way onto bobbins. Nearby, yarn snaked its way upward from cones, over another bar, through more loops, and was then paired with another strand before getting twisted together onto a bigger bobbin as plied yarn.

Robert yelled an explanation over the noise, but to be honest, the sights and sounds and smells were so overwhelming that I barely heard what he was saying. I just knew I was in love with this place.

At last, we ducked through a back door and sat down on white plastic lawn chairs in the dirt. Luisa and Robert sat with their backs to the wall, facing the afternoon sky. I could see large pebbles where the adobe walls had begun to wash away.

Luisa smoked. I held my breath until the breeze changed, then quickly filled my lungs with clean air before the smoke blew back again. I watched the cigarette as it got smaller and smaller, until, whew, she stubbed it out. She probably had asked if I minded her smoking, but after our bumpy start, I was certainly not going to tell Luisa Gelenter not to light up.

We sat there talking about yarn—about the current state of the knitting world, about the state of domestic textiles, about the fate of larger mills across the country. Robert had worked at many of them and witnessed their demise firsthand. Now, he operated a fraction of what he was used to, serving a very different audience. Instead of running ten hours a day to satisfy the voracious appetites of T-shirt or towel manufacturers, he was spinning small batches of wool for handweavers, knitters, and hobby farmers, people who cared about the breed integrity of their flock and knew each animal by name. Farms in the region tended to have Navajo-Churro sheep, or alpacas and llamas, even angora goats, animals who generally grew long, strong fiber. Robert set this up as a semi-worsted spinning mill with equipment that had been carefully chosen and calibrated to process these fibers. He also made yarns for Luisa.

When I brought up my passion for breed-specific wool yarn, Robert shook his head. He’d approached several breed associations over the years to try and get them to pool their fibers and spin special yarns from them. But back then, in 2006, nobody was interested yet. It turns out Robert was a man ahead of his time.

Whenever the conversation lagged, Luisa would pull out yet another cigarette. Robert, whose yellowed mustache suggested a lifetime of smoking, preferred to nibble on sunflower seeds, spitting the shells into his hand and dropping them on the ground. Every few minutes he’d pop another one in his mouth, and the two of them would launch into another story—mostly about people I didn’t know but they assumed I did. My interview skills were still abysmal, and I was so intent on impressing them, on proving I wasn’t that upstart kid Luisa had thought I was, that I didn’t dare reveal the depths of my ignorance.

On the subject of making yarn, however, Robert gave answers that have guided me well all these years. He cautioned me about the importance of starting with good fiber. “You can’t make good yarn out of bad fiber,” he explained, before adding, “but you can make bad yarn out of good fiber.” Holding the keys to the good and the bad? The people operating your mill equipment. “Oh,” he added, “and always get your carding waste back. They’ll just try to sell it to someone else.”

Eventually, the sun slipped below the horizon and the neighborhood dogs started howling. My family would be worried about me; it was time to go. We said our farewells, leaving a heap of butts by Luisa’s chair, a mound of sunflower-seed shells by Robert’s, pages of words scribbled in my notebook.

My yarn book came out a year and a half later, and the Maine Morning Mitts pattern—designed using Luisa’s yarn and offered as a free download—became a runaway success. For me, they were a fitting tribute to the beauty of Luisa’s colors, like knitted jewels for the hands. I know she was pleased and proud, but also a wee bit annoyed that the pattern called for just one skein.

Luisa and I would email back and forth occasionally. When she friended me on Facebook, I knew I’d passed the test. She would comment on my posts, usually something like asking about a rug in the background of a photo I’d taken. When she forwarded me emails with subject headers like, “Fwd: Fwd: HOW A DOG HUGS A BABY . . . ABSOLUTELY PRICELESS,” I’d finally become a friend.

As the years passed, the knitting world changed. Carefully nurtured relationships with magazine editors were no longer enough to stay on top, nor was having Julia Roberts as a customer. Ravelry arrived and, around that same time, the rise in so-called indie designers. Instead of being told what yarn to use by a publisher with advertisers to please, these designers got to pick whatever they wanted—often the least expensive yarns they could find or the ones offered to them free. That wasn’t Luisa’s way. She was a shrewd businesswoman, and giving away yarn to unproven strangers didn’t seem to be in her nature.

Along with the indie designers came indie dyers, filling the market with fresh new machine-washable wools in electric, acid-dyed colors we would affectionately refer to later as “clown barf.” Nuanced natural hues had no place under that circus big top. La Lana remained a pilgrimage stop for traveling knitters, but over time they left with fewer and fewer skeins in their bags.

They say the hardest thing for a musician is to play quietly, and the same is even more true for hand-dyers. While she’d built her reputation upon vividly nuanced skeins, by now Luisa was experimenting with the most intriguing and extraordinary yarns of her career—which also ended up being the least known.

Eternally curious and with a mill at her disposal, Luisa had been exploring the notion of using minimal color to define an otherwise white space. Whereas before she relied on handspinners to blend the colors, now she was doing it right at the mill, layering dyed fiber by hand, in varying intensity, atop undyed fiber as it entered the carding machine. She’d hinted at it in my visit, when we’d been looking at the carding machine. Once I had a skein of the yarn in my hands, I understood.

You see, the carding machine is to textiles what sifting is to flour, that essential first step in producing clump-free cohesion. It is built to blend. But Luisa and Robert were figuring out when and how to add color in such a way that it would remain distinct all the way through carding, pin-drafting (that green machine that was giving Robert trouble), and the final spin. It’s the most complex and demanding thing you can try, something you can only do if you control the mill equipment yourself—or have a really good working relationship with the person who does. You’re hacking a machine whose entire purpose is to mix, tricking it into barely doing its job. On a large scale, Eisaku Noro in Japan is the only other person who’s ever managed to do this successfully.

The results were astounding in their silence. Skeins of white puffy singles, upon closer examination, revealed traces of color that were distinguishable down to their individual fibers. As you knit, the color would gain intensity, then fade away again. It looked effortless, and perhaps that was the problem. By then, the expectation was that La Lana would remain a museum for beautifully colored handspun yarns. Here, you had barely any color at all, and it was masterful. But it wasn’t enough.

In February 2012, news came that La Lana was closing. It was the end of an era. “Faithful customers who could be counted on to drop a couple hundred dollars in wool and supplies have all but disappeared,” Luisa told the Taos News. “Plus, I’m getting old. We all are.”

A whole new batch of natural dyers had cropped up. Some had taken classes with Luisa, others knew her only vaguely by name. Whereas Luisa had learned her trade in South America, these newcomers had found their passion in places like India and Japan. They had blogs and Ravelry fan pages and Etsy shops.

But for La Lana to close, for Luisa to take down her shingle from lack of business, it was as if Georgia O’Keeffe had gone out for groceries and returned to find that all of the other artists and galleries had abandoned New Mexico, leaving her with nothing but a stack of canvases, some back issues of Knitter’s Magazine, and a hefty rent payment coming due.

After the announcement, Luisa was inundated with messages and orders for remaining inventory. “We are so sad about our closing,” she wrote me. “Well I am sad about it too . . .” She explained that she’d still offer her dyeing services for private clients, and I made a mental note to ask her about collaborating with me on my Great White Bale project. I promised to spread the word about her closing sale and I wished her the best of luck.

Later that July, she sent me a quick email about a yarn I’d just mentioned in Knitter’s Review. Apparently someone aquí en Taos (although born and raised in New York City, Luisa often veered into Spanish when she wrote) was planning on opening a yarn store in Taos with the same name as the yarn. “Will this be a problem for her?”

I was annoyed at being asked something I had no authority to answer, so I never replied.

On December 8, 2012, I learned that Luisa had died.

Melanie Falick, who’d spent time with Luisa while writing Knitting in America, later told me Luisa had been diagnosed with cancer. She left behind a son, Aaron, who works as a plumber in Santa Fe.

Upstairs in my barn studio, right next to my first-edition copy of The Principles of Knitting and dog-eared Barbara G. Walker books, is my shrine to Luisa. It contains several skeins of her yarn that I’ve never had the courage to knit. Every time I try to think of a suitable project, Luisa’s voice interrupts me. “Oh God, not the mitts again.” She shakes her head. “You want to blend me with Cascade 220? Are you loco?!”

In death, Luisa Gelenter has become one of those larger-than-life people about whom you tell stories to the young folk around that proverbial campfire. They nod, doing their best to imagine, to try and understand. But they will never quite grasp how exciting and awe-inspiring Luisa’s work was. She was the real deal, the kind of person who could leave even a glamorous Hollywood superstar momentarily speechless.

FROM BASEBALL TO BROADWAY: Swatching in the Big Apple

KNITTING CONFERENCES used to have a reputation for taking place in Atlantic City or Oakland or maybe a ski resort in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the off season. They were rarely in what you’d call “top-tier” destinations. The hotels usually had a free airport shuttle, dreadfully slow elevators, and lobbies that smelled like a swimming pool.

But when Vogue Knitting threw its hat into the event ring in 2011 with Vogue Knitting LIVE, it was a point of pride that its first show take place in the city most powerfully associated with the magazine and, in fact, with anything sporting the name Vogue: the Big Apple.

We gathered for three days in early January at the Hilton Midtown between West 53rd and West 54th Street, just up from Times Square, one long block from Fifth Avenue and within a Warhollian paint splatter of the Museum of Modern Art.

Every knitter of note had been invited, from Debbie Stoller (Yale-educated editor of BUST and author of Stitch ’n Bitch) and Meg Swansen (legendary daughter of the equally legendary early media maven Elizabeth Zimmermann) to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (two-time New York Times bestselling author and possibly the only woman alive who can fill a convention center with sock knitters). They were there, along with nearly every author, designer, and teacher I’d ever known or admired—50 teachers in all, and more than 250 classes. It was a three-ring circus of the very best, most awe-inspiring kind.

Instead of gum-chewing staff who spell your name wrong and express awe at how far you’ve traveled (“Wow, Maine? Really?”), here we had doormen and corridors of elevators and glistening marble floors that looked like they’d just been cleaned with a Zamboni. In the midst of it all was the deeply incongruous but irrefutable presence of knitting. Skeins of yarn had been arranged along the top of the check-in counter. A tall, glitzy event banner hung proudly by the main doors that opened onto Sixth Avenue.

The event was a three-day embodiment of, “If you build it, they will come.” More than 2,500 students and 6,000 market-goers converged for the inaugural show. Many traveled from afar, excited to have a reason to venture into New York City. Others emerged from nearby brownstones and co-ops and condos. Like superheroes responding to the Bat Signal of knitting, they came.

Some were regulars, the kind who can rattle off the names of every conference they’ve attended for the last twenty years. These are the knitting groupies who collect names and experiences.

“To tell you the truth,” one might say, “I wasn’t that pleased with the accommodations at Stitches East.”

Her friend would interrupt, “But they had that buffet. . . .”

“Oh you’re right,” she’d reply, “that was good. But the parking, that was highway robbery.”

They’d both nod and look around the room, arms folded, collecting more observations to discuss back in their hotel room.

For others, this was a first. I had an elegant, fur-clad woman in my yarn class. She wore diamond earrings the size of swimming pools, and she’d never heard the word “handspinner” before—nor did she understand what my explanation, “someone who spins yarn by hand,” meant. Yet, she was a knitter, the deeply intuitive kind who was probably taught by her mother (or nanny) at such an early age that it was instinctive now. She knew the how, and I was able to teach her the why—why, for example, she wanted a silk blend for that fine, flowing pleated skirt she was about to begin.

These events are the closest we have to our own university, to tenured professors and a formal curriculum. Because we lack sufficient financial clout to establish a permanent place for such learning, we have this traveling circus of experts who roam from town to town, event to event, squeaky-wheeled suitcases of samples in tow. Instead of vacuum cleaners or encyclopedias, we sell knowledge and skill acquired from decades of experience.

Our classes covered everything from cables and Estonian lace to welts, reversible color knitting, and, in my case, yarn. Some taught entire classes dedicated to helping you complete one pattern; others focused on technique and theory.

At the heart of it all, we were pitching inspiration. We taught the dream that you can make these things at home. And through achieving that dream, and with the ensuing confidence that brings, you feel a few inches taller after conquering something you honestly didn’t think you could do. Some run marathons to get this feeling, others knit. Some, like Susie Hewer, run marathons and knit and set Guinness World Records for it.

In our cozy bubble, it was easy to forget where we were or that anyone else was staying at the hotel. A brief elevator ride was all it took, a friendly smile, a glance at our name tag, a double-take, an exclamation of, “Knitting, huh?” followed by an awkward silence until they reached their floors.

Knitters, like nurses and librarians, seem doomed to stereotype. As Stephanie Pearl-McPhee first pointed out, there are more knitters in North America than golfers. We represent one of the largest consumer population segments. Yet we continue to be pigeonholed as weak and comically irrelevant. When it was announced that Hillary Clinton would become a grandmother, opponents suggested she drop out of politics to stay home and knit for the baby. Nothing is a stronger cultural lightning rod than two needles and a ball of yarn.

But by Saturday night in the Big Apple, we were feeling our oats. We’d bent the hotel to our will. We had the waitstaff and bartenders and housekeepers trained. Do not touch the shawl that’s blocking on the bedspread. Bring extra water to all the classrooms, and make sure it has lots of ice in it. When I say “Tanqueray and tonic,” I mean pronto.

As we sprawled and knit and drank and talked in the lobby that evening, I noticed a disturbance in our midst. Newcomers were arriving, fancy people in suits and winter coats and furs. They walked in clusters, exerting a confidence that suggested they, not we, were the ones who owned the place.

They were oblivious to our signage, to our yarn displays, to our sprawl, just as most of the knitters were oblivious to them. I watched as a man with a big camera took pictures of the people shaking hands.

I’d gone to the lobby to meet Stephanie for dinner. She was surrounded by fans near a group of the newcomers. I joined her and glanced over at the fancy people. A distinguished older gentleman met my eye. I smiled and he gave me a wink.

I learned later that I’d just exchanged a smile with Willie Mays, the highest-ranking living player in baseball history. He was in town for the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s annual awards gala, which was taking place somewhere in the bowels of our hotel. Sports Illustrated would describe that evening’s event as, with the exception of the All-Star Game, “the greatest assemblage of baseball stars in one place.” And it was happening during the greatest assemblage of knitting stars in one place.

I wonder what a Knitting Writers’ Association of America would look like. Where would we hold our banquets? And who would we invite? We have no shortage of designers, people with great skill in translating creative vision into numbers on paper. But we have far fewer capital-W Writers in the knitting world.

Stephanie would naturally be on the board, as would Debbie Stoller. June Hemmons Hiatt would get lifetime membership for her work on The Principles of Knitting. Of course, posthumous nods would be made to Richard Rutt for his A History of Handknitting and Elizabeth Zimmermann for, well, everything she did. Novelists Ann Hood and Debbie Macomber, they, too, would be card-carrying members. Maybe I’d try to pull strings and get historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich an honorary membership for her inspiring work, The Age of Homespun.

That’s still only six living people, not including myself. Forget the Hilton, we could just take a table at a diner for our meetings. Maybe a diner like the one I went to for lunch the next afternoon.