Mother of Purl by Eig, Edith (best desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📗

Anthony Hopkins; and The Mothman Prophecies, starring Debra Messing and Richard Gere. Tal is a high–powered Hollywood executive whose position comes with a certain level of stress. Tal walked into my shop one afternoon to learn to knit. She’d heard that knitting was relaxing and therapeutic and needed to take the steam out of her pressure–cooker life. Ironically, the biggest stress in her life was caused by her fear of flying. After a recent trip back to Los Angeles from Tokyo, Tal came to show me her scarf. It had to be at least thirteen feet long and was riddled with dropped stitches. “I know this isn’t my best work,” she said sarcastically, “but I think I owe my sanity to this scarf. My seven–teen–hour flight was filled with eleven hours of turbulence, and I thought I was going to die. Then I started to knit. It was the only thing that kept me from having a total panic attack. To tell you the truth, with every stitch, I literally felt the stress ebbing from my body.”

Chapter Six

EMOTIONAL KNITTING

Besides the obvious pleasure of owning a successful business, one thing I find truly gratifying about La Knitterie Parisienne is that it enables me to help my knitters reconnect with something important that is missing in their lives, to feel some connection to their mothers and grandmothers, to their roots. When I first came to America, knitting

was a solitary activity; I was the first to reintroduce the idea of social knitting to a new generation.

For me, the knitting experience has always been a social one; in my first store, The Canvas Pad, I encouraged people to sit and linger and work on their projects. What was popular in New Jersey has exploded into a cultural phenomenon in Los Angeles; whether it’s Wednesday nights or Friday mornings, I always have people sitting at my table, chatting, knitting, and enjoying each other’s company.

I love this aspect of what I do. In a city like Los Angeles, where everyone is from somewhere else, it’s hard to meet people and develop friendships, and even harder to replace that feeling of having older female relatives—a mother you can call on when you feel out of your depth. Always available at my fingertips is a long phone list of my regular customers—they are more than clients, they are friends. We have dinner, share the holidays, and know and care about each other’s good and bad times. Just because a pregnant member of the knitting circle is confined to bed rest does not mean she is out of the loop: I will call her from the hubbub of Wednesday night so she can talk to her friends and feel part of the circle again.

SEEN & HEARD AT LA KNITTERIE PARISIENNE, PART 1

Edith’s ability to understand your work is amazing. You can know something is wrong but not know what it is. So you hold up your work from across the room and she will say, “Third row down, about halfway across—rip!” She’s seen the mistake, and she already knows what you have to do.

I’ve been coming to La Knitterie Parisienne for years now, and all my family know that it’s really helped to keep me grounded, give me somewhere to go to be with friends and just relax. A few months ago my mom called me on my cell phone with some bad news—the first thing she said was “Yoli, are you knitting,” and I said “No,” and she said, “I wish you were …”

I guess I’ve spent too much of my life here, because every so often my husband will call me and say, “Honey, I’m driving past the store now, shall I throw some food and water through the door?”

My husband was so excited when I started knitting, because he thought he’d save money since I was shopping at a yarn store instead of the Beverly Center. When I finally brought him in, he looked at a beautiful Prism scarf and said, “That’s gorgeous,” and Edith said, “Of course it is, that’s a $95 scarf,” and my poor husband replied, “Do you have anything else?”

SEEN & HEARD AT LA KNITTERIE PARISIENNE, PART 2

Drive to Edith’s shop: 1 hour. Cost of gas: $6. Sitting at Edith’s table: priceless.

It’s so wonderful. I knit two rows here, two rows there. I can relax for ten minutes. It’s added to my life; it’s more than a knit shop.

“You’re too stressed, go knit at La Knitterie Parisienne for a couple of hours,” said one husband to his wife!

The best words Edith can ever say to you are “Bring it here, I’ll fix it.”

This sense of community is what I mean by “emotional knitting,” and it’s what I hope in this chapter to help you to create for yourself. Over the years I’ve been called upon to organize customized knitting socials for countless celebrities. The baby–blanket social is always the most popular, but there are dozens of other holidays and special events that can be organized around a knitting party—the only limit is your imagination.

ORGANIZING YOUR KNITTING SOCIAL

There are two kinds of knitting socials. The first is organized to accomplish a specific task, for instance, to make a baby blanket for an expectant mother. The second kind is organized for purely social reasons, perhaps to try and jump start a knitting group at your local coffee shop. In either situation, you need to consider the same basics: location, materials, guests, and theme. As knitting socials become more popular, you’ll need to be adventurous to draw guests.

SEEN & HEARD AT LA KNITTERIE PARISIENNE, PART 3

“I couldn’t stop, didn’t have time to stop, but my car stopped anyway.”

Debra Messing

“You made me an addict.”

Caroline Rhea, on opening the door to my shop on her way to dinner.

“I program my car. It only knows one way …to your store.”

Susan Tolsky

In all my years in business, it was Carnie Wilson who pointed out something I’d never