A Weekend With Julie and Cookie

I had a marvelous mini vacation last weekend with one of my favorite people, Daughter Julie, and one of my favorite designers, Cookie A. The event was a two-day sock-knitting seminar put on by one of Julie's knitting pals. It was held at a private home in Solomon's Island, on the shores of the Patuxent River, with a view of its convergence with the Chesapeake Bay. Even on a cloudy grey morning, the setting was beautiful and, when the front passed, leaving a bright sunny afternoon, it was absolutely spectacular.

One of the classes we'd signed up for was called, "Intuitive Chart Reading" and actually, I really didn't expect much to come out of it. Fortunately, I was greatly surprised.

Let me explain. I learned to knit in a time when knitting patterns were either painfully terse, leaving much to the imagination, or verbose, dictating each stitch in its place. I went out of my way to avoid the former and sought out the latter. When I worked those patterns, I felt a sense of pride that I could make sense of it all, akin to being able to read Klingon. I felt like the designer was present with me as I knit, coaching me stitch by stitch. So, fast forward to the present age. Almost no one writes patterns in English anymore. OH NO, they draw charts. Each stitch is still there, in its specific order, but now each one is represented by a strange arcane symbol--one looks like a Breast Cancer ribbon, others resemble ceiling rafters or bridge support fixtures. I never thought knitting charts made much sense and working from them was tedious. Usually, I retreated to the past and transcribed each row onto an index card. Then, I felt comfortable again, flipping each card as I completed each row.

Cookie began the class by asking each one of us to say how they felt about charts. Those women who were of a certain age--that is, over 40--said almost the same thing, "Charts are strange and I hate them." The younger members of the class were, as a group, less passionate, just wanting to better understand charts.

Cookie A is a perky, cute-as-a-button young lady with green highlights in her "pixie" haircut. It doesn't take long to recognize that she's very bright and extremely knowledgeable about all things knitting. Still, I had doubts that I would witness any conversions, especially not my own. In the course of a few hours, using a dry erase board and four different colored markers, Cookie A, made sense of the whole business of charts. She showed us that the silly little symbols weren't silly at all, but stylized representations of how the stitch looks and what it is doing in the pattern. The "Breast Cancer Ribbon" symbol indicates a twisted stitch and the bridge fixtures are really cable stitches. She also helped us to make sense out of charts that aren't square and the little blackened-in squares that I now know mean "do nothing."

Soon, we were all speaking Chartese, discussing yarnovers and double decreases, like it was our native tongue. By lunch time, I felt like I'd discovered and conquered a whole new territory in the Land of Knitting. It was pretty damn awesome.



After that, it was all just gravy. We had dinner at a nice Italian restaurant and a group of us stayed at the local Hilton. Sunday was a taste of Indian Summer--clear blue skies with a warm breeze. Julie and I attended another class about designing rib stitches and then, spent the afternoon in the front yard, chatting and enjoying the view. Cookie even taught a short lesson on the lawn and the sailboats scooted by. I couldn't imagine that a trip to Europe could have been any better.