FIBEAR SPEAKS: Getting Righteous at the LYS

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Hi everyone I hope you had a fantastic holiday season and I look forward to writing another year’s worth of articles for my favourite bunch of readers. OK, my ONLY bunch of readers because I don’t know how to use wordpress, but still, love ya!!

This article was going to be about the pitfalls and pratfalls of springtime crafting, and namely how it almost always ends up being baby projects because evidently a winter-full of tv reruns, shortened daylight and lots of time on people’s hands always seems to end up with spring being chock-o-block full of a little bow-chicka-wow-wow if you get my drift. I may even write that article up for the summer edition, but something happened to me very recently that got my Irish up and so now y’all will bear witness to my restraint and good sense and can be called upon to do so by a court of law should the need arise. Not that it will, just sayin’.

Not many of you know this, but up until recently I was a pack-and-a-half to two-pack a day smoker. I have been since I was eighteen, so that’s fourteen years. Cigarettes in Massachusetts, where I live, are now obscenely expensive. So for that and a variety of other reasons, I quit. I’ve been on the patch for about a month by the time you read this, and honestly after the first days I no longer feel even the slightest need to go have a smoke. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I took the money that I would have spent on cigarettes on a given day out of the ATM like I normally would, then put it in a plain envelope taped to my desk. After my first week, I had (and I’m really horrified to admit I ever spent this much on smokes in an average week) $120. That’s right, one hundred and twenty dollars. Being a sane and now smoke-free happy-go-lucky dude I decided what any one in my position would decide. ZOMG I HAVE OVER A HUNDRED DOLLARS I CAN SPEND ON YARN!!!!!!!!!!! SQUEE!!!!!!

So I decided “Let there be Laceweight” and lo, I didn’t see laceweight that I wanted at the LYS I usually go to. Not to be dissuaded, I decided to try out a yarn shop about a half hour’s drive from me. I’d never been but others I know had been and seemed to like it. 

I found the place after using my cell phone’s GPS. It wasn’t hard to find, I just get lost that easily, and honestly after looking at the highway I was on I realized if I had just taken a left at the top of my driveway and basically kept on the same damn road instead of all the twists and turns the GPS told me to use I’d have gotten there eventually. I turned the car off, turned the cell phone off, took the hands-free earpiece off (or as I like to call it, “De-Borging”) and walked in. 

There was myself, the proprietor, and one other customer. Now the shopkeeper and the customer were poring over pattern books or a stitch dictionary or some such since the conversation I heard was about correcting some sort of stitch problem, so I could forgive the quick look-up-to-see-who-walked-into-my-sole-source-of-income-and-spit-out-a-quick-hi that I got as a greet/welcome to my store. They were sitting to my left, so I went to the right to give them privacy and elbow room. Besides, I soon found out that was where I wanted to be since I found some reasonably priced alpaca in the weight and color I wanted (and then some!!) but I also wanted to case the joint since I did some quick mental arithmetic and for what I was looking for I would only spend about forty of the celebratory no-smoke money. At that point, it started. 

Now most of you have never met me, and the picture that goes with these articles is slightly old, so let me paint you a quick picture. I’m a smidge over six feet tall, bald as a baby’s butt, and have a van dyke. I wear glasses for the most part since first thing in the morning I cannot poke myself in the eye without coffee. All this on a build that most would call “generous” and I call “bearish”.  Now despite all this I am one of the least intimidating people you will ever meet in your life. I look pretty much like what I am, an enormous geek. Now I’m not sure if the look I was getting from the shopkeeper was because I’m a guy or because I was browsing (with intent to buy) but I was feeling distinctly unwelcome when every four minutes I was getting tapped on the shoulder or asked “what do you want”. Not “what can I help you find” or “what sort of thing were you looking for”, but “What do you want today”… Well I want a twenty eight inch waist, ten million dollars, and a pony but today I’ll settle for yarn.  I told her I was looking primarily for laceweight but also puttering for inspiration. 

“Well what are you making?” 

I told her I hadn’t a concrete idea as of yet, hence the looking for inspiration. I had a vague Idea of something I wanted to make in terms of a table runner/altar cloth for the little altar that sits in the corner of my bedroom but I hadn’t fleshed out the design yet and she didn’t need to know any of this.

She presented me with some laceweight cashmere. I agreed it was lovely, but I wasn’t going to make a wearable object so that wasn’t really where I was heading. She then asked the magic question..

“Well what ARE you knitting?”

I blinked.. and said blithely, “ Oh I’m not, I crochet.” At this point you’d have thought I kicked a busload of six week old puppies into a vat of sulfuric acid for the look I got from this person. I’d never been a real victim of hookophobia before this. I didn’t think it would happen to me. She pointed, and I mean actually extended a finger and pointed to the wall I had just been looking at and said “Oh, well the lace weight is over there.” She then proceeded to go back to her other customer in the shop and ignore me. 

Now when I say ignore me I don’t just mean forget I was there. This was not a big shop and you can see from one end of it to the other quite clearly. As I’ve given you a description of what I look like you can imagine that in a yarn shop with ONE other customer in it and the only person in the entire freaking building who not only cleared the two meter mark but did not have fallopian tubes, I would stick out. 

I brought my yarn and cash in hand to the check out counter..and waited.. and waited… 

“Oh, you’re done?” Oh lady you have no idea how insanely done I am right now..

Now it so happens that this was the day I normally go to my stitch night. The store that hosts my stitch night is another ten minutes up the highway from this shop, so I had basically packed myself up and was ready to zip up and plop down in the café with a cup of coffee and chit chat for the next three hours. Being that I was going from this store to another store with no stop in-between, I asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question..

“Yes, and may I get this one skein wound on the ball winder please?”.  Gentle readers I was utterly SHOCKED at the response..

“Do you know how to use it?”

A) yes, I do, I not only own a swift and ball-winder but I own the exact same model you are using in your store. 

B) most people over the age of three have mastered the jack-in-the-box and are capable of turning a crank. 

Anyways, after having shelled out what amounted to seventy bucks for seven skeins (four lace weight alpaca and three bamboo in dk that I just HAD to try) I was evidently expected to wind my own damn ball at the store. I am blessed to have six LYS within a reasonable driving distance of my home. I have (now) shopped at every single one of them. At EVERY SINGLE BLESSED ONE besides this one, when I make this request the response is invariably “sure, give me two ticks” and then we make pleasant chitchat over the clacking of the bamboo and the chugga-chugga of the crank while the proprietor or salesperson to whom I have just given a good chunk of MONEY is performing GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE and getting my purchase into a useable form. 

So I’m winding the ball the best I can. This set up is rigged for a small woman. The distance from swift to ball winder is just less than two feet. I am well over two feet wide at the shoulder (in fact I wear a 50L suit coat in case you were wondering) and have to keep moving my left arm in some sort of jerky parody of St. Vitus’s dance so I don’t thwock myself in the funny bone with a big hunk of spinning bamboo. The customer who had the stitch problems is now taking HER turn to verify that I am in fact a yarn-crafting male and not some sort of petty thief or Viking bent on pillaging the yarn shop and burning it to the ground amidst much quaffing and hearty laughs. 

“So YOU crochet?”

“Yes’m.” (Clickety-clackety OW clickety-Clackety)

“Well what do you make?” I shrugged at this point and answered honestly 

“Darn near anything, just as the spirit moves me.”

“Well what, though, do you make afghans or dishcloths?” 

This was not asked in a Do-you-prefer-one-or-the-other way. This was asked in a This-is-all-that-crochet-is-possibly-good-for-so-which-do-you-make way.  At this point, I wanted one of two things. On one hand, I wanted to raid my SCA friend’s wardrobe and come back with a two handed broadsword and a Xena-like battle cry, or I wanted to suddenly become a jedi and tap into the Force, leaving these women choking on the floor while saying “ I find your lack of faith in Crochet most…distressing.” Being raised a gentleman, I simply answered...

“Well let’s see I make afghans, amigurimi, shawls, shrugs, teddy bears, toys, bags, scarves, hats, socks and have had some of my finished objects featured on national yarn manufacturer’s websites.” That’s true by the way, my robot amigurim-E was featured on the Lion Brand notebook. This took both the ladies by surprise. I asked if the proprietor had Ravelry access. She did, and I gave her my handle so she could check out my finished projects page. They both looked at the page, especially the SIX shawls I have finished in the past two months.   (Ten shawls in 2010, and I have more than half done. Muahahahahaha!)

All of a sudden, it was like I had established my credentials. I was a real person and worthy of their time and attention. Both Crochet as an art form, and myself as a crocheter and a person with genetically engineered outdoor plumbing had proven ourselves as valid art form and artist, respectively. Unfortunately at that point I had finished the one skein and decided to get the hell out of Dodge before I started throwing a diva-fit so large it could be seen from space. This person and this shop will never be named. I will not give them the press. I had gone through the gauntlet of tests they had thrown at me and I passed them without breaking a sweat. I had even educated them to the possibilities one hand and one hook can offer.

And I did it all without wanting a single cigarette.

Joshua, aka the Fibear, can be found on ravelry @ Benegesseritrm, or at benegesseritrm [at] yahoo [dot] com