On Sunday I took a trip to the nearest knitting store, Knit-n-Stitch=Bliss which I'm finding is a mixed bag. Everyone there is always very, very nice to me. They keep a basket of toys for children, which my son loves, and they always have time to discuss things and give advice. I almost never find the yarn I want there, and I think their needles are overpriced, but sometimes I still buy them because I want them to stay in business. Local business is a good thing. So after a typical frustrating trip without the color or type of yarn I wanted, I humped the baby stroller with the baby in it down their stairs followed by a sniffling woman. When we got to the bottom, I turned to her and realized that her trip to the knitting store had made her cry!
I asked her what was wrong and heard her story. She's a new knitter taking a class there who’d missed class and had called ahead to see if they would give her advice because she was stuck with her project. When she got there they told her they didn't have time to talk to her! Now, while I was checking out in the same store at the same time, I had two people waiting on me, and we discussed in detail why my tension would be tighter knitting English vs. continentally, including a cast on. In the leisurely ten minute conversation I had no idea they were in some deep rush. While I wheeled my happy baby out, someone within the same store gave her such a brush off she was reduced to tears.
So we sat on the bench outside the Starbucks and looked at her problem. But she had no problem. She had knit up all the pieces of this baby sweater perfectly, and blocked them perfectly, in cotton no less, with no sign of tension issues. I was impressed. It was a great beginning project, better than I can do in cotton stockinette. She just couldn't figure out how the pieces fit together. So I looked at the pieces and neither could I. "Where's your diagram?" I asked her, but her instructions didn't have one. Say what? How do you teach beginning knitting without a diagram of the finished pieces? She was confusing the collar with the arm hole, as I did as well at first, but when we turned it around, the whole thing fit together perfectly. It took me, not so experienced knitter, about five minutes, maybe less, to show her how it went together.
As my husband, the marketing guru, pointed out, they have just lost a potentially faithful customer. I somehow can't believe that the store owner would be happy to hear this. At the now defunct Yarns International, I put back over $200 worth of yarn in the empty store after a clerk threatened to charge me an hourly rate if I asked her a follow up question to my first. Ironically, it was the super nice employees at Bliss that sent me their way when they didn’t have what I wanted. Now Bliss has gone that way? They should change before they’re defunct.
Besides making the store look bad, it pointed out the knitterly snobbishness which until now I had never associated with that store. I mean, come on, it's just a little crafty hobby, and everyone's got to learn the basics at some point. I get treated all "insidery" because I show up with some finished product that gives me cred? Puh-lease, if your ego is that invested in your knitting you need to reassess your source of self-worth. One would hope that providing a little encouragement, being generous in praise and kindness would be a bigger ego boost than shutting down a teary newby. This is why I love Nona. Because her motto is, “If Nona knits, then you can too.”
