Something around 289

The real point of today’s trip through Gray and Lisbon Falls was to get to Purl Diva in Brunswick for Franklin’s photo shoot for the 1000 knitters project. We got there right around 4:00, when the store had closed as a store for the day and was just being a photo studio. Cars were parked on the street facing back towards U.S. 1. I drove past the end of the line, turned around, and joined the small parade of photo subjects walking toward the store.

They were very organized. As soon as we walked in I was handed a slip of paper with my number (first come, first served) and a clipboard with a model release form to fill out. There was cider and cookies (pretty daring for a yarn shop to have food right there next to the yarn!) for all.

Purl Diva has lots of examples of knitted things hanging up (is that a Knitty Clapotis at the top center of the picture there?) and displayed on shelves. It was a little too crowded to look around a lot — there was standing room only by the time we got there, and it only got more crowded as time went on. I was number 17 and Franklin was photographing number four or five by the time I got there, so there were say 13 people ahead of me. When we left they had given out number 33 I think, so there the last person in by that time had a longer wait than I had.

To break up the wait, our hostess passed around an advance copy Woolbur, a children’s book about a nonconformist lamb.
Here’s Franklin at work. I peeked in at the studio area when he was about on number 12.

How it works is, you sit up on a high stool, figure out how you want to hold the looong ribbon of knitting he has — it’s mostly ecru worsted weight cotton with a big band of indigo somewhere near the other end — and start knitting on it and talking. Franklin gives the impression that he would be comfortable talking to anyone, which of course means he’s pretty good at making his subjects comfortable. You knit on the ribbon, anything you want so long as you leave the same number of stitches on the needles as you started with. Franklin takes pictures, and when you’ve done two rows you’re done. It’s not that your turn is over as soon as he has one good picture, or that your turn lasts until he has one good picture, two rows and that’s it. He tells you what sequence number you are in the project. I don’t remember precisely but I think it was somewhere near 289.

I had brought along a handful of my “knitting” rubber stamps.

About 10 years ago Arlene’s Aunt Lee had invited us to sell stamps at a weaving guild convention that she was helping organize. We designed a bunch of stamps specifically for that event, including a drop spindle and a couple of spinning wheels, and that ball of yarn and a skein. This particular one has been the best selling stamp of all the ones that I’ve designed (as opposed to Arlene’s designs, several of which have sold three or five times as many as this one). The “3620 F” is our catalog number, not part of the stamp, included in the GIF so people can’t use our stamp catalog pages as clip art. As copyright holder, I can use it on my blog if I darn well please. Well anyway, I gave a stamp to the store owner, one to Franklin, and one to Marlena of Swatch This. I also met Jessica of saisquoi. And there were probably other knitbloggers there that I didn’t introduce myself to. All in all, it was lots of fun being at the knitblogging center of southern Maine for an afternoon.