Knitting in Massachusetts

Purl for a Purpose on Nov. 9 to raise money for Pine Street Inn

Boston's Pine Street Inn is having a Knit-a-thon Sunday, Nov. 9, from 11:00 a.m. till 5:00 p.m. to raise money for its housing program for formerly homeless people. It works like this: participants pledge to knit or crochet a certain number of 9"x9" squares and ask people to either make a flat donation or pledge on a per-square basis. The squares will be assembled into blankets that will be given to tenants of the Pine Street Inn residences.

Pine Street Inn makes it easy to create your own fundraising web page (through the site FirstGiving.com) so you can collect donations online. They ask that you start making squares before the event so that more blankets can be assembled during the Knit-a-thon. (Any kind of yarn is okay; just label each square  to show its fiber content.)

Sign up for Purl for a Purpose, or learn more about it, here.

If you can't participate, please consider helping me raise money by clicking the Donate button and giving online.

Save your $300. New edition of Principles of Knitting due by fall 2009

I'm posting what I thought was going to be a scoop, then realized it's not -- by about nine months.*

But I'll post about it anyway for those of you who may not have heard, or may not be familiar with this book: The Principles of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt, which is out of print and selling used for around $200-$300 a copy, is due to be reissued this fall by Simon and Schuster. The author is revising and updating it for the reissue. (Thanks to Jane J. at Porter Square Books for checking on this; if you live in the Cambridge, Mass., area, you might want to check out the store's monthly Knit One, Read Too knitting group or the Oct. 15 reading by Yarn Harlot Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.)

I first learned about The Principles of Knitting when it was recommended in another knitting book. (I think it was Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles -- which I gave away once I discovered the Magic Loop method of sock knitting.) The reviewers on Amazon all give it four and five stars and call it a knitting bible. I borrowed a copy from my local library and it does seem to live up to the praise. And last I heard, the planned retail price for the new edition was $45.

*It's already been written about here.

Blogging again - at least for now

I've recently had the impulse to blog again, so I reactivated my Typepad account, at least for now. I will probably move this blog over to Blogger, though, since it's free and has many more features than it did when I first started blogging. I'm not sure I'll keep updating it. We'll see how things go. At least if I move it to Blogger, it will be free, so I won't feel bad if I only update it once in a great while.

I'll probably delete the lists of knitting and spinning groups, though. They were getting time-consuming to keep up, and what with other sources of information out there (like the SnB Boston Yahoo Group, Ravelry and several maps of area yarn stores), it seems unnecessary.