This is the story of The Best Knitting Group Ever™. It is both tragedy and  enthralling comedy. It is a story of the dangers of forming a knitting group in a college town where the population is inherently transient.

The story starts in August 2007. Ravelry was still very young and there were only a ½ dozen or so people in Bloomington on the site. Huan-Hua and Leigh emailed the few Bloomington people to see who wanted to get together and knit. Nicole said she was game.  And so they met. And they knit. It was agreed that they would meet every other Thursday. Within the next few weeks, they were joined by Elli and Kalani.

Every other week, they would knit, talk, brag and bitch about the terrible music. A few months later, Katie and Norma started coming. By the next summer, Sarah had jumped into things.

That was about when things started to change. Suddenly, we were a group of knitters who’d become friends. Norma and Leigh were gone for the summer but were ever present in the conversations.  We started to meet every week. Changes in locations provided adventurous bonding experiences (like being shushed at poetry readings). We had the first idea for a collective project (details for this project will come eventually).

That was also when Huan-Hua left for Milwaukee. Her boyfriend had finished his MBA and was going to get a Ph.D.  We had a send-off gathering and in future meetings, joked about Skyping her in, and lamented the fact that we had no scissors now that she was gone (Huan-Hua always had a pair with her).
The next academic year came and the meetings dropped to every other week. We decided to start meeting at a local bar. Norma began calling us a drinking group with a knitting problem. Our conversations included word take-overs, presidential fisting (let’s include a link to this one) and pornographic pursuits. The laughter and giggling at each meeting brought curious onlookers who would point at us and say “oh look! Knitters!” More knitters joined us, including Claire and Kalani’s horrible sister.  Then crocheting Dan started coming.

And then, when Melanie and another Sara started coming and we needed a way to organize without endless rounds of email, we all (mostly) joined Twitter. And started tweeting back and forth about zombie attacks, yarn pee and sick children, even when it wasn’t Thursday night. We were having so much fun, how could we not call ourselves The Best Knitting Group Ever™?

And then… one summer night, over a round of ½ price martini’s another evil idea was hatched: a group blog… where we have this much fun, even as we all go our separate ways… in more than 140 characters and public to the world. [1]

[1]. Though really, this is just groundwork for us to take over.[2]
[2]. Yes, we did just format our about page with footnotes. It’s the academic side to us.

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