by Clara Parkes
The more I looked, the more I noticed. Children’s drawings had been lovingly taped along the wooden wainscoting below the kitchen bar. Each table, each chair, even each tablecloth was different, sporting flowers, polka dots, abstract swirls and zigzags, in shades of pink, orange, red, yellow, blue, and gray. Taken together, it felt as warm and velvety as the inside of a peach.
L’Oisive Thé would be a remarkable shop no matter where it was, whether in Paris or even Kansas. Which, as it turns out, is where Aimée is originally from. She, too, had come to Paris as a college student. She’d met a boy, Gilles, and had fallen in love. He tried to join her back home in Kansas, but as the song goes, How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?
Gilles suggested they return to Paris, and her family encouraged it. As a young woman, Aimée’s mother had made the journey from Korea to join her husband in the States, and she knew both the hardship and possibilities of such a big move.
Aimée took the leap and off they went. They married in 2002 and had two children. Back in Kansas, Aimée had enjoyed a successful career managing marketing for the industrial equipment manufacturer Caterpillar Inc. But once in France, she discovered that her degrees and experience were essentially useless. She would have to start over from scratch.
By 2008, she and Gilles were looking around at all their friends buying houses and starting families. “We looked at our lives, and it came down to this,” she told me. “We could buy an apartment and be in debt for twenty years or more, or we could take out a loan and start a business I’d been dreaming about for years—and be on our feet again within seven years.” They chose the latter.
Entrepreneurism hadn’t really taken hold in France when I lived there last. Starting up one’s own company, going freelance, not only were these foreign notions to most French, but they also went against the very culture of the place. Young people were supposed to know what they wanted to do by their early teens and direct their studies toward that goal. They’d get a stage, followed by a job that they would likely keep until retirement. The system was just beginning to break down when I left. Students were emerging from school to find no stages, no jobs. They’d done as they were told, but the system couldn’t keep its end of the bargain. The same thing was happening in the United States.
As its name suggests, L’Oisive Thé was originally conceived as a tearoom. A skilled baker and a tea connoisseur, Aimée was also an avid knitter, so she dedicated a small space in her tearoom to hand-dyed yarns from England and the States. These were yarns nobody had ever seen in France before. At first, she said, it was a hard sell. “People were used to paying twenty-five euros per kilo, and here I was asking that much for one skein?”
But with a lot of sacrifice and hard work, she has cultivated a loyal and appreciative customer base. That single shelf soon became a wall, which has since taken over most of the shop. You could say she has been a key figure in bringing France’s knitting culture into the twenty-first century, with not only hand-dyed yarns but also knitalongs and Stephen West workshops. She is now living the dream, one that includes plans for expansion, and it suits her.
One by one, the members of her TricoThé knitting group arrived. We made introductions. They were chatty and enthusiastic. Just back from Norway, one woman quickly pulled out a skein she’d bought on her trip. We oohed and aahed and discussed all the things she could make with it. Ours was the same conversation I’ve had with knitters everywhere.
I couldn’t help but wonder how different my life would’ve been if this shop, this community, had existed in Paris twenty-one years ago. Maybe I would’ve found myself and stayed after all? No, I had to leave in order to find my way. But to return and find community for who I am now, it gave me a deeply calm, settled feeling. I’d caught the other swing of the trapeze.
I didn’t have any knitting on me, a problem Aimée was more than happy to remedy. But yarn in my bag would have been lipstick on the collar to my family, proof that I’d broken my promise, that there had been yarn stores on this trip.
The women were lovely and the chairs so inviting. How I wanted to stay and hear more stories, but family beckoned, and I was resolved to keep what remained of my promise to them.
A summer downpour began as we were saying our goodbyes. Aimée handed me an old-fashioned clear hoop umbrella that someone had left behind. It felt fitting to move through the streets in a plastic bubble, still observing without quite being back in it. As my Métro car passed over the Seine, the clouds parted. Rays of sunshine hit the choppy waters and reflected back in a million tiny sparkles.
That evening, my family and I enjoyed dinner at a guilty-pleasure tourist trap that even the locals enjoy at least once. We piled onto long benches at communal tables and ate “as they did centuries ago,” yanking vegetables from a basket for our salads, cutting slabs of pâté, eating meat on skewers, and filling pitchers with wine from a large wooden barrel. A gray-haired man came by with his guitar and sang folk songs to us. Everyone joined in, whooping and cheering and stomping their feet. Long-forgotten lyrics spilled out of my mouth.
Tomorrow, we would part. I’d fly home, and my family would board a train for Switzerland. Ours would not be a sad parting, as I knew I’d see them again soon. And my parting from Paris would not be sad either, for I knew I’d see it again soon—and the next time, there would be yarn.
A THING FOR SOCKS AND A VERY BIG PLAN: Portland, Oregon
THE CITY OF PORTLAND, OREGON, has long enjoyed a reputation for the quirky. The home of Voodoo Doughnut and Powell’s Books, the inspiration for the hit TV show Portlandia, a birthplace of food-truck culture, and host to the Velveteria: Museum of Velvet Paintings and the World Naked Bike Ride, Portland has never been one to reject the unusual. And so it was that, when a pair of knitters approached the Oregon Convention Center about renting it for a sock-knitting conference, little debate ensued over what the answer would be.
The Sock Summit was the offshoot of “seven lunatic women with a thing for socks and a very big plan.” At its heart were author and blogger Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (better known as the Yarn Harlot) and hand-dyer Tina Newton, aided by a dedicated staff of volunteers.
Along with Debbie Stoller, Stephanie shares the distinction of being one of the only knitting authors to hit the New York Times bestseller list. Hers has been the Oprah of blogs, with one mention holding the potential to make or break upstart designers and yarn companies. By the sheer force of her personality alone, she managed to raise more than $1 million for Doctors Without Borders. She does not do things small.
Which is why nobody was actually surprised when the news came out that she and Tina had rented out the Oregon Convention Center and were planning to stage an event there. Were we pleased and excited? Yes. Surprised? Not really.
This was 2009. Ravelry had been live for just two years and was still in beta. Major knitting conferences were still the domain of the XRX/Stitches franchise, with Interweave’s Spin-Off Autumn Retreat maxing out at just 200 people. Only after the runaway success of this show did Interweave and the publishers of Vogue Knitting wake up, sniff the air, and venture into the big ring themselves. It was almost inconceivable for a couple of indie upstarts to plan anything of convention-center magnitude. The fact that they intended to focus exclusively on socks seemed even crazier. But the name was pure genius: It would be called the Sock Summit.
We teachers believed in the idea, and forty of us heeded the call. It was an impressive list, with names like Nancy Bush, Cat Bordhi, Meg Swansen, Anna Zilboorg, Sivia Harding, Judith MacKenzie, Cookie A, and Anne Hanson, to name just a few. We all shared collective goose bumps upon hearing that Stephanie had managed to locate the legendary Barbara G. Walker and to lure her out of knitting retirement for what was her first appearance in decades. Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, by then in seriously poor health, was equally wooed.
Classes were scheduled on anything that could possibly relate to socks, from heels and toes to cast-ons and bind-offs,
textured colorwork, arch shaping, photographing our work, and even the proper ergonomics of sock knitting. While an outsider might assume they would be hard-pressed to come up with seventy-eight sock-themed workshops that first year, in fact, the organizers had to reject far more proposals than they could accept.
I modified my Yarn 101 workshop to focus exclusively on the needs of sock knitters. It felt a little contrived at the time (I really just wanted to be there, socks or no socks), but the preparatory research was so compelling that it ended up inspiring my third book, The Knitter’s Book of Socks. Other teachers, not all necessarily fans of the sock genre, were so eager to be a part of this pathbreaking event that they, too, gladly reshuffled their offerings.
That first year, the knitting public had been whipped into a frenzy by the time registration finally opened. Every blogger and publication and yarn store and knitting guild had been percolating news. At the designated hour and minute and second of registration, more than 30,000 concurrent users hit the website and scrambled for classes.
Nobody had believed the organizers when they said this system needed to be able to handle major traffic. Who could expect that from a mere knitting event? With a gentle pat on the head, Stephanie and Tina had been sent on their way, glasses of water in their hands, and reassured all would be fine. It was an experience they had repeatedly during the planning and execution of this event. By the time the second Sock Summit rolled around in 2011, they had invested in a world-class system that would, at last, work without fail.
But in the case of that first registration, all was not fine. The system quickly went haywire under the weight of so many users. Classes appeared sold out when in fact they weren’t, shopping carts were suddenly emptied, error messages flashed, knitters were left bitterly disappointed.
That alone, the feeding frenzy, the ephemeral nature of registration, the luck of getting in, the randomness of having your hopes dashed by the software, created a kind of star zeal we’d never seen in a knitting event before. When the dust cleared that first year, some 1,800 people managed to snag spots in 78 classes. At the second Sock Summit, that number ballooned to 130 classes and 6,000 attendees, roughly the population of Harvard, Massachusetts. They even succeeded in getting the mayor of Portland to declare it Sock Knitting Week. As I said, Stephanie doesn’t do small.
Normally at larger events, the key personality stays above the fray, relying on staff to handle the minutiae of the show. But at the Sock Summit, Stephanie was both key worker bee and star. She also taught several workshops. Staff wore earpieces and carried radios in their pockets, and more than once I watched as Stephanie was forced to interrupt a heartfelt confession from an admirer to tap her ear and start another conversation. Everyone wanted a chance to interact with her.
A few months before the first Sock Summit, after all the classes and the schedule had been set, word got out that a group of knitters in Australia just set a world record for the most number of people knitting simultaneously (at 256 people). It wasn’t hard to do the math and figure out that our 1,800 registered attendees could easily blow that number out of the water—and so it was decided that we would also set aside fifteen minutes to break a Guinness World Record.
We dutifully assembled in the largest ballroom and took our seats. Having been prepped and pumped by Stephanie, we all knit for fifteen minutes without stopping. Official observers set the tally at 935 people. We were filmed and left confident that we were victorious. Which we were, until Australia’s knitters fought back and regained their title. In 2011, a group in Taiwan seized the lead, and, last I heard, it was snapped up by the National Federation of Women’s Institutes in the United Kingdom, which managed to wrangle a whopping 3,083 knitters for the task.
As much as I’d like to think people came to Sock Summit primarily for the teachers and workshops and for the chance to help set a Guinness World Record, the marketplace was another real draw of the show. More than 150 vendors had been assembled from across the United States and as far away as Australia.
Sock knitting was at its height. Because socks use just a single skein of yarn, sometimes two depending on the yardage, they’re the perfect way to use up those hard-to-repeat skeins from independent hand-dyers. Think about it: A dyer who manages to fit six skeins at a time in her microwave doesn’t have to worry about maintaining consistent colorways for larger projects if she focuses on serving sock knitters. It was a marriage made in heaven.
We had the brightest, best examples of indie hand-dyers on hand, as well as makers of tools, bags, accessories, and even shoes. It was like walking through a life-size, three-dimensional version of Etsy. What a thrill to see this vast exhibition hall, the kind usually reserved for boat and RV shows, filled instead with yarn and knitters. Members of the Teamsters Union guided semitrucks into the loading docks and unloaded cartons and cartons of yarn.
The excitement on that first opening morning was so great, the line to get into the marketplace so long, that Stephanie and Tina guarded the doors and got everyone to sing “Ninety-nine Skeins of Yarn on the Wall” to keep the masses from revolting. As soon as the doors opened, the scrum began.
The flip side of showcasing smaller producers? Smaller quantities. Like the Beatles on their 1965 world tour, vendor booths were swarmed. Shelves were picked bare within minutes of opening. It was the registration frenzy all over again, this time with the embarrassment of full, public display. Skeins were grabbed out of hands, tossed over heads, held in triumphant “neener-neener I got it and you didn’t” poses in pictures for social media. Market scores became people’s badges of honor. If you didn’t get a skein of Goth Socks (which was picked clean by fellow vendors before the show even opened), you weren’t a cool kid. Or so some wanted it to seem.
But the real gem of the show was hidden deeper in the marketplace. Past the screaming crowds and their wads of cash sat an actual sock museum with painstakingly curated examples of historically significant sock replicas from “the dawn of time” to today. We had World War II Red Cross socks, argyle socks, socks knit by Barbara G. Walker and Elizabeth Zimmermann. We had beautifully knit examples of medieval socks, Anasazi socks, and popular sock designs like Monkey, Rivendell, and Pomatomus. Walker, rather surprised by the adulation she was receiving from all these knitters, did swift business selling her old handknitted socks out of her suitcase that weekend.
At the second Sock Summit, Stephanie and Tina announced their intention to bring livestock onto the show floor. It took quite a bit of haggling with the convention center, but they won out. In the end, three sheep, fittingly named Heel Flap, Instep, and Gusset, took up residence in cozy pens near the back of the hall.
They were the stars of the Fleece to Foot contest. Six teams competed to card, spin, ply, and knit two pairs of socks out of Heel Flap, Instep, and Gusset’s freshly shorn wool. I was tasked with spinning the “standard” yarn by which the teams would base their own efforts. At the sound of the word Go! the teams toiled until exactly 3:30 PM, when the needles were stopped. While nobody actually succeeded in finishing the challenge, a team called World Wide Mash-Up completed the most knitting and was declared winner.
We made no attempt to set another Guinness World Record at that second Sock Summit. We learned and laughed and connected; we acquired; and we even danced at a 1980s-themed sock hop. The sock hop was just a warm-up for what happened next.
Late on Saturday afternoon, I walked out into the public square in front of the convention center. Several others were already there. More knitters streamed into the square until we numbered in the hundreds, all casually milling, all with a skein of yarn in our hands.
When the clock struck 5:15 PM, the first notes of “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from the film Dirty Dancing began to play over discretely placed loudspeakers. The crowd came together, everyone faced the same direction, and we began a choreographed dance in which we serenaded the skein we were holding. It may have lacked the element of surprise, and the dance may not have been visi
ble to more than a handful of passersby, but we rejoiced in being part of the very first knitting flash mob. For those of us there at that moment, we really were having the time of our lives.
With two sold-out shows under their belt and a state-of-the-art registration system now in place, it was pretty much assumed that Stephanie and Tina would continue to ascend higher and higher Sock Summits. Even before the second show was done, people were already announcing their plans to return in another two years. Hotels were picked, roommates chosen, classes discussed before anything had been inked or announced. Then, in April 2013, Stephanie announced that the Sock Summit was no more.
Naturally, there was disappointment. Oh, how we’d looked forward to seeing what new records we’d be asked to help set, what new heights Stephanie and crew would manage to reach this time. But I suspect they were just following the cardinal rule of high-altitude mountaineering: Always preserve enough energy for the descent. “It’s a round trip,” mountaineering legend Ed Viesturs once wrote. “Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.”
MIGHTY SCOOPS AND PHO TO GO: Celebrating TNNA in Columbus
BOOKSELLERS HAVE BOOKEXPO AMERICA, the gift industry has NY NOW, and in the knitting world, industry folk converge twice a year for TNNA, our largest and only trade show, sponsored by the National NeedleArts Association.
Here, the people who make our world go ’round—the manufacturers, distributors, designers, agents, and retailers, to name a few—come together to network, take classes, and conduct business for the coming season. TNNA is where trends are launched, competitors are eyed, and closely held secrets are revealed. Are we headed toward novelty yarn again? You’ll get your answer at TNNA. Is the pompom back in style? A quick walk through the show floor and you’ll know.
As with any such trade organization or show, TNNA has strict membership requirements designed to keep out the spies, the amateurs, the kids desperate for an early peek at what Santa has in his workshop. Depending on the membership level you seek, from Affiliate to Student, Retail, or Wholesale, you may even have to share bank statements and letters of recommendation from other members. Every few years, you have to do it all again. Even the sitting president had to get two letters of recommendation to requalify when her time came.
