Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_01 by Crewel World

vest hand-crocheted herself with cotton thread in a pineapple pattern, and her favorite earrings, shaped like tiny scissors. She patted her dark curly hair, cropped close to her narrow head. She looked neat and competent. She smiled at the reflection, admiring the whiteness of her teeth. Perfect!
    She rose onto her toes before stepping off in the direction of Crewel World, a mannerism she had seen in a musical once and copied whenever she was feeling ebullient. She had twenty minutes left of her lunch hour, time enough to get there and start making friends with her new rival. What fun!
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    Betsy sat behind the big old desk that Margot used as a checkout counter. She was biting on her lower lip. In her hands were two metal knitting needles and a ball of cheap purple yarn. Open on the desk was a thin booklet that promised to teach her how to knit in one day.
    The reason her lower lip was being held in place was that doing so prevented her from sticking her tongue out.
    Betsy considered herself very well coordinated. She could ride, she could shoot, she could thread a needle on the first try. Back when her hair was long, she’d taught herself to French-braid it down the back of her head without looking. But knitting was different.
    â€œCasting on” she could do. She’d cast on twenty-five stitches, as instructed, and on the second try done it loosely enough so that knitting was something she now could also do, after a fashion. She’d proved that by doing about an inch of knitting.
    But purling was not possible. The needle went through the knitted stitch, apparently as illustrated, and allowed itself to have a bit of yarn wrapped over it, but it wouldn’t capture and bring through the purl stitch. Not without the aid of a third hand, which she didn’t have.
    Not that she could see why anyone wanted to purl anyhow. It looked like the same thing as knitting, according to the illustration, except up and down instead of across. Which is why it was impossible. One knitted from one side to the other, not upward.
    Could it be some kind of secret knitters’ thing? They let outsiders try and try to purl while they, the cognoscenti, the in-crowd, the clique, rolled on the floor snorting and giggling? And after a week or two allowed as how there was no such thing as purling? Sure, it was just a hazing thing they did to people who wanted to join the knitting fraternity—er, sorority. Though Betsy knew there were men who knitted. Sorternity?
    Wait a second. If she tucked the end of the empty needle under her arm ... Rats, for a second there she’d thought she’d got it.
    She gave up and went back to knitting another row, slowly easing the needle through, wrapping the yarn, lift-twist-tipping it back, slipping the old stitch off.
    She remembered how her mother would sit and watch television or her children play in the park, while her hands, as if with an intelligence of their own, moved in a swift, compact pattern and produced sweaters and scarves and mittens by the yard.
    And she’d watched Margot do the same on Sunday evening up in the apartment.
    While here she struggled slowly, stitch by stitch. Still, she was actually knitting. If she kept this up, in a year she’d have a potholder.
    Margot hadn’t watched television while she knitted, but talked with Betsy. Of course, there had been the odd pause while Margot counted stitches—knitters were forever losing track, it seemed—but on the whole, Margot had been able to keep up her end of the conversation.
    It had been very comfortable up in that apartment, the puddles of yellow light making everything warm and intimate. They’d done some catching up—though now that she thought about it, Betsy had been allowed to do most of the talking, about Professor Hal (the pig), and the cost of living in beautiful San Diego (the sunlight in April on the white buildings and the endless sussurant crashing of the ocean, the dry,