Knitting Night

Our home group for church has a pattern of meeting that is sometimes very sudden. Like, "We're not meeting until the second week in January for Christmas break. Just kidding! We all want to hang out, we've got about eight hours to put something together, let's invite everyone we can think of and see who shows up." For this reason, we keep our Thursday nights open :)

There has been a lot of interest among the ladies in the different circles of church, homeschool, and small group who want to learn skills from each other. There are jewelry makers, paper crafters, embroiderers, painters, sewers, crochet-ers and of course, knitters.

As the text went out for the guys to gather at a deli in town, a similar text went out to lots of ladies to come for crafting night number one--knitting! I gave myself a refresher course earlier in the day, because I haven't knitted in a long time. Buck and I drove separately (he was giving several other guys' night fellows a ride), because I didn't intend to stay very late. We'd had a youth leaders' meeting the night before and it went an hour longer than I expected. Normally, I enjoy diving into all the social stuff, but I had a lingering headache for about three days (probably because I ate sugar on New Year's so my body had to go through the detox process again). Expecting a packed house full of sick kids (there is sooooo much ill in the hood right now!), I had my exit strategy pre-planned and the kids pre-informed of expected departure time.

But then just a handful of ladies arrived to learn to knit (probably due to the last minute invite), and it was so calm and chill. The kids all separated into their pockets of age range. The girls were upstairs playing, the boys went outside to play football on the trampolines, the littles watched Justin Time on a video screen in the room next to us . . . very different than what I was expecting! I didn't want to start any projects and Caelan's current project is huge, so we were on hand to help teach. I made myself a cup of very berry tea (I don't really like tea from a tea bag source, but this was pink and cute and I actually drank maybe half of it :), and sat down to chat and teach and cheer for the learners (who were pretty excited, like I was to accomplish making fabric!)

Mrs. K and her kids were there, too! This was fun, they aren't part of our current small group, although it sounds like Pastor D is recruiting them :) Mr. K went with Buck and the guys to the deli, and they talked for a couple of hours. Buck got home about 45 minutes after the kids and I did.

I think these craft nights will continue once each month while the guys are meeting and the ladies are not, but now are :) Ha! Tricky, but it works. Super glad we've found this friend group. Again, one of the reasons I didn't want to switch churches was because I have enough friends. Well, God knows better. You can never have too many friends in His family :)