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Another essential knitting tool that doesn’t fit in a
knitting bag is a Good Chair in a Good Spot. 
Over the years, I have knit in living rooms, waiting rooms, parks,
trains, cars, beds, airplanes, coffee shops – wherever I happened to be and
happened to have my knitting along.

 

But I have favorite knitting spots, of course.  The car on roadtrips, for example.  Starbucks is a good one, too.  At home, I usually knit in my leather chair
in the living room – usually in the evening. 
During the summer, I enjoyed knitting out on the deck, but autumn has
settled in and I doubt I will do any more deck-knitting this year.

 

But now I have a new spot – and I am pretty excited about it
(okay, even knitters may think I am a little crazy now, but…)

 

The leather-chair-in-the-living-room is cozy in the evening,
but a bit gloom-ish in the afternoon.  
Our autumn-winter-spring skies are (almost) perpetually gray, but even
the thinnest daylight is welcome as the nights elongate.  Our living room faces east and has narrow
windows – there are some lovely tall firs glowering nearly to the walls of the
house, too.  So, in the afternoon there
is essentially no daylight – not even the thin stuff.  Meanwhile, across the way is the dining room
which faces west, has a generous bay window – and the lovely tall firs are a
good stone’s throw from the house.  So,
lots of thin daylight!

 

Frequently, I sit and knit at the dining room table;  except that 
I don’t much care for having a big heavy table hanging over my lap while
I knit and the chairs are sturdy wooden ones that are not well-suited for the
leaning-back-a-bit position I prefer for knitting.  So the dilemma:  if I stay in the dining room, I get fidgety
and stiff, if I retreat to the living room, I cast longing glances at the
luminous dining room window and become depressed.

 

Enter: the sudden realization that I have small sewing
rocker (i.e. a rocking chair without arms – arms get in the way when one is
sewing by hand and, coincidently, when one is knitting).  I fetched the rocker – which is compact
enough to fit between the table and the window without my having to rearrange
anything.  I zapped a mug-worth of coffee
I found stone cold in the pot, put my iPod into the speaker-thing which is attached
to a kitchen cupboard (a benefit to being in the dining room beside the
kitchen), located a piece of dark chocolate (another benefit of being close to
the kitchen), pulled out my lace knitting, sat down on my rocker in a pool of weak
Pacific-Northwest sunlight, and began to knit!

 

I found that the rocker has a pleasant throaty creak and
that the ability to rock a bit helps me settle into my knitting rhythm – and
decreases my need to fidget.  AND I get
daylight in the daytime.  Sometimes it
really is the simple things that make all the difference.

Anna-Lisa Kanick Avatar

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