"If you could have only one yarn on a desert island, what would it be?" is a question often posed in Rosie's Yarn Cellar.
Lisa Myers, the owner of the Center City knitter's haven, said she would take the 100 percent wool yarn produced by a women's cooperative in Uruguay.
Myers visited the Penn Bookstore last night to read from her book The Joy of Knitting and to initiate a charity knitting circle to benefit Project HOME and the University of Pennsylvania Health System intensive care nurseries.
A corner of the bookstore was transformed into a knitting center, evoking comfort with whimsical knitted apparel on display -- a purple, spangled scarf, a rainbow-colored child's sweater and a pointed elfin hat. Myers said that she is "a sucker for color."
The knitting session was a forum for knitters to "improve the world," according to Myers, as well as to practice a craft they love.
As audience members gathered up materials and patterns for baby hats and afghan squares, they chatted with Myers, sharing stories of their own knitting experiences, listing their favorite stores and discussing which type of yarn they would choose to bring on a desert island.
The audience, ranging from knitting veterans to first-timers, munched on cookies and sipped tea.
"I learned to crochet from my grandmother," said Caroline Couture, a Penn employee. "I want to pick it back up again."
Before projects got underway, Myers opened with a passage from her book. "Through the last two centuries, knitting has been an unpaid domestic work ... a craft, not an art," she said.
Myers' first book -- as well as her second, The Joy of Knitting Companion: A Knitter's Handbook -- seems to announce a kind of knitting renaissance. In effect, Myers hopes to make it a practice that women "who are now secure in our newer roles may appreciate." A firm enthusiast, Myers argues that "knitting can be part of women's new lifestyle."
Although she learned to knit at age 8 from her grandmothers, Myers did not embrace her passion until later in life.
While a graduate student in Penn's English Department, Myers said she was "in denial" about her true calling. "I was teaching and, meanwhile, I was knitting," she said.
Eventually, with the opening of her yarn store, she "switched which was [her] profession and which was [her] hobby."
Her books seem to have just sprouted out from this general knitting enthusiasm. Writing the books "sort of fell into my lap," Myers said.
