A New Chapter...

Hi everyone!

I’m really, really excited to be blogging for the very first time. It coincides with the launch of our new website. The blog and website will allow us to reach our customers more easily and allow our customers to reach us much easier as well. At Knitted Together we like to consider our customers as our friends. So our hope is that any new web-only customers will also feel our friendship as they enjoy a bit of the Knitted Together experience online. Be sure to check out www.knittedtogether.com for everything we have to offer: class info, monthly newsletter, shopping, everything you want to know about the Wyatt family and what led us to creating our shop, our customer projects, and more!

Well, for those of you who don’t know me, I’d like to start my first blog by telling you some of my knitting history.

I learned to knit with my mother when we took a “mommy & me” class at a small shop in West Des Moines, Iowa sometime in the early 1960s, somewhere around 1962 to 1964. One of the first projects I remember knitting was slippers. The pattern was a simple flat piece that was garter stitch with a knit 2, purl 2 ribbed toe and you seamed from the toe to the cuff. I also played couture to my Barbies, knitting all sorts of rectangular things for my dolls to wear. I certainly wasn’t going to give Nicky Epstein any future competition when it came to my doll clothes designs! By junior high I put my knitting on hold and picked it back up sometime during my college years.

By my late 20s I was working in Alice Brown’s yarn store (Macra-Weave Plus which was located in Windsor Heights on University Avenue and 73rd Street). Alice helped me to refine my knitting skills and I became obsessed with knitting, and started making sweaters. Yarn had become really exciting with lots of textures and brilliant colors. It was the early to mid 1980s and knitting had become popular again. Besides knitting, Alice also taught me how to treat customers with kindness and friendship. Every day we had a group of women come into the shop to sit, knit, and talk -- it was the beginning of what everyone calls a knit-along! I’ve been blessed by a few of the customers from Alice’s shop wandering into Knitted Together, and I’ve really enjoyed catching up!

About a year after Alice retired and closed her shop I turned my knitting interests into a job at Meredith Corporation (Better Home and Gardens). Eventually I got to do a knitting magazine called Knit It! and a crochet magazine called Simply Creative Crochet. I think doing those magazines may possibly be the best thing I could have done in my journey to becoming a shop owner. My knitting friendships with lots of incredible designers, my knitting skills and pattern editing, all have helped me to become a better knitting shop owner.

I can’t wait to tell you what I’m knitting these days. I’m planning to keep you posted weekly on my current favorites in patterns, books, tools and yarns. I’m also going to give you a weekly recipe that we like at our house plus lots more.

I hope you enjoy our first recipe. It’s one that we eat frequently for lunch and is pretty healthy.

Tim’s Chicken and Veggie Salad

Ingredients

• One grilled chicken breast (we actually slice one breast into thin halves … they cook more even and quicker … then use one half per salad … you may want the whole breast)
• Dice veggies to the size of your liking (medium size works best … remember this isn’t a lettuce salad). The following list is what we use:
• Red peppers
• Yellow peppers
• Celery
• Cucumber
• Sweet red onion
• Tomatoe chunks or cherry tomatoe halves
• Avocado
• Green olives and Kalamata olives
• Cheese: (we use) Gorganzola crumbles, (you may like) feta crumbles, blue cheese crumbles, etc.
• Brasswell’s Creamy Vidalia Onion dressing

We put the ingredients into a bowl that the salad would be served in as we cut and mix everything … then add the dressing and toss it together.