SummerKnits

Last week, I attended a Christmas function. Actually, I attended three Christmas functions last week and have several more to go... but this one stuck in my memory because someone at the venue had decided that live coverage of a monster truck racing event was the perfect entertainment for a professional association's Christmas bash. This was all very novel (our regular venue plays quiet classic jazz), so in between catching up with all the people we hadn't seen since last year and eating insane amounts of tasty nibbles, we watched the races.

Between each race, the station ran ads for future monster truck racing events and for SummerNats, a car festival (judging from the ads - burnouts, drag racing, alcohol and scantily clad women in more or less equal proportions).

Now, I wasn't sure about the burnouts, but as the evening wore on, I felt that the knitting community could certainly use a 'must attend' megaevent (note to self: next year, wean slowly onto a diet of beer and high-fat, sugary foods from October to lessen the brain trauma when Christmas party season begins). In my mind's eye, I could see the rows of tents, each with a family knitting out the front... the young blokes cruising the campground, yelling "Show us your knits!"... the knit-offs, where steely-eyed seniors confront Gen X yarn-bombers and handspun alpaca goes head to head with furry acrylics... the grid girls, all wearing knitted or crochet swimwear (with a nice throwover or the cute dressing gown from Jo Sharp's Knit Issue 2 to keep things decent) ... utes bringing in extra tea, milk and sugar to fuel an evening spent around the campfire, swapping pattern tips... And finally, on the closing night, a massive fireworks display, with fireworks blossoming into balls of yarn, flashing needles and maybe a jumper or two.

At the moment, of course, that's largely wishful thinking - Aussies still don't knit in summer and nobody who has a choice camps out in winter! But maybe in five or ten years, if our suppliers keep releasing lovely things (like Filatura di Crosa's new Tempo), we will have enough summer knitters to book that campground and start planning the fireworks.