In case you haven't noticed the giant Meetup badge on the left side of my blog I recently started a new knitting group. Well, it's not exactly new. Long-time readers of this blog (am I allowed to say that when I've only been posting for 8 months?) know that I started the Upper East Side Knitters as a Yahoo Group last year. I decided to move the group's web headquarters over to Meetup.com to utilize their unique features such as RSVP's, message boards, and to gain greater publicity.

UES Knitters lives here.

It's working well so far. We met last Tuesday and had a decent turnout of really interesting friendly people. We were going to get together tonight in Central Park to knit during the New York Philharmonic concert but got completely rained out. I'm planning on us meeting every other Tuesday or so mainly at M Rohr's coffeeshop. The shop recently moved to a larger location at E 86th St. between 1st and 2nd Aves.

If any New Yorkers out in cyberspace want to come out of lurkdom go ahead and join my group. There's no fee to join except to buy a cup of coffee or something while you're in the shop. My idea was to have frequent get-togethers mostly in the same place so people can get to know each other and feel comfortable getting to the location. If anyone has a job like mine the workload is very unpredictable and often requires staying late so I made the start times at 7pm figuring people could either go home and change or grab a bite to eat on their way over.

I'm having fun running this group so far. I'd like to extend a public thanks to Julian for being my faithful assistant organizer and always being supportive. Whether pushing me to go ahead and start my own group rather than just talking about it to always coming along even when he was tired or had other things to do I'm really lucky to have him :-)

P.S. I presented my felted laptop case to its recipient and he loved it. It fit his Mac Book perfectly. Yay for designs that actually knit up the way I planned them to (we'll make no mention of my "Shall We Dance" lace shawl)!