“Once upon a time there was an old woman who loved to knit. She lived with her Old Man in the middle of a woods in a curious one-room schoolhouse which was rather untidy, and full of wool.

Every so often as she sat knitting by the warm iron stove or under the dappled shade of the black birch, as the season might dictate, she would call out to her husband: ‘Darling, I have unvented something,’ and would then go on to fill his patient ears with enthusiastic but highly unintelligible and esoteric gabble about knitting.

At last one day he said, ‘Darling, you ought to write a book.

‘Old man,’ she said, ‘I think I will.’ So she did.”

Thus begins Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitter’s Almanac: Projects for Each Month of the Year, a delightful and quirky book about knitting. We will be having a book discussion the second Friday of each month (before Yarn Tasting) from 3-4:30, starting this February with her first chapter “An Aran Sweater.”

I have six copies for $7.95 at the shop, but you can probably pick a copy up at the library or even off your own shelves.