After the Fall

As pretty much everyone who was there knows by now, a vendor's cash box got stolen at NHSW. Amazingly, it was found later, with the cash gone, natch, but with the checks and credit-card receipts intact, which is at least something. Apparently the vendor was covering things and closing down on Saturday afternoon, turned her back momentarily, and turned around again to find she'd been robbed. (I joined the steady stream of people who headed over to her booth to improve matters a bit by buying something, and did I snag some awesome laceweight. Pix to come.)

Hearing this, I felt as if I'd reached into a basket of beautiful sock yarn and grabbed a scaly coil instead of a skein. Chris ascribed the crime to our becoming known as easy marks, too honest, too trusting. It's disheartening to find that snakes have crawled into our yarn basket, making life just a bit darker and harder for everyone.

Yet Chris also told me that not only was there thievery in Maryland as well, there were incidents within the knitting community, involving brazen attempts to copy other people's work. Now, I photograph beautiful things I see at festivals all the time, and I think most of us take inspiration from fellow knitters (I might wish it otherwise, but unlike some designers I can think of I wasn't born a genius), but hanging out in a booth with pencil and paper diagramming a pattern? Taaaacky.

Of course I knew that even in the world of fiber arts all is not always sweetness and light. I still think that we're a nicer-than-average crowd on the whole, but from now on I'll keep a closer eye on my wallet, and on my friends' cash boxes. And I'll remember that we are, after all, human beings, for better and for worse.