More Knitting

This afternoon, Jon and I went to a graduation ceremony for our friend Jodi (the same Jodi I mentioned in my previous post: For crying out loud, I'm KNITTING!!). Anyone who has ever attended a college graduation ceremony knows that they are boring and long, and the entire point of going is to wait for one person's name to be called so that you can cheer for them and their achievement. So, I took a small knitting project with me. It is a dishcloth, and is intended as a Christmas gift for none other than Jodi and her husband. Little does she realize that I spent most of her graduation ceremony knitting!

For crying out loud, I'm KNITTING!!

So yes, I knit in public (KIP). It happens. Lots of people do it (though not many around here, it seems). Monday night, we had a rare opportunity to go to a movie with friends. As is usual for me, I took along my smallest current work in progress (WIP). I can knit in the dark by touch if it is a simple stitch and does not require me to follow a pattern, and that is what I do at the movies. It keeps my hands moving and keeps me from eating popcorn (which I'm really not a big fan of anyway, but if it's there, I'll eat it).
Jodi (one of the people we went with, and the one who sat next to me) just did not get it. There are now commercials before the previews (how sad is that?) and once we got settled in our seats, I broke out my WIP. Jodi exclaimed, "Sara! Why are you crocheting? Are you that bored?" and before I had a chance to reply, she turned to her husband Randy and exclaimed to him that I was crocheting. I calmly corrected her, "I'm not crocheting, I'm knitting, and it does not mean I'm bored since I am fully capable of multitasking, thank you very much."
Throughout the course of the rest of the commercials and the previews, and into the movie, Jodi would occasionally lean over to me and tell me to stop crocheting. She even leaned across me to talk to my husband and tell him to make me stop. Well, since I wasn't crocheting, I had no trouble ignoring the request (though actually ignoring her was harder). I only stopped when I realized that I had picked up a stitch somewhere. I couldn't see well enough in the dark to find the mistake, so I put it away and settled in to watch the rest of the movie.
If I had thought I was truly distracting her, I would have stopped without a problem. But I know for a fact that she only noticed me knitting during the movie because she saw me doing it before the movie. And if she ever would have looked closely enough, she would have noticed that my eyes rarely left the screen, so obviously I was watching the movie. I actually was more engaged in the movie before I stopped knitting than after. She moved about and made much more noise than I did with her insistence on checking to see whether I was still knitting.

The sad thing is, what annoyed me the MOST about it is her insistence on calling it crocheting! I love to crochet, and I do it well. But I can't do it by touch and therefore would never crochet in a dark movie theatre. The first mistake on her part I will overlook, but the continued repeated mistakes still bug me.