incredibly hard to get to the Great Oz, who she believes can send her home. At no point does she say, “Scarecrow, Tin Man, Lion, this place is a hoot. Much more colorful than Kansas and I don’t have to clean the barn. Let’s set up shop in Oz”.
One of the devices commonly used in this type of fiction is that the fantastical world turns out to be a dream. This annoys me to no end. We get caught up in this other world only to be told it wasn’t real. Dorothy, Alice, Merle, all dreamed it. Merle is the spunky protagonist in Wanted: A King: Or, How Merle Set the Nursery Rhymes to Right by Maggie Browne. I like an author who commits his/her characters to the journey and doesn’t cheat them or us in the end.
I’ve recently started commuting to work by train so I find myself looking out the window at all the places a portal could be slyly tucked away: a neglected substation, a small shack by the bridge over a river, a clearing quickly glimpsed as we hurtle by. When I was growing up, there was a natural fort by a summer house we went to. A pine tree was growing over a small cropping of rocks and the branches created a canopy that hid the play space. No adults went there and we entered through a curtain of pine
boughs to a castle, a ship, a safe house for spies.
"A portal is just a quick way of getting there without all the hassle of planning the trip. "
We first met Kim and her husband, Scott [a senior editor with the magazine] when we visited Esther’s Place Fiber Studio in Big Rock [see this issue’s Thimble article]. We struck up an immediate rapport and couldn’t stop talking and comparing notes. Kim’s passion for both knitting and publishing made it clear that our readers would enjoy be introduced to Chicago Knits.
Tell us how you became interested in knitting?
When I lost my job in 2009, I needed a hobby. I got tired of going to JoAnn Fabrics and half the store was yarn and I couldn’t do anything with it. I bought a book there which included a set of needles and an instruction book, and a $3 skein of yarn (Red Heart Super Saver). I made the world's ugliest scarf and didn't stop there. Pretty soon, my friends were buying the stuff I was making. When I started hanging around Sifu in Edgewater [design studio and fine yarns], I met a bunch of people who were only too happy to help me learn more about knitting. I didn't know that when I started knitting that it would turn into a personal revolution.
By Barbara Barrows