The Meet and Greet

Hello everyone and welcome. Help yourselves to the champagne and nibbles and make yourselves at home.

As you all know, we're here to knit the pretty as a peacock shawl. I know some of you have already started, some are waiting on patterns and/or yarn to arrive, and some of you might be spectating for the moment.

No matter, we're all equal here. You start when you're ready. And when you do, don't forget to let us know - because the secret to a dynamic knitalong group is a noisy bunch of participants, don't you think?

Now, as an ice-breaker, I suggest we all drink four beers and find a karaoke machine. (No? Oh well, works for me). OK, let's just introduce ourselves as we come on board, and after that we'll start talking about our progress . I hope that's ok with you guys.

I'll go first. My name is Ailsa. I live in Wollongong, Australia - which is a beautiful city with a bad reputation (a little like Detroit - but we have a steelworks not car manufacturing) on the South Coast of New South Wales. It's about an hour's drive south of Sydney.

I have been knitting for about five years or so, and am completely nuts about it, much to the chagrin of my husband and family. I am 40 years old on Monday 12th, and I have one husband, two children (boy - 9 and girl - 7) and a dog (shit-zu/maltese cross named Storm).

I work in the civil service in a job-share (we both do half the hours of a fulltime job). I kind of die a little inside every day I go there. But it's a 'good job' and I need money to buy yarn, so I try not to complain.

I got the test-knit gig through a kind of 'six degrees of separation' type experience out there in knitblog land. My friend Donni thought it would be a good idea to get a randomish group of bloggers to participate in a group swap thing for a year back in 05. Anyhow, one of the people chosen was Jae - and that's how I found out about her and vice versa.

Jae did a course on lace knitting last year, and the peacock was born. When she'd finished it, she wanted to have her charts tested so she asked me to do it. So, it's not like I knit for a living or anything like that - I just fluked a good gig!

So enough about me, tell me about yourself.