Best Quote I Heard All Day
"The French are just useless. They can't organize a piss-up in a brewery."
--Elton John

Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire ete arrive. Sorry, no accents grave available.

Edith Eig's True Roots Story
You know, every time I've read about Edith Eig and her La Knitterie Parisienne on the lists and elsewhere, I've always wondered if she could be the same Edith who once owned The Canvas Pad on Rte. 46 in Parsippany, NJ, where I used to go to buy the occasional needle and sock yarn.

Well, after all, how could it be the same person? After all, Edith Eig is the LYSO to the Hollywood stars, such talented knitters that they aren't (Goldie Hawn excepted).

So I did a Google to see if I could find out if my hunch was correct--that Parsippany Edith was one and the same as Beverly Hills Edith. I mean, Martha Stewart grew up in Nutley, NJ. Why couldn't Edith Eig get her LYS start in Parsippany?

Well, son of a bitch. It is the dear, sweet, continentally confused and badly bleached blonde Edith that I knew who sold all the crappy French yarn you didn't want from her shop. Anny Blatt, Phildar, Pingouin, and a host of other, totally unappealing glitzy Euro-trash "fibers." Here's her story--it's a bit long, but does show a picture of her shop on Rte. 46, although it mentions neither Parsippany nor New Jersey.

It's apparently only cool to be from NJ if you're Bruce or Jon or Jack or Bruce Willis. It doesn't fly for the ladies, evidently.

I remember well when she decided to sell the shop and move. It must have been about 7 or 8 years ago. She simply couldn't flog her stuff to the local knitters and told me that she wanted to move out to California to be with her kids. I only went into The Canvas Pad occasionally (she did sell needlepoint) because the place was such a disorganized mess, only she and her husband could find anything. That precluded meandering around looking and feeling stuff. And she'd follow you around if you decided to be independent and wander off upstairs where she couldn't see you (like there was anything you'd want to steal). The Canvas Pad was an old Victorian house and the store occupied both floors.

I'm glad to see that La Knitterie Parisienne seems to be a tad neater than her old digs. And clearly she's making far more money and getting far more publicity than she ever would have in Parsippany. I never found her particularly helpful when it came to knitting advice. But then, I never asked.

Ah, Edith Eig. Knitting purveyor to the Knitting Curmudgeon.

Now, is that rare, or what?