Chaos Theory

Some Random History:
(included to up the intellectualness of this blog for my big bother)

A long time ago, somewhere on the planet earth, someone had thread and two sticks and figured out that using these seemingly primitive tools you could make cloth. I suppose before that someone had grass or reeds or overly fuzzy sheep and figured out they could make yarn. THEN they grabbed two sticks and proceeded to make cloth. Most likely they made lots of mats, wash clothes, blankets and scarves before they figured out more complicated, but useful things like the sock, sweater and snuggie. Anyway, realizing they were on to something good, they taught their friends and family who taught their friends and families and so on and so forth and so this concept passed through the centuries.*

In 1862 Alexander Parkes publicly demonstrates the first man-made plastic, which he calls Parkesine. He was very humble.

In the 1950s, there were two bored Canadians, Harry Wasylyk and Larry Hansen, who put their Canadian brains together and fought off brain freeze by inventing the plastic bag.**

From roughly 1957 - 1976, with the help of the brains of several different people, the Internet was invented. Completely unrelated to this, somewhere in the United States a future Nana learns to knit. Perhaps this is the start of:

The Butterfly Effect (which was coincidentally just mentioned on warehouse 13):
(aka how knitting rescued a key from being lost forever)

Somewhere in the US, some lady named Kay Gardiner learns to knit. Somewhere else in the US, Ann Shayne learns to knit.

In France a crazy person chops up plastic bags and hooks the resulting loops together, creating plastic yarn that they use to knit a chair. The pattern is published in a magazine.

A Nana teaches her granddaughter how to knit. The cute and sweet and charming granddaughter teaches her aunt, the aunt teaches her mother-in-law.

Kay and Ann meet on the Internet, become friends and write a book. Kay reads about a French plastic bag chair and realizes it can be modified to work with old clothing and can be used to make rugs. She dubs this "calamari knitting" and includes a story about it in her book.

The mother-in-law buys her daughter-in-law (aka the aunt) a gift certificate for Christmas. The mother-in-law comes to visit and she and the daughter-in-law go to the yarn store to spend the gift certificate. They buy a book that has an article on calamari knitting.  The aunt tells her niece (aka the granddaughter) and the niece's father overhears. He donates some old pants to the cause, pants that were going to be thrown out, that were, in fact, on the trash bin. The niece tells the aunt "you should clean those, they're dirty" and gives a look. The aunt cleans the pants along with other laundry and discovers a mysterious key. The aunt calls around and discovers it's her brother's (aka the niece's father) post office box key, saved from the pocket of the pants that were going to be thrown out.

And that is the story of how knitting saved a key and is why Joe owes a thank you to a lot of people the next time he opens his PO box.

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* non-verified, historically questionable account, but some things must be forgiven when spinning a good (or at least moderately ok) yarn.

** the "bored" part was not historically verified. Also it is possible they were not fighting brain freeze, but were trying to figure out a cheap way to keep their feet dry. These two theories will be explored in a future blog post. Or not.

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