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Reclining Knitter Raises Ire, Causes Plane to Be Diverted

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woman escorted off plane after fight with knitterWhen I first saw this story, I thought it was a joke. But, apparently, it happened. A Delta flight from New York headed to West Palm Beach, Florida, made a stop in Jacksonville instead on Monday because of a fight that started over knitting. Sort of.

One woman, whose name is not given but who was described in some reports as an “older woman,” reclined her seat in order to make a little more room for her knitting.

The woman behind her, identified as Amy Fine, was apparently trying to take a nap on her tray table when the seat reclined. Her reaction was yelling and swearing.

According to a report from the guy sitting next to the knitter, when the flight attendant came over Fine said she wanted the plane to land.

Fine was met on the ground by police but not arrested. No word on what happened to the knitter.

Perhaps this is why you should always use circular needles while traveling? (Just kidding.)

Have you ever had a dramatic reaction to your knitting? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo by Joanna Thatcher/ABC News from cell phone video of the woman being taken off the plane.]

Comments

  3. No reaction to knitting but frankly, I wish they would not allow seats to recline. In this case, someone had their head on the tray (kind of odd), but with a 36″ inseam, I barely fit anyway and if you move your seat, my femur is shoved into my hip bone socket – and it hurts!

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]