(Sorry, I have no idea what is up with the paragraph spacing tonight that refuses to be fixed. Let me try to at least break it up visually with…)
…Tina Newton has passed after a long fight with cancer.
…Stephanie Pearl-McPhee wrote years ago about Socks That Rock, Tina’s sock-yarn-of-the-month club that was doing quite well–but then her bank decided it was clearly all a terrorist front required to be reported to the Feds, locked her account, refunded all her perfectly happy and suddenly astounded customers from her money and cut off her access.
…Because clearly, obviously, duh, it didn’t pass their laugh test that people would pay sums like that for a (hand dyed) skein of yarn to knit–socks?? Are you kidding me?!
…Note that they did not contact a single customer, much less Tina, before doing so. Every single person she’d done business with could have verified that this was most definitely for real.
…My story with Tina is that she had a colorway with an unusual name that had me asking, By wild chance, is that named after this song on a favorite album of mine?
…It was! How did you know about them?
…I knew the guy who’d played on and produced several of their albums and I’d met the lead singer. He was about to have a bone marrow transplant and I wanted to knit him a hat in that yarn.
…She sent me a custom-dyed skein just for him, a little darker than some she’d done, which was perfect.
…And as we emailed back and forth we found out we had grown up about a half mile apart and knew people in common, though we’d gone to different schools. After that, when I traveled back to Maryland I took pictures of things I knew she missed and sent them to her.
…I didn’t know her well, but she was a gem and an artist and put much good into the world and I am keenly sorry she’s gone from us.