By Rupa Shenoy
Daily Herald Staff Writer
Posted Thursday, June 22, 2006

As their needles twirled rapidly, four women knitted strings of purple, blue and pink yarn into an ever-growing, 2-foot-wide, floppy hoop Wednesday.

It was the beginning of what the knitters hoped would be the largest hat ever, with a pompon on its top.

“We need to find a really big head,” deadpanned Carla Hibbard of Geneva, a knitter of four years.

After a morning rain soaked Third Street, Hibbard and other participants in the second annual Swedish Days Knit-out on the Courthouse Lawn were relocated to the Geneva History Center.

The event was sponsored by Wool and Co., at 23 S. Third St.

At the center, a room was filled with the hum of three dozen women and a few men of all ages socializing. Knitters shared tricks of the trade, competed for prizes, or learned knitting from scratch.

They also took up an attempt begun last year to make the “biggest hat ever.”

“It’s a community hat,” Susan Mitz of West Chicago said. “Our goal is to have people stop by and work on it — not to finish it.”

At a table in another corner, knitting teacher Sharon Lynn of Geneva got advice on how to instruct boys from Neil Edmondson, husband of Lesley Edmondson, owner of Wool and Co.

“Tell them to stab it, choke it, rip its guts out, and throw it off the cliff,” he said, accompanying each verb with a movement of his needles, resulting in a completed stitch.

Neil said knitting helps relieve stress through repetition.

“It’s addictive,” Lynn said.

Across the room, a competition for fastest knitter was beginning.

“Are your needles loaded?” Lesley Edmondson said as the audience craned to watch. “Go.”

rshenoy@dailyherald.com