Hysterically enough, it started as an act of defiance. Allison had been snooping in the attic to find information that her father was refusing to just share on the grounds of "We're putting that behind us now." As though he'd asked her if she wanted to put it behind her.
Allison hit the jackpot with her grandmother's cedar chest. The chest seemed ancient and was covered in layers of dust. She suspected it hadn't been moved since the woman had died well before Allison was even born. It contained a treasure trove of information. Journals and a second bestiary littered with handwritten notes in the margins, all buried under skeins of yarn. Some of it was still on the needles, projects that would never be finished.
Chris had found her staring curiously at a project that had more needles than entirely reasonable sticking out of it. It appeared to be a half finished sock with a delicate argyle pattern. He was already turning an angry red with indignation over her snooping, having come to the correct assumption for her presence in the attic.
"Did you know Gram knit? I think I want to learn." She presented the half made sock hopefully and tried to exude innocence. Chris deflated visibly in his confusion. She prayed he didn't know what else was in the chest.
As it turned out, he had no idea. With a sweet, dimpled smile she convinced him to carry the chest into her room. She figured, if learning to knit was the price she had to pay, she was getting a pretty good deal.
Lydia's eyes narrowed as she swanned into the room and flopped onto Allison's bed. "What is that."
Allison rose a brow and eyed the project on her needles speculatively, as though it would somehow jump off of them and attack at any moment. "Knitting. I think."
Lydia scoffed, "Yes clearly. Perhaps I should have said why. Why are you knitting." She doesn't bother to add inflection.
With a glance to the left and a small shrug Allison said, "My gram knit, you know? I thought I should pick it up." Her voice rose, suddenly speaking to someone not in the room, "Since clearly I can't practice with my bow anymore." She glared towards the conspicuously silent hallway.
After a pause in which no response was forthcoming, Allison rolled her eyes and nodded towards the opened chest, now sitting comfortably at the foot of her bed. Lydia sniffed and looked into it, poking around the yarn until she found the bestiary. Her eyes lit up and she glanced at her friends face. Allison had a finger up to her smiling lips and glanced towards the door significantly.
Lydia nodded, "You should teach me."
"Sure! You know, there's a knitting group I've joined. You're more than welcome to come." Her grin was sly and Lydia tilted her head to the side, considering.
"When is it?"
"Aah, Saturday's actually. Around noon."
Lydia barely kept herself from snorting. To call the pack meetings a knitting group was a pretty impressive stretch, but this went a long way towards explaining Allison's sudden presence last week. "Sure, I can do that. Maybe afterwards we can get dinner together or something."
Oddly enough, it was Boyd who took up the craft next. They had taken to actually knitting during the pack meetings to at least have progress to show off whenever Chris got too curious. Neither of them really admitted how much they enjoyed it, but their contentment did not go unnoticed.
Lydia had already advanced to lace in the time it took Allison to complete a serviceable scarf and worked herself up towards a hat with some ribbing. It was hard to begrudge Lydia's progress, everybody was pretty used to her being phenomenal at everything she put her mind to and besides, it was awesome having someone around who could pick up dropped stitches in two seconds.
With no comment at all, Boyd had come to a meeting with his own project in tow. While he got a few odd looks, particularly from Erica, nobody felt the need to comment until he'd made enough progress on a ludicrously long scarf for Stiles to finally cry out "OH MY GOD IS THAT A FOURTH DOCTOR SCARF" and derailed the entire meeting into talking about Doctor Who.
Derek was less than thrilled, but let it slide because for once nobody was in immediate danger of gruesome death. He would never admit that Nine was his favorite, no matter how much Stiles badgered him about it.
Erica sidled up to Allison one meeting and stared intently at her needles as they clicked away. Allison had determined that she'd leave the fancy stuff to Lydia and started up a fairly epic afghan using a couple massive circulars. She preferred the simple repetition of a basic knit as it let her focus on the meetings. She'd been particularly proud of graduating to being able to knit without actually looking down at her work.
After some obvious trepidation, Erica whispered, "Will you show me...?" Allison's answer was interrupted by a snort loud enough to interrupt the meeting in progress. In the silence that followed, everyone turned to Isaac.
Erica turned pink and demanded, "What?"
Isaac just put his hands up in a disarming gesture and smiled playfully, "Well it just doesn't seem like your kind of thing." He turned to Scott for support and was not disappointed when his friend nodded thoughtfully.
Erica frowned, already shrinking away from Allison subconsciously. To everyone's surprise, it was Lydia who spoke up next, voice laced with disdain. "Really Isaac. Nobody needs that kind of Madonna/Whore bullshit."
"Madonna...?" Scott questioned tentatively. Most of the room was grateful someone asked. Lydia just rolled her eyes.
"Not the singer, oh my god. It references the virgin Mary. Basically this completely arbitrary and outdated divide that rides on old stereotypes and the assumption that men have the power to ruin someone with their dicks." She snorted and knit angrily as she continued. Distantly, she realized this was probably an overreaction but once started she didn't feel inclined to stop. "As though women are so simple they can be divided up into "sluts" and "good girls" with no more complexity than an inanimate object."
She dropped a stitch, she just knew it, and her lifeline was rows back. She threw the project into her lap and looked up for the first time. The entire room stared at her in silence. "I've got some extra needles and yarn, Erica. I can show you how to cast on if you like." With a tentative smile, Erica perked up and crossed the room to settle in next to Lydia, taking the olive branch for what it was.
Derek broke the silence by calling attention back to the border patrol schedules and everyone else resumed their normal level of inattention.
Stiles was next up, casually but not actually casually flopping next to Erica and Lydia on the couch. Deaton had mentioned knitting in a long list of crafts that were easy to mix with spell making. Lydia perked up at the mention of it, mostly because she was starting to run out of challenging patterns and was looking for something new to add to the mix.
Allison's afghan was nearly halfway done, Boyd was STILL working on the Doctor Who scarf and there appeared to be no end in sight. Erica had started adventuring into baby clothes because one of her aunts was expecting.
Derek took a long hard look at the knitters of his pack and realized with a bit of a start how much the craft has helped them pull together. Nobody really noticed when he started setting aside time at the end of every meeting for them to lounge around chatting, the needles flying as the conversations traipsed over whatever happened to come up.
Eventually Isaac apologized to Erica, and by extension Lydia. Lydia accepted with the grace of a queen, but Erica had tackled him to the ground and said she'd only accept the apology if it was accompanied by a scarf he made. He made a show of reluctance, but sent her a secret little smile. She winked at him and begun explaining the basics that very night.
It didn't come particularly easy, but by the time Allison's afghan had finished, Isaac presented Erica with the most knobbly, pathetic scarf any of them had ever seen. She accidentally knocked them both over in her enthusiastic acceptance and made a very clear point of wearing the scarf on a regular basis. She probably did it for the pleased grin he'd wear every time he saw her in it.
Scott followed shortly after Isaac. Well. Sort of. After several long and completely abysmal attempts that mostly ended in tears and wasted skeins of yarn, Scott determined that knitting was most definitely not for him.
By that point, Stiles had discovered crochet and was now creating miniature figurines of anything and everything. Mostly genitals. Everybody in the pack started discovering little anatomically correct amigurumi penises and vulvas in their things, usually at the worst times possible.
Derek pointedly did not acknowledge that he appeared to be the only one that got uncircumsized penises strewn about his possessions. It didn't bear thinking about.
Eventually, Scott threw down his latest attempt at knitting in frustration and Stiles took pity. It only took a few days for Scott to pick up crochet. It was almost nauseating how excited and adorable he was when he asked Allison if she wanted to start working on an afghan together. She agreed, of course, and Stiles pretended to vomit into the trash can.
It wasn't that Derek was completely horrible at it, it's just that he had the dubious honor of being the last to learn and was getting bombarded with information on all sides. Nobody could agree on what the best cast-on to even teach him was, let alone settle on the english or the continental holds. While he tried desperately to be patient he very nearly lost it when Stiles started laughing at what he called Derek's 'grumpy cat face'.
While Derek waved an oversized needle in Stiles' direction and attempting to come up with the most gruesome threat he could, Chris Argent burst into the room, alarmingly armed and assuming the absolute worst. Everyone turned to face him with matching looks of surprise, their various projects dangling half-forgotten in their hands. In Boyds case wrapped around his neck twice and trailing down the back of the armchair because the Doctor Who scarf still wasn't done.
"Well, I'll be damned." Chris conceded, "You really are knitting." He awkwardly put his weapon away and spoke to Allison while he stared straight at Stiles. "I suppose this does explain that... thing... that fell out of your purse the other day."
Allison's "Oh my god, dad." was drown out entirely by Stiles laughing so hard he wound up wheezing on the floor.