Shortbread was consumed

in the library yesterday.
I had promised the knitting group they could have some of my shortbread baking - and of course the staff needed some too.
It was our last library knitting group meeting for the year - an up and down sort of year for the group. One of them lost a sister to cancer, another lost her father and discovered a sister she did not know she had, another went back to New Zealand and one has been away in America for several months. 
The rest of us have knitted and taught each other new ways of casting on and finishing off and how to read particular patterns. Crochet has been taught too. We have experimented. We have talked about new knitting ideas, new knitting books and just about everything else. We have welcomed people in for just a few sessions - a young mother-to-be making baby garments, a girl who needed help to finish something before she went on her gap year abroad and a woman who asked shyly for some help in working out how to do a border. We have not yet had any men - but we live in hope. Men do knit. I know men who knit very well indeed.
It has been a noisy group. The meeting room is usually alive with chatter. There was a "book group" in the other half of the room yesterday and that was alive with chatter too.
We ate. We drank. We talked. One person used a pen to write something on a pattern she was using.
We broke all the old rules for using libraries. No eating. No drinking. No talking (except very quietly to the staff). No pens, only pencils.
Breaking some rules can sometimes be fun.