After several humiliating attempts to learn to knit, Mary Lou Carney put aside her knitting needles and instead co-authored a charming children's book, "The Truly Terribly Horrible Sweater ... That Grandma Knit" (HarperCollins, $16.99, 2009).

Carney, who lives in Chesterton, first got the urge to knit after meeting Debbie Macomber at a conference.

"Debbie was a reader of Daily Guideposts which I've been writing for 20 years," Carney says. "She came up to me and told me she read Guideposts and just loved my writing. I asked her if she was an attendee at the conference and she said no, that she was the keynote speaker." 

It turns out that Macomber is a New York Times best-selling author who has more than 60 million books in print including the Cedar Cove and Angelic Intervention series.

Carney, the senior editor at Guideposts, is no slouch in the writing department either. She is the former editor-in-chief of Guideposts for Kids and Guideposts Sweet 16 magazines as well as the author of more than a dozen books for children such as "Dr. Welch and the Great Grape Story" (Boyds Mills) about the invention of grape juice. Besides that she writes a blog http://www.ourprayer.org/blog/user/mary%20lou

"Have you ever met someone who just seems like your sister?" Carney asks in describing her immediate connection with Macomber. And though the two have writing in common, they didn't have knitting in common at all. Macomber, when she isn't penning romance novels (Carney calls her friend the "Queen of Harlequin" because most of her novels are published by that giant of romance novels), loves to knit. Indeed, Macomber's Blossom Street series is based on a yarn shop and the people who lived nearby.

As for Carney, when she signed up for a knitting class, she was quickly separated from the group by her instructor for remedial knitting. "Debbie is a great knitter and I'm not very tactile," Carney says.

But what she lacks for in knitting skills, she makes up for in imagination and so suggested that the two of them collaborate on a children's book which would become the first Blossom Street Kids book.

Their story is about a young boy named Cameron who receives a sweater that his grandmother knitted for him. It's awful and Cameron spends a lot of the book trying to destroy the sweater including coating it with mustard. But as ugly as the sweater is, it's also durable and so Cameron ends up wearing it to the train station to meet his grandmother.

"Grandmother tells him how she was thinking of him when she was knitting it, how she used red because it was the color of love and she added the blue for his two wheeler," says Carney who got the idea for the book when Macomber mentioned that her grandson, also named Cameron, never wore the sweater she had knitted for him.

The real Cameron may still be avoiding wearing his sweater, but the book Cameron quickly realizes how much love went into the sweater and how that is what matters.

And for those who love to knit, at the end of the book is a knitting pattern created by one of Macomber's friends called The Truly Terribly Wonderful Sweater.

 

Mary Lou Carney book signings

* 4 to 7 p.m. Dec. 11, Barnes & Noble, 150 Silhavy Road, Valparaiso FYI: (219) 531-6551

* 2 to 4 p.m. Dec. 13, Borders, 2074 Southlake, Merrillville FYI: (219) 795-1925