On a whim, Brad Perry, a reporter at KUSI-San Diego, accepted a spare ticket to a taping of Jimmy Kimmel Live! And, given the downtime on taped shows, he brought his knitting bag.
“I was sitting in the audience and the warm-up guy saw me and said, ‘Are you knitting?’” Perry recounts. “Then Jimmy, during a break, said, ‘I hear there’s a guy knitting.’ I guess its kind of rare seeing a six-foot, two-inch black guy knit.”
Perry offered to knit Kimmel a bowtie. Then guest Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting (from The Big Bang Theory) wanted to know if he could make her slippers. “I got a little scared,” Perry admits. “I’d never made slippers before. So I went home and learned to make slippers…and I’m making her some slippers.”
Footage of Perry’s encounter with Kimmel quickly surpassed 50,000 views on YouTube. Knitters, impressed with Perry’s ability to knit a bowtie on the fly, loved the story behind his hobby.
“My daughter was 16 at the time, and her friend was showing her how to knit,” he recalls. “I asked her to make me a beanie.” After a few days his daughter said it was harder than she thought. “She gave up, so I started learning.”
Determined to make a hat, Perry visited a local knitting shop. “It was fun being the only guy there,” he admits. Under the tutelage of renowned knitter Kristi Porter, he mastered the beanie. The divorced dad then taught his 17-year-old son to knit — and his daughter, now 21.
As for Kimmel, he wore the bow tie on the show, and Perry and the women from his knitting circle decided to make Kimmel an entire suit. He reports: “I think we can do it in about two weeks.”
