"But this v-shape can make you seem five pounds lighter," says a striking blonde with a thick Russian accent standing beside her. Affectionately adjusting the shoulder of the sweater, hand-made from hundreds of dollars of the finest yarns, she tilts her head almost apologetically and softly giggles, "I would like toant to keep this sweater it for myself."

"Oh, me too!" admits the third, a younger woman standing behind them, laughing.

"So would do I," sighs the silver-haired woman wearing the garment, slipping it off her shoulders for alterations.

"We are trying to put fashion and knitting together again," says Linda Morse, the woman trying on the sweater and the owner of String, a knitting shop which opened in October, and which is located in the lobby of 1015 Madison Ave, between 78th and 79th streets on Manhattan's posh Upper East Side. "Hand-made sweater designs should be fun to make and fun to wear."

This is no typical craft store with bins of cheap, generic yarn in primary colors; in fact, it can hardly be categorized as a store at all. Fitting of the neighborhood, Morse has created what can only be called a knitting boutique. Wool from Wales and yak from Tibet, yarns from Scotland and Japan, Italy and Australia line the walls in vibrant colors in everything from classic olive to fiery fuschia. The yarns and hand-made designs are artfully arranged, creating a lavish space, offset by a large inviting table with plenty of chairs, and topped with a big bowl of M&M's and peanut butter cups, and a vasebucket of knitting needles.

Meeting Linda Morse will single-handedly shatter any harbored stereotypes of knitting aficionados as homely grannies creating outdated sweaters in rocking chairs. There is nothing stodgy about her; she is elegant and poised, sophisticated with her neatly styled hair and gold-rimmed spectacles, confident and steady in her speech. She has the air of an approachable business woman, albeit one with a passion for knitting. "It was hand knitting that got me through the stress of all those years of work and raising children, and having a job where I was on plane at least once a week, typically more. I simply always had my knitting with me and used it to relieve stress and to relax, to just get into my own world."

Raised in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of a steel executive with an artistic side who sculpted and published poetry, and a mother who sold gift items at high end stores, Morse is a pioneer woman, building a successful career and raising a family in a time when women had access to only a limited number of professions. She graduated in 1964 magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in psychology and statistics from Goucher College in Baltimore. From 1967 to 1976, she worked in university administration, as Assistant Dean of Faculty at Princeton University and Assistant Provost at Columbia University, both highly prestigious academic institutions. "I was the first ever woman to work in Princeton's historic Nassau Hall [the historic building in which the president and key University officers have their offices] and join the Princeton University administration in a nonsecretarial position," she says proudly.

At the time, women were expected to give up their careers for their families. "When I was pregnant, I know this sounds crazy, but I hadn't really thought about whether I was going to go to work or not after I had the baby. I worked on Friday, went to the hospital on Sunday to have a baby, and my secretary called me on Monday to let me know that they had packed up all my stuff and sent it home, terminated me as an employee. That's when I decided, 'That's it, I am going to have a career.' I wanted to break down old prejudices and assumptions and show that you can work and raise a family."

Morse eventually moved on to a notable career in information technology and management consulting. After leaving academia, she joined a start-up company in 1976 called American Management Systems with some 100 employees. She stayed there until 1999, serving as vice president of the organization she helped build into a publicly traded, billion-dollar company which works with leading organizations in the private and public sector. She also served as the Chief Executive Officer at govWorks, Inc., the subject of the acclaimed documentary of the dot-com era, "Startup.com" directed by Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim.

For all those people who say they are too busy to for their non-professional hobbies, Linda Morse surely serves as an example. "Wherever I went and whatever I did, I always made time to go to the local knitting store. I have been dreaming about having a knitting store forever. You go through these periods in work where you have kind of had it and you have these fantasies of what you are going to do when you grow up; mine have always had something to do with knitting," she says, taking a moment to look around her shop. "I set out to build the store I always dreamed I would find out there, but never did."

One of the aspects of knitting that Morse appreciates is its cross-generational, cross-cultural appeal. Grandmothers, mothers and daughters can share the hobby of knitting together, she says, and knitting surpasses cultural barriers. When she gave a hand-knit shawl to her Greek daughter-in-law's mother, the Greek family was pleasantly surprised that Americans also appreciated hand-made skills.

For her new enterprise, Linda Morse has used her management skills to bring together some of the stars of the knitting world to create a passionate, knowledgeable staff of different ages and backgrounds. Lidia Karabinech, KnittingyarnString's in-store designer, was born in Eastern Ukraine and graduated from Kiev University after studying Chemistry for nine years. In 1993, she moved to New York and pursued her knitting talents, overseeing the black label designs of such designers as Donna Karen and Ellen Tracy. Karabinech's designs have been featured in Interweave Knits magazine in the past, for which she is a regular contributor, and she will be the featured designer in the January issue. Her original designs of sweaters and scarves are so carefully crafted that they hardly seem hand-made to the novice eye. "I don't like when can see the knots, even on the inside," she says, showing the inside of her handsome cream-colored sweater with a grey pattern on the front. "See, you can't see any knots. If it is a mess on the inside, I don't like it."

Linda Morse's business skills prompted her to enlist the help of the third woman, Adina Klein, the creative director of Stringyarns who is responsible for selecting some of the finest yarns in the world for the store, and for securing exclusives on hand-dyed fibers. Klein is a contributing editor at Interweave Knits, and a self-proclaimed active participant in the sub-culture of knitting. "Adina is very involved in the knitting world," Linda Morse says of her colleague. Together, they have made Stringyarns not just into a yarn shop, but into a knitting hub.

Stringyarns offers an array of knitting activities, including knitting lessons to groups of four ("In three hours," says Klein, "you will have all the skills you need to begin your first sweater."), private lessons, bridal and baby showers (the participants each knit a square, all of which are combined to create a patchwork bridal or baby blanket), knitting parties, after- school programs for kids, lectures on trends, as well as opportunities for established knitters to share their work.

All three women share not only a love of knitting but a deep respect for each other's work, repeatedly singing each other's praises. This makes for a creative and supportive atmosphere which can inspire just about anyone to take up knitting. A woman pushing an infant in a baby carriage enters the store around noon on a Friday; she has come all the way from Connecticut just to take a look. She slowly walks around touching all the yarns, oohing and aahing her way past the rows of multicolored fibers. Eventually something catches her eye in the center of the room and she stops and watches, mesmerized. It is Klein and Karabinech, excitedly moving about the shop selecting colors for their next sweater design and arranging them on the table, so taken by the yarn you would think that they, too, had only seen the store for the first time that morning. Klein catches the eye of Morse, who is handling a call behind the desk and laughs, "We're having funplaying," says Klein.

"I know," Linda Morse says softly, smiling, and gets back to business at hand.