Knitting! (and other needle arts...)

kri · Post by **kri** » February 27th, 2006, 2:37 pm

pberinstein wrote:Never heard of SnB Nation till you mentioned it, but after Googling it, I see it's extremely popular. (This is Stitch and Bitch Nation, for the unfamiliar, which I was.) How's the book?

I can't believe knitting has become so popular again. I've been doing it for decades, and all of a sudden I'm noticing it's huge. What's brought all this on, I wonder.

I have no clue what has brought on a new trend (if there is one). I just know that I've always known how to crochet, not knit. I decided recently to learn to knit, and have fallen in love

I can't remember for the life of me where I got the impetus to learn though.

lynsey · Post by **lynsey** » February 27th, 2006, 2:39 pm

well, i think knitting grew in popularity BECAUSE of debbie stoller's stitch and bitch book. there were trends growing before then but she sort of maximized the growth. i think it's fantastic! my mom knits but i never learned how until i had moved hours from her. i have a background in costume design and knitting comes naturally to me because i understand the fundamentals of construction and fit. i LOVE it because it's social and transportable. i created the memphis stitch n bitch, which consists of women of all ages and a few college aged men. this was fantastic for me because i had just moved to town with my husband (he's in dental school) and had no friends. we knit over coffee and talk about everything. i think needle arts has seen a revolution also because of the internet. as more and more people connect, creativity spreads like wildfire. i feel like today's online communities, even just message boards, are our new quilting circles.

kri · Post by **kri** » February 27th, 2006, 2:43 pm

lynsey wrote:i think needle arts has seen a revolution also because of the internet. as more and more people connect, creativity spreads like wildfire. i feel like today's online communities, even just message boards, are our new quilting circles.

I think you're right in that respect. I'm so glad that I had the internet as a resource when I had/have questions. Plus, the availability of free patterns is awesome. Even better are some of the companies that sell stuff online...yarn, patterns, materials. While I do have a yarn shop about 20-30 minutes away, sometimes it's nice to just know what you want and get exactly that.

With that said, with my new knitting obsession, I really need to go back to that yarn shop really soon. The last time I went I had very very little interest in the yarn, as I was going for embroidery threads.

Lynsey, why don't you just sign up for an account? :p It'll make things easier for you, eh?

pberinstein · Post by **pberinstein** » February 27th, 2006, 3:00 pm

kri wrote: I have no clue what has brought on a new trend (if there is one). I just know that I've always known how to crochet, not knit. I decided recently to learn to knit, and have fallen in love I can't remember for the life of me where I got the impetus to learn though.

I like to think it was from us.

Heather · Post by **Heather** » February 27th, 2006, 3:10 pm

You know, it's funny, it was there and growing before 9/11, but in NY I really REALLY saw the explosion (forgive the metaphor) of knitting in the year after the attacks.
I also sense that as we build a more and more distant and technological world for ourselves, more and more of us are drawn to the hand-made arts. Just reading all the knitting blogs makes me think there's some connection...some need to be tactile after tapping keys all day.

Funny how the techie geeks seem to be such avid knitters (myself included). I never would have predicted such.

; )
Heather

You can see how 9/11 affected me and my high school students at
www.geocities.com/HSLAPS_WTC.html
www.geocities.com/Knitting_for_Charity.html

lynsey · Post by **lynsey** » February 27th, 2006, 3:39 pm

Heather wrote:Funny how the techie geeks seem to be such avid knitters (myself included). I never would have predicted such.

i think this is because we think in patterns!

linguists (like my brother--who is a german linguist), programmers, musicians, etc all succeed at knitting. i'm a techie WITHOUT a blog (i know. boo.) but find that knitting is obsessive after a long day of fake techie work.

Heather · Post by **Heather** » February 27th, 2006, 4:24 pm

I think you're on to something. A Programmer/knitter friend of mine can read a pattern the way she reads lines of code and will say "that row is written wrong."
: D
She's an AWESOME knitter!

pberinstein · Post by **pberinstein** » February 27th, 2006, 4:28 pm

Here's an idea that may be too bizarre to contemplate. I wonder if you could take some elegant code and turn it into a knitting pattern of some kind.

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » February 27th, 2006, 4:42 pm

pberinstein wrote:Here's an idea that may be too bizarre to contemplate. I wonder if you could take some elegant code and turn it into a knitting pattern of some kind.

Hehe... my husband and i have been talking for awhile about writing patterns based on things like Pi and the Fibonacci sequence ... but we gave it up when we found patterns already out there using the idea...

we've also talked about doing patterns based on binary code too... but nothing has really come from these musings =)

pberinstein · Post by **pberinstein** » February 27th, 2006, 5:08 pm

You found such patterns, Betsie? Where? What did they look like?

raouf · Post by **raouf** » February 27th, 2006, 5:39 pm

pberinstein wrote:Here's an idea that may be too bizarre to contemplate. I wonder if you could take some elegant code and turn it into a knitting pattern of some kind.

Not so bizarre,
the original idea of a computer came to Charles Babbage together with Lady Ada Lovelace from automating loom machines.
The idea first came to Joseph-Marie Jacquard who essentially understood that weaving instructions are machine code. (Ever heard of Jacquard sweaters?)
A good reference:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0192805770/026-0993084-4305268

That same environment is from which the punch cards came from, the first pucnh cards were for loom machines.
Here's Jacquard's example of looms using punch cards in the Smithsonian.:

raouf · Post by **raouf** » February 27th, 2006, 6:09 pm

Hehe... my husband and i have been talking for awhile about writing patterns based on things like Pi and the Fibonacci sequence ... but we gave it up when we found patterns already out there using the idea...

we've also talked about doing patterns based on binary code too... but nothing has really come from these musings =)

Here are some pattern based on Fibonacci sequence:

http://www.fuzzygalore.biz/articles/fibonacci_seq.shtml
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004347.html

If you like that kind of stuff then you might want to try a Moebius scarf.
http://www.cobweb.net/~knitting/moebius.html
Moebius strips are two-dimensional one-sided surfaces.

pensk · Post by **pensk** » March 9th, 2006, 4:18 pm

moebius scarf?!?! heehee i've made moebius strips before out of paper but never a scarf

pensk · Post by **pensk** » March 9th, 2006, 4:24 pm

pensk wrote:moebius scarf?!?! heehee i've made moebius strips before out of paper

i like to here myself talk

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » March 10th, 2006, 8:38 am

So, the Happy Hooker arrived from amazon.com yesterday (see this thread: http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1570 ).... I should have known better than to order it...

it's incredibly amusing, but there really aren't any projects in it that I would consider making... ok, maybe one or two... it has really great instructions for learning crochet (but I really don't need them at this point in my life)... and most of the projects are designed for skinny people... the sock monkey baby blanket is cute though.

so, I guess I'm going to send it back.