#WeirdEd Week 72- Knitting

Photo credit- http://fashionablygeek.com/tattoos/knit-fast-die-warm-tattoo/

Knitting* can be repetitive work. There's counting, recounting, cursing, frogging, and finally finishing with something from almost nothing. You take a piece of yarn and using two sticks you create a work of art. It's a miracle of creation. Watch someone knit something some time. It's magic. By artfully twisting, knotting, and looping a single strand of fiber something new is born.

Knitters can make anything. I'm convinced. I've been around them enough to know that they are funny, artistic, and as involved in their work as you've ever been. There is a yarn stash in my house that will never go away. My wife has knitting projects that have been planned years ago which still aren't started. Yarn from New Zealand sits, waiting in a tub, for her to find the time to make me that sweater she promised years ago.

Knitters are bawdy. I used to go to knitting group with my wife. A group of women (and maybe a guy) would gather at a coffee shop Thursday nights and for two or two and a half hours they would knit and tell the dirtiest jokes. No, I never learned. It doesn't look fun to me. I got to be part of the group because I'd stay on the edges and write, assuming the cafe had wifi. Eventually I would get caught up in the conversation and inch over. We became very close friends with many of the women and their families. One of the knitters from that group, Dorothy Dean, designed the covers of both of my books.

Knitters are vandals too. Check out yarnbombing some time. You've seen it around and didn't know it. It's the most fun type of physical graffiti outside of a Led Zepplin album. Knitters also can't sit still. We choose movies at my house based on how easy they are to knit during (assuming the Weirdlings will allow knitting, which is rare).

#WeirdEd moderator Shawna Briseno (@nolagirlfromtx) is also a fiber artist. Since she's moderating tonight, I have Open House, I thought it would be fun for her to link one of her passions to another.

How is knitting like teaching? Do we take something and create something else? Are there patterns and rules we need to learn? Can we follow a pattern? At what point do we start making our own patterns? Are these rhetorical questions or will they end up in the chat?

Bring your biggest needles and come find out.


*I'm probably going to use knitting, crocheting, quilting, and sewing terms interchangeably here. Sorry fiber-nerds. Feel free to correct me in the comments.