Free Things I Learned From Knitting by Stephanie Pearl–McPhee

MAKES ME LAUGH WHEN PEOPLE TELL ME , as they so often do, that knitting is a silly way to get a sweater or a pair of socks. These garments are simply clothes to non-knitters. They look at the time and expense involved and shake their heads sadly at knitters’ collective lack of intelligence. Even knitters can’t argue that if what you’re after is just some new clothes, knitting might be a pretty dumb way to get them.
    After all, knitting a sweater takes time — way more time than just going to the store and grabbing one off the rack. Anybody who’s recently bought yarn, especially good yarn, can attest that knitting your clothes from scratch certainly isn’t any cheaper than going to the store. In fact, once you factor in what your time is worth, most of us are knitting fantastically exorbitant sweaters and ridiculously priced socks. Even if I boughtsock yarn on sale and merely “paid” myself minimum wage, a pair of hand-knit socks amounts to a good deal more than the one dollar per pair I’d spend if I bought socks bulk at a discount shop.
    Add to this what non-knitters don’t even know (but knitters do): After you buy the yarn and the pattern and spend hours and hours knitting up a sweater (and ripping it back and knitting it up again), due to operator error, there is still a chance that the sweater won’t fit or frankly, even be wearable. Knitters entirely understand the non-knitter’s confusion about why on earth, if you need a sweater so badly, you don’t just walk into the store, pull one in your size off the rack, and be bloody done with it.
    Knitters know this. We get the point. We see what’s happening. It’s not as though we’re uninvolved here. We know knitting is slow; we are the ones doing the knitting. We know it can be expensive; we’re the ones wiping out a yarn budget. We know that if a person had a whole family to clothe and keep safe from frostbite, and if that person had serious limits on their time and budget, and if that same person lived three minutesfrom a discount store with socks on sale for a dollar, that knitting would be a incredibly silly way to get clothes for that family. We know.
    That said, we know something non-knitters don’t. We’re not just making clothes. There is a reason the hobby is called “knitting” and not “sweater making.” If it was just about getting a sweater, we would totally do it the way everybody else does. Who on earth would spend $20 on hand-painted sock yarn and then invest at least twenty hours of time churning out the things if there was nothing in it but a pair of socks?
    What we know and try to explain is that when you knit a pair of socks, you don’t just get clothes. You get satisfaction. You get art. You get a boost to your self-esteem that only comes from making things cleverly. You get hours of cheap entertainment and endless interest. Best of all, you get to have something to do while all those non-knitters stand around in their standard-issue store sweaters and talk about how silly knitting is.
    And that’s funny, because it’s true.
    Knitting is still trying to teach me …
    THAT THERE’S NO SUCH THING
    AS TOO MUCH INFORMATION .
    After a new knitter finished her first project, I gave her a gift: a beautiful skein of yarn. She came to knit night the next week with her first sock cast on and a huge grievance about the wool. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” she complained, “and this yarn is very pretty, but I’m finding it impossible to work with.” With that, she pulled from her purse the biggest mess of fiber I have ever seen. It was about 380 yards of sock yarn, all tied somehow into one massive, near-hopeless knot. Several knitters nearby actually gasped and recoiled in horror.
    I flinched with guilt. It was my fault. I had assumed this knitter knew. I had known something for so long that I had forgotten that there