Free Things I Learned From Knitting by Stephanie Pearl–McPhee Page B

focus, and a sense of accomplishment and progress, however small. This can be helpful for those who struggle with depression.
    4 Joints require motion to stay healthy. For those knitters with arthritis, “use it or lose it” remains an important notion in treatment. Knitting can help arthritic hands remain flexible and promotes a reduction in pain. (Naturally, this assumes that you are able to limit knitting and not slide all the way from “use it or lose it” to the rather uncomfortable “abuse it.”)
    5 Knitting can promote fitness. Who among us has not raced to the yarn store, run for a wool sale, walked a mile to find the merino we’re looking for, or wrestled another knitter to the ground for that last skein of tweed that we need to finish a sweater? (Maybe that last one is just me. It was a very nice tweed.)

the 32 nd thing

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
    A WHILE AGO, I MADE A TIMING ERROR related to a knitting deadline that ended up being pretty catastrophic. For reasons I won’t go into here (but mostly having to do with me being an idiot) I found myself having to knit eight socks in eight days — that’s eight adult-sized, sock-weight socks. Naively, I felt this was going to be difficult, but possible (a frequent knitterly delusion), and I started knitting. Being a mostly ordinary person, and because I wouldn’t want to land in prison for neglecting my children, I couldn’t just quit all my regular stuff and knit. I had to approach my life as usual: cooking, writing, cleaning, taking care of the kids … except for one critical difference. Without exception and whenever possible, if my hands were free for even a moment, I knit socks. I multitasked. In fact, I was the supreme multitasker. If I waswalking, I was knitting. If I was on the phone, I was knitting. If I was thinking at the computer, I picked up the sock I was working on, even if it meant I just did three stitches. I took advantage of every little possibility.
    My friends thought I was out of my mind. I think they may even have considered an intervention of some kind. They regarded me with a critical eye and assessed my sanity. Even my knitter friends thought I might have gone a little off the deep end, and more than one ordinary person called me “knit obsessed.” I defended myself with historical evidence. Bishop Richard Rutt wrote, in
A History of Hand Knitting,
“… it is a mistake to think that the early knitting-frame quickly speeded up the bulk production of stockings. A framework knitter working hard might produce ten pairs a week, while a good hand knitter could make six.”
    Six pairs of stockings in a week? Twelve stockings? Admittedly, Bishop Rutt is speaking of professional knitters who worked at it for a living, but even so, if I lifted all burdens from you for eight hours a day and let you work at knittingstockings for a living, would you be producing six pairs a week? (I thought maybe I could do it for one week. Then I would die.)
    He also quotes Richard Valpy (1754–1836) speaking about the stocking knitters of Jersey: “This is the chief employment of the women. The dexterity and expedition with which they dispatch a pair of stockings are almost incredible.… A woman seen walking without a stocking in her hand is stigmatized with idleness.”
    It’s incredible to think of the specifics. Children as young as four were being taught to knit at this time in England, and certainly by the time they were seven or eight, they were expected to be making stockings in a way that could contribute to the family’s income. Women, men, children: all knitting away at stockings, producing certainly as much, if not more than my measly sock a day, all while chopping wood for the fire, baking bread, sewing and mending clothes, knitting all the other items that the family needed to keep warm, caring for children, and in general leading an extraordinarily