Consider Knitting

Let’s say that, like me, you are a person who stares at a computer and writes code for a living. As a straight male who grew up in a time where knitting was very strongly female coded, it for the most part never occurred to me that knitting was a thing I could do and might enjoy. Regardless of your demographic categories and background, it’s possible that you have also not really considered knitting.

This article exists to get you to do so. Specifically, I’ll try to convince you, one software person to another, why it might be a good fit for your life and brain. This is a pitch for knitting, but—for better or worse—an extremely nerdily argued one.

Before I start, note that when I say “knitting”, you can read that as any of the various fiber arts, including crochet, weaving, macramé, cross-stitch, etc. I talk about knitting here because that’s the one closest to my heart and I strive to speak from the heart. You can make stuff out of string however you want. We are all fiber friends.

The sense of touch#the-sense-of-touch

I love the aesthetics of programming. Sitting in a cool quiet room, techno thumping in my headphones, coffee mug next to me, while a neatly arranged field of glowing monospace glyphs stream across my screen. But there’s one sense unmentioned in that sentence: touch. The sense we devote more neurons to than any other is curiously underutilized while pumping out code.

It’s no surprise that some programmers fetishize keyboards. It’s just about the only part of programming that has any physical sensation at all.

I got into knitting a few years after the pandemic. While I have a variety of hobbies, most are still staring at a screen and maybe pushing some buttons and turning knobs. When I wasn’t doing those, I was staring at a screen for work, or staring at a screen for not-work.

I don’t know if I have a good way to explain how much my body craved tactile experience by the end of that. It’s like my fingers ached. A deep hunger, but not for taste. I’d wander around the house, driving my wife insane, unable to sit down and get comfortable. My body was just screaming at me to do something.

My youngest daughter had just picked up knitting, and she taught me. At first it was frustrating and annoying. But once I had the basics down, it was like a a deep sigh felt in my hands. Knitting is so touch-centered. Skilled knitters can knit without looking at their hands at all—touch alone is sufficient.

There are so many different kinds of yarn to work with and they all feel different. Cotton is tough and firm, like twine. Wool is soft and springy, forgiving as you pull stitches open to work them. Superwash wool is smooth and glides off the needles. Non-superwash wool has this very slight stickiness to it that makes the resulting fabric feel solid and whole. Thin fingering weight yarn wraps tightly around your finger like a reminder knot. Working it is like performing delicate surgery. Squishy chunky wool spreads your fingers wide and works so quickly it’s like fabric is spooling out of your hands on its own accord.

Even needles each have their own personality. Stiff grippy bamboo with its dull clack. Less worrisome to use because stitches don’t slide off as easily, but harder work to push against the friction. Polished stainless steel where the stitches just fly off the needles—good when you are done with those stitches but not so much otherwise.

Once you’ve worked a few thousand stitches into your muscle memory, you can watch your fingers form stitches almost of their own accord, hypnotically. Right needle opens the stitch and slides in. Left finger wraps the yarn around the needle. Right finger grabs yarn. Right hand pulls the needle back out, a new stitch formed and transferred to the other needle. Over and over, like a meditation in the body.

Knitting feels good. It is an intimate, constant reminder that we are a tool-using species with thousands of years of evolution giving us incredible dexterity and the emotional wiring to make us want to use it.

An open world game with optimized skill curve#an-open-world-game-with-optimized-skill-curve

Of course, you could get much of that same tactile joy by driving to your nearest yarn store and wandering around the aisles jamming your fingers into every ball and skein of yarn they have. (An activity I certainly also do and highly recommend.) Knitting isn’t just about having a hedonistic tactile experience. It is a skilled art with an unbelievably deep lore.

I used to be a game programmer, and I tend to look at a lot of activities through the lens of game design. Games are interesting because they are user experience distilled to its essence. When you are, say, using a banking app to transfer some money into savings, there is a user experience in play. But there’s also a utility, a real effect you are trying to have in the material world. You may use your banking app and be satisfied that it helps you save money even if the UX is trash.

But a game, almost by definition, doesn’t do anything “out there”. Aside from leaderboards and stuff, the point of a game is to be a low-stakes sandbox where you can play without, you know, accidentally deleting money out of your bank account. Because of that, it’s a pure user experience. All experience and nothing else.

Therefore, skilled game designers are possibly the best user experience designers in the world, and the tools they use to think about game design are useful lenses to evaluate just about any kind of human endeavor.

Two aspects (at least) are relevant to knitting.

Linearity#linearity

A game is “linear” if there’s only one path from beginning to end, one way to play. Don’t particularly enjoy the desert level? Tough shit, you gotta get through it to get to the end. “Nonlinear” games let players choose among multiple paths to reach the end. “Open world” or “sandbox” games blow the gameplay wide open and let players go where they want when they want. The game may not even have an “end”.

Knitting is an open world game. There are all sorts of objects you can make out of yarn, and all sorts of styles and techniques to make them. Don’t like socks? Fine, you don’t ever have to go through a “sock making phase” to graduate into what you really want to make. Find stranded colorwork too fiddly? There’s intarsia or just buy a ball of self-striping yarn and let the yarn change colors for you. Is a sweater too big of a commitment? You can make hats forever.

Once you get past the very basics of getting loops on the needles and making stitches, knitting very rarely forces you to slog through something you don’t want to do in order to reach some other goal. Except weaving in ends, I guess, which is kind of a chore. But, honestly, it’s not that bad.

Skill curve#skill-curve

A skill curve is sort of like a learning curve. It’s an imaginary graph of how much effort it takes to reach greater and more rewarding levels of skill. Some skill curves are steep at the beginning and then flatten out once you’re over the hump. When you first start playing guitar and don’t have the hand strength, callouses, or dexterity to form chords, it’s really hard. But after a few days you can get the basics down. Then it’s pretty easy to learn more and more chords after that.

Other skill curves start shallow and get steeper. You can learn chess in a day and have fun playing it, but as you get more serious about it, each incremental increase in skill requires a greater commitment to studying the theory of the game.

Knitting has a marvellously smooth, user-controllable skill curve. There’s a small hump at the beginning. It does take a little while to figure out how to hold the needles, control the tension of the yarn with your fingers, and get your hands to work in concert to make stitches. It feels like you’re making a shadow puppet of a sewing machine. Your initial experience will be frustrating.

But you can push through that in an hour or so. In a day, you can learn a basic way to cast stitches onto the needles, make knit and purl stitches, and then cast off to finish the work. With just those, you can make scarves and dishclothes. You are a knitter.

Then the world is your oyster. There are thousands of patterns out there, each listing the techniques required. You can pick ones well inside your comfort zone and grow your skills slowly. Or you can challenge yourself to learn a bunch of techniques at once. There are dozens of tiny little independent tricks to learn, each it’s own little merit badge serotonin hit: long-tail cast on, increases and decreases, cables, etc. So many fun different ways to form stitches. Each is one bite-sized lesson and no matter how many or few you want to chew on at a time, there is a project out there that will satisfy your appetite.

It’s not just the steepness of the curve, but also its height. Some skill curves top out early. I suspect the world’s greatest kazoo player is not profoundly better at kazoo than I am. Others seem to have no limit, like the world’s best violinists or Go players.

Friend, the knitting lore goes deep. People have been developing this artform for literally over a thousand years. Knitters have sat there, brain semi-idle, while their fingers worked yarn for millions of hours. They had plenty of time to invent all sorts of crazy ways to tangle yarn up. You could knit full-time for the rest of your life and never run out of new things to learn. Knitting will never stop rewarding you.

Structured but not a game#structured-but-not-a-game

To be clear, I’m talking about knitting and videogames as a metaphor. I don’t think of knitting as a game to win. Like a lot of programmers, I am prone to pointing my dumb optimizing brain at random activities and trying to min-max the shit out of it. Ask my wife how many ways to make coffee I have tried to find the optimal effort/reward ratio.

When I knit, I do try to knit efficiently. I mean, if I’ve gotta make 10,000 stitches to finish a single scarf, it pays to put some thought into the process. At the same time, knitting isn’t just a pointless exercise to scratch my gamification itch. It is a real artform, and I am making real objects.

For me, knitting strikes a good balance between structure and unstructure. I like making music and when it goes well, it’s very rewarding. But sometimes I sit down and every melody that comes out sounds like a knock-off NES game (and not in that cool chiptune way). Or I’ll spend an entire evening working on the drum mixing and at the end I can’t tell if I made things better or worse. It’s too unstructured.

When I sit down to knit, I might make a mistake that needs unwinding and fixing. But for the most part, I can be confident that an hour spent knitting will get me closer to a beautiful finished object. It provides a reliable serotonin hit of “I’m making progress”. But it’s not so rigidly structured that it triggers my optimizing brain into sucking the joy out of it by turning it into math homework.

A time and a space#a-time-and-a-space

A particularly nice property of knitting is that it is able to provide that reliable gratification while accommodating all of the other complexities in my life. It takes very little time to make progress knitting. Unlike, say, painting, there’s almost no set up at the beginning of a session or clean up at the end. When I pick up the kids from school, I can get ten minutes of knitting in while I wait for the bell.

Nor does it take up much space. A zip-loc bag with a ball of yarn and two needles is basically all you need, which is always in my backpack when I get on an airplane now.

Conveniently, the TSA specifically allows knitting needles on flights. (The fact that the TSA is explicitly fine with you bringing a satchel full of foot-long sharpened metal spikes onto a plane as long as its accompanied by some string really says something about it as security theatre.) Note that this only applies to domestic flights in the US. Other countries have their own rules, though I haven’t had any trouble bringing knitting to Denmark or Costa Rica.

Knitting expands and contracts around not just physical space, but headspace too. Had a long day and want something mindless to help you unwind? Slap together a garter stitch scarf and just do the same stitch over and over again. Stressed out by work or grieving a loss and need something consuming to take your mind off it? Start a lacework or cable knit project and the chart and counting won’t leave room to think about anything else.

Whatever logistical or mental capacities you have, there is a knitting project that will tuck neatly into it.

And then at the end#and-then-at-the-end

So far, I’ve been talking about knitting as an activity. A personal hobby to kill time for your own joy. Kill time it does, but knitting isn’t just about whiling away the hours. It’s not playing solitaire or binging a TV show for the fifth time.

As yarn spools through your fingers and the hands twirl around the clock, an actual physical, beautiful object emerges at the end. Well, your first couple of objects may not be so beautiful. But even the lumpiest knitted scarf is imbued with something increasingly elusive these days: care.

The first real thing I knitted was a scarf for my mother-in-law. In retrospect, I can’t say it’s a great scarf. Kinda cheap acrylic yarn. Not really her color. 4x4 rib was about all I could handle complexity-wise at the time, and it means the scarf tends to bunch up on itself. But when she opened the package on Christmas and saw it, her eyes teared up. Mine are tearing up now writing this.

Because regardless of how good the object itself is, it is an inarguable testament to the fact that I chose to spend dozens of quiet hours making stitch after stitch, all the while thinking about her and how much she means to me. A fraction of my life’s wick that I burned for her and no one else.

In a world where so many seem to want to get more and more out of less and less, to automate and AI-ify everything until an infinite content firehose is blasting into every orifice of every consumer, hand knitting to me is the antidote. An acknowledgement that all we really have is time and thus there is no gift more precious than spending it on someone.

Also, once you finish a project, you get to buy more yarn. Because, if I’m honest, a little consumption feels kinda nice too.

OK, I’m sold#ok-im-sold

Anyway, this is what knitting means to me. Which, now that I read all this, is a lot more than I realized. If that didn’t pique your interest, fine. It’s not for everyone. I do hope you find something out there to spend your time on that provides as much joy as knitting does to me. You deserve that.

If this did make you want to give knitting a try, you’re probably wondering what next. Fortunately, there are, like, a million “learn how to knit” tutorials out there. One of the actually marvellous things about living in the world today is good access to lots of videos, and knitting is an activity that’s really hard to convey in book form. You kind of need to watch someone’s hands. Learning from someone in person is best, but if you don’t have that, YouTube is a pretty good substitute.

Keep in mind that everyone’s hands are different! There are many ways (a handful, heh heh) to hold the needles and form stitches because our anatomy and the texture of our skin varies so much. Watch a few videos and don’t worry if what works for them doesn’t work for you. Eventually, you’ll find one that does.

Expect to be challenged and frustrated at first. There’s a lot to going on all at once: controlling the tension of the working yarn, keeping the stitches from the previous row on the left needle, keeping the new stitches on the right needle, forming new stitches. This may be one of the first times you’ve used this many of your fingers doing different things all at once.

I promise that if you’re patient with yourself and give it a few tries, you will get over the hump. Once you can knit a swatch of garter stitch, everything else will come naturally over time.

So go your local craft store, buy a cheap pair of size 7 needles, a ball of worsted (i.e. medium) weight acrylic or wool yarn in a color you think is pretty, and give it a try. The worst that can happen is you’ll waste a few bucks. If you’re lucky, you might end up making your mother-in-law cry (in a good way).