On knitting

The key to successful blogging is frequency. If you write often, you allow yourself to write about fun trivial subjects, and you don't sweat the impact of each post because there will be another good post in short order. If you don't have much time or mental energy to maintain a frequent blogging presence, you end up like me: you have lots of little ideas to blog about, but nothing that seems momentous enough to justify the fact that you've been silent for three months. So when you finally get a spare hour because you have pledged to take a break from your dissertation and your husband is busy selling furniture on craigslist, the idea you had about to write about the difficulty of finding a knitting project seems paltry and sad. And then you either shut your laptop and watch some Antiques Roadshow or decide to take the plunge with the hopes that one good post will lead to another. Lately, it's been Antiques Roadshow. But tonight it's not on. So here we are.

I started knitting several years ago. Some of the first posts in this space were about knitting, in part because I was doing a lot of it, but also because it embodies that strange location about halfway between traditional misogyny and feminist reclamation. Is it a throwback art that women do to busy themselves in the private sphere of the home that they are relegated to, or is it a progressive expression of a women's craft tradition that honors the legacy of millions of unrecognized women artists who made their family's clothing and decorative housewares? Or is it simply something that you can do while sitting quietly with your partner, each engaged in your own private thoughts but physically close, together on the sofa? I don't think we have to choose one. But it's that tension that makes knitting such an interesting and valuable craft, and I really enjoy it in practice as well. It's like growing plants or baking bread. It's making something out of nothing. And the precision that it requires is attractive for those of us on the A side of the personality scale.

So, I like knitting. It does, however, take a lot of time. At least, it does for me. I once made a tank top - a lovely salmon-colored, lace-bottomed camisole made out of a silk-tweed blend yarn - that took me two years to finish. TWO YEARS. I hardly wanted to wear it by the time I finished it. My mother, on the other hand, made me a wonderful cable-knit winter hat, a sort of tam-inspired thing, in a weekend. I have no idea how she did it. I imagine fingers flying, but she probably just sat in front of PBS for three hours each night and, voila. I'm slower, and I tire of single tasks quickly. I knit furiously for an hour, and then I'm done.

Now, with so little time for things like knitting, it's difficult to decide what to make. I have made scarves for everyone who cares to have one, mittens for myself and my husband, hats galore, booties for new babies. The idea of taking on another shirt-type project terrifies me. I picture myself rocking in a chair in a nursing home, still working on the sweater I started when I was 34. And the problem with just knitting any old thing is that I really like to use the items that I make, or to have someone else use and love them. Maybe I can be like these amazing homesteading mothers I read about in the blogosphere who knit hats and scarves as low-cost, high-value holiday gifts. Maybe I can just give them away, regardless of the time of year, to people I think might like them. But that seems like an awfully expensive way to go. One hat can take $20 or more of yarn.

Maybe I should just take up a less time-consuming hobby. Or maybe I should just take out my yarn and an old pattern and knit, and deal with the consequences later.