This Is Not Your Grandma's Knitting
May 2, 2017 5:37 PM Subscribe
"It’s coming around again, as it has probably for time immemorial — the thing where someone who doesn’t knit discovers that there are people who do knit, and some of them are apparently under the age of 90, and then the next thing we know, someone is writing articles or spouting this line on TV or social media or something: 'This is not your grandmother’s knitting.'"
by Abby Franquemont, who "was bred by anthropologists to preserve textile lore and engage in written slapfights."
by Abby Franquemont, who "was bred by anthropologists to preserve textile lore and engage in written slapfights."
Yeah, "Not your mother's" is pretty misogynist, when you think about it. Mothers are awesome, and not to be sneered at. On average, they put up with a lot more shit than we did, and made the world a better place in the process.
Just like every generation thinks they invented sex, every generation does that weird judging of their parents ( until they grow up and take their heads out of their asses ).
posted by leotrotsky at 5:52 PM on May 2, 2017 [21 favorites]
Just like every generation thinks they invented sex, every generation does that weird judging of their parents ( until they grow up and take their heads out of their asses ).
posted by leotrotsky at 5:52 PM on May 2, 2017 [21 favorites]
This has been going on for 20 years now!
posted by thelonius at 6:00 PM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 6:00 PM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]
I didn't see my grandmother knit — she'd given it up for latchhook and crochet by the time I was born. But I do have her old set of circular needles that I inherited. I still knit with them from time to time, when they're the right needles for the project. But even when they're just sitting in my knit box, it feels good to know they're there.
Thanks for posting.
posted by Banknote of the year at 6:00 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
Thanks for posting.
posted by Banknote of the year at 6:00 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
Awww this is great, thanks for posting.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:04 PM on May 2, 2017
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:04 PM on May 2, 2017
I see young knitters on the subway all the time.
(also, my 97-year-old Italian immigrant grandmother is a lifelong knitter, always sending us blankets, socks, potholders. If she could I think she'd knit us a house)
posted by jonmc at 6:05 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
(also, my 97-year-old Italian immigrant grandmother is a lifelong knitter, always sending us blankets, socks, potholders. If she could I think she'd knit us a house)
posted by jonmc at 6:05 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
Abby Franquemont! I read her blog for ages-- she's the reason i wanted to learn to spin. Very excited to read this.
posted by nonasuch at 6:11 PM on May 2, 2017
posted by nonasuch at 6:11 PM on May 2, 2017
When I first started knitting, back on the early 2000s, I heard "not your grandmother's knitting" pretty often from knitters. There was also a trend towards putting, like, skulls and shit on knitting, to make it clear that this was young, punk-rock knitting, not old lady stuff. And you really don't see that anymore, or at least I don't. At least now knitters have stopped perpetrating the whole agist thing with denigrating "grandmothers' knitting," even if muggles sometimes still use that stupid, stupid cliche.
But yeah, there was not a single thing wrong with my grandmother's knitting. And like a lot of knitters, I'm more interested in learning about knitting traditions than in differentiating myself from older generations.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:12 PM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]
But yeah, there was not a single thing wrong with my grandmother's knitting. And like a lot of knitters, I'm more interested in learning about knitting traditions than in differentiating myself from older generations.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:12 PM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]
I am a grandmother but I'm not YOUR grandmother, so this knitting right here is not your grandmother's knitting and if you think I'm giving it away to you, you're out of your fucking mind. Find another sucker to knit you a pair of dupioni silk fingerless gloves, ya loser.
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 6:20 PM on May 2, 2017 [95 favorites]
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 6:20 PM on May 2, 2017 [95 favorites]
When I was a kid, my twin great aunts who lived out of town would always give us these elaborate hand-knitted sweaters with unfortunately designed Christmas characters on them--reindeer with bells, anatomically impossible elves, that sort of thing. At the time I would open my sweater, roll my eyes, ball it up and toss it in the closet, and then donate it to charity in the spring.
Now that I knit and crochet myself, I recognize how much work and love and care went into those hideous sweaters, and I wish I'd kept just one.
posted by xyzzy at 6:33 PM on May 2, 2017 [17 favorites]
Now that I knit and crochet myself, I recognize how much work and love and care went into those hideous sweaters, and I wish I'd kept just one.
posted by xyzzy at 6:33 PM on May 2, 2017 [17 favorites]
Biff! Pow! Comic books that aren't about your grandma's knitting aren't just for kids any more!
posted by No-sword at 6:46 PM on May 2, 2017 [19 favorites]
posted by No-sword at 6:46 PM on May 2, 2017 [19 favorites]
This is not your grandmother's knitting. However this post is a pipe.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:59 PM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:59 PM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]
I'm glad I'm not the only one who immediately jumped to that comparison. :P
posted by tobascodagama at 7:00 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by tobascodagama at 7:00 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
I've mentioned this before, but the gender dynamics of knitting are... odd. It's the only community I've ever been in that simultaneously patronises men and way overvalues their presence.* And it's the same impulse as is behind "not your grandmother's knitting", that, despite a lot of talk to the contrary, people have collectively bought into this idea that knitting, as an activity dominated by women (albeit not historically, which people will hasten to point out, as another manifestation of this phenomenon), is somehow inherently unworthy of our time. I almost feel like the fixation on grandmothers is not so much about ageism but about some idea that grandmothers are somehow perceived as "extra" feminine, but I don't have a fully formed thought.
I tell people my grandad taught me to knit, in part because it subtly bothers them a bit (even many knitters) and in part because it's roughly true. I learned out of the back of a magazine with my grandad kibitzing, telling me I was doing it wrong while simultaneously insisting he couldn't possibly show me what I was meant to be doing because he couldn't see.
*I think there's weirdness around how queer men in particular are treated too, but that's a whole other thing.
posted by hoyland at 7:28 PM on May 2, 2017 [31 favorites]
I tell people my grandad taught me to knit, in part because it subtly bothers them a bit (even many knitters) and in part because it's roughly true. I learned out of the back of a magazine with my grandad kibitzing, telling me I was doing it wrong while simultaneously insisting he couldn't possibly show me what I was meant to be doing because he couldn't see.
*I think there's weirdness around how queer men in particular are treated too, but that's a whole other thing.
posted by hoyland at 7:28 PM on May 2, 2017 [31 favorites]
hard to say, but I'm guessing that the 'your grandmother's knitting' thing has something to do with the Great Depression and the postwar rise of women in the workforce, and the number of people of an age to be writing breathless stories about how this isn't your grandmother's knitting, but whose grandmothers actually knit that much more than anyone else is small and dwindling.
posted by wotsac at 7:41 PM on May 2, 2017
posted by wotsac at 7:41 PM on May 2, 2017
It's the only community I've ever been in that simultaneously patronises men and way overvalues their presence.
This seems really common in a lot of female-dominated hobbies, careers, and spaces and means that I definitely do not envy the men who try to navigate those worlds.
I definitely know knitters who still put skulls and shit on their knitting, but the knitters also just really like skulls and zombies.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:56 PM on May 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
This seems really common in a lot of female-dominated hobbies, careers, and spaces and means that I definitely do not envy the men who try to navigate those worlds.
I definitely know knitters who still put skulls and shit on their knitting, but the knitters also just really like skulls and zombies.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:56 PM on May 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
I almost feel like the fixation on grandmothers is not so much about ageism but about some idea that grandmothers are somehow perceived as "extra" feminine, but I don't have a fully formed thought.I think it's about both ageism and sexism. Those aren't separate things. Sexism diminishes all women, but it especially diminishes old women, who don't even have the saving grace of being desirable to men. Old women are just a waste of space. Things associated with old women are just washed-up and silly.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:02 PM on May 2, 2017 [19 favorites]
what i've seen generally actually is not a "this is not your grandmother's" disposition, but rather a confused fascination with aging in general among young people. dressing like a mom, or a grandma, and dyeing one's hair grey is (or at least two or three years ago) was very hip, as was calling all your friends "mom" or "dad" etc. sure there is ageism in this, but i don't think it's symptomatic of increasing ageism (in the same way current politics is so informed by resurgent racism) but rather the breakdown of any meaningful notion of what it means to grow up or grow old and a more general disbelief in adulthood (and of course all the markers previously associated with it (e.g. homeownership, steady job, all the millenial stuff associated with the 2008 recession, age of precarity &c &c &c)); there is no adulthood, just "adult-ing." so i think it's a mix of parodic negotiation and genuine confusion – if becoming an adult and getting old has no clear boundary or threshold, the supposed chronic, pathological infantilism of your average millenial snake-person is also immediately elderly (and so parody helps to distance oneself from this fear of already actually being old; but then also trying to be/act old to proleptically abate the fear of growing old (or never growing old)). i'm not sure actually what i am saying anymore
but i think my point is that, from what i've seen, it is more precisely like "this is your grandma's knitting, because being a grandma is cool and maybe even sexy" ?
posted by LeviQayin at 8:41 PM on May 2, 2017 [9 favorites]
but i think my point is that, from what i've seen, it is more precisely like "this is your grandma's knitting, because being a grandma is cool and maybe even sexy" ?
posted by LeviQayin at 8:41 PM on May 2, 2017 [9 favorites]
It’s lots of people’s knitting all over the world.
Lovely.
Neither of my grandmothers left any knitting. I wonder why my mother's mother had the knitting needles I have from her. They aren't very good ones, actually.
A great-aunt knit and crocheted and gave us paradigmatically hideous acrylic sweaters and afghans in the 1970s, which turned out to be impervious to wear (modified rapture). We wore the sweaters dipping sheep and clearing blackberries and scraping a boat and they just... rinsed clean. I believe the afghan got laid down to get the car out of a mudhole and was slightly bruised by the effort. So hideous. I regret giving my sweater away, but it's probably still out there, vivid, waiting for me.
posted by clew at 11:10 PM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]
Lovely.
Neither of my grandmothers left any knitting. I wonder why my mother's mother had the knitting needles I have from her. They aren't very good ones, actually.
A great-aunt knit and crocheted and gave us paradigmatically hideous acrylic sweaters and afghans in the 1970s, which turned out to be impervious to wear (modified rapture). We wore the sweaters dipping sheep and clearing blackberries and scraping a boat and they just... rinsed clean. I believe the afghan got laid down to get the car out of a mudhole and was slightly bruised by the effort. So hideous. I regret giving my sweater away, but it's probably still out there, vivid, waiting for me.
posted by clew at 11:10 PM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]
hey stitch and bitch rhyme
let's do something with that
posted by obiwanwasabi at 11:16 PM on May 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
let's do something with that
posted by obiwanwasabi at 11:16 PM on May 2, 2017 [5 favorites]
It is interesting how often this gets trotted out, for decades. My mom taught me how to knit when I was about 10, and I took it up again around 2003, after the post-9/11 knitting resurgence. I remember articles about knitting taking about grandmas then.
Now my closest internet friends are through Ravelry.
posted by apricot at 11:25 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
Now my closest internet friends are through Ravelry.
posted by apricot at 11:25 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
I actually taught myself to knit my first winter break home from college. Neither my mother nor my grandmother could knit at the time; my great-grandma did, and I have a few sets of her knitting needles.
My mom learned to knit a couple of years ago, and when I took her to the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival she was astonished by its scale and scope. It was not, in fact, her grandmother's knitting.
posted by nonasuch at 11:59 PM on May 2, 2017
My mom learned to knit a couple of years ago, and when I took her to the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival she was astonished by its scale and scope. It was not, in fact, her grandmother's knitting.
posted by nonasuch at 11:59 PM on May 2, 2017
obiwanwasabi: A Stitch and Bitch is a term used over here in Oz for an informal gathering of knitters and other yarn crafters, usually held in a pub. Mine's on a Tuesday.
I wish I had my grandmother's knitting. She can cable like nobody's business. I also wish I had my great grandmother's crochet, who could apparently do Irish Lace on a doorstep while minding like, every small child in the town, all at once, without looking. She had like fifteen kids, raised them in a two bedroom house in regional Queensland, in basically a dustbowl. She was fucking hardcore. So is my gran, who apparently used to steal horses for fun and get into fights with the boys and very often win. She still exhorts me to burn things in the street if they offend me. I think that might include the Prime Minister, but I'm too afraid to ask.
I wonder, rather a lot, what these mythic timid, boring grandmothers look like. I sure as shit have never met any.
posted by Jilder at 12:48 AM on May 3, 2017 [21 favorites]
I wish I had my grandmother's knitting. She can cable like nobody's business. I also wish I had my great grandmother's crochet, who could apparently do Irish Lace on a doorstep while minding like, every small child in the town, all at once, without looking. She had like fifteen kids, raised them in a two bedroom house in regional Queensland, in basically a dustbowl. She was fucking hardcore. So is my gran, who apparently used to steal horses for fun and get into fights with the boys and very often win. She still exhorts me to burn things in the street if they offend me. I think that might include the Prime Minister, but I'm too afraid to ask.
I wonder, rather a lot, what these mythic timid, boring grandmothers look like. I sure as shit have never met any.
posted by Jilder at 12:48 AM on May 3, 2017 [21 favorites]
I wonder why my mother's mother had the knitting needles I have from her. They aren't very good ones, actually.
Not everyone who takes up knitting keeps at it. I didn't. I don't still have the needles I used, but I have shed a lot of stuff that other people might keep.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:46 AM on May 3, 2017
Not everyone who takes up knitting keeps at it. I didn't. I don't still have the needles I used, but I have shed a lot of stuff that other people might keep.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:46 AM on May 3, 2017
Now that I knit and crochet myself, I recognize how much work and love and care went into those hideous sweaters, and I wish I'd kept just one.
I've got a navy blue cableknit sweater my mum made about 40 years ago for herself and then gifted to me about 20 years back. I wore it a ton then left it in a box for a decade but recently got it out again - it's still going strong.
Sometimes the only thing I don't like about handknits is how durable they are - I really have to space out my own knitting projects so i don't end up with a surplus of cardigans. I learned from my grandmother, nanna and mother, and didn't knit too much until a few years ago but now I love it and I'm so grateful I gained the skills from them even if my technique is still terrible and slow.
posted by wingless_angel at 3:32 AM on May 3, 2017
I've got a navy blue cableknit sweater my mum made about 40 years ago for herself and then gifted to me about 20 years back. I wore it a ton then left it in a box for a decade but recently got it out again - it's still going strong.
Sometimes the only thing I don't like about handknits is how durable they are - I really have to space out my own knitting projects so i don't end up with a surplus of cardigans. I learned from my grandmother, nanna and mother, and didn't knit too much until a few years ago but now I love it and I'm so grateful I gained the skills from them even if my technique is still terrible and slow.
posted by wingless_angel at 3:32 AM on May 3, 2017
Sometimes the only thing I don't like about handknits is how durable they are - I really have to space out my own knitting projects so i don't end up with a surplus of cardigans.
An infestation of moths will sort that right out for you. I don't have any of the socks that I made three years ago. Sigh
posted by Gordafarin at 3:40 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]
An infestation of moths will sort that right out for you. I don't have any of the socks that I made three years ago. Sigh
posted by Gordafarin at 3:40 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]
I've mentioned this before, but the gender dynamics of knitting are... odd.
Odd is one way of putting it. Rage-provoking is how I experience it.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 4:39 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
Odd is one way of putting it. Rage-provoking is how I experience it.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 4:39 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
Odd is one way of putting it. Rage-provoking is how I experience it.
I was intentionally being circumspect given that this post is about women knitting and how men who knit are treated is in many ways a perverse manifestation of male privilege. Like I said, I think the post in the FPP is talking about what is fundamentally the same gender dynamic, so talking about how men are viewed/treated is not a derail, but this also isn't about me (us?).
posted by hoyland at 5:14 AM on May 3, 2017
I was intentionally being circumspect given that this post is about women knitting and how men who knit are treated is in many ways a perverse manifestation of male privilege. Like I said, I think the post in the FPP is talking about what is fundamentally the same gender dynamic, so talking about how men are viewed/treated is not a derail, but this also isn't about me (us?).
posted by hoyland at 5:14 AM on May 3, 2017
I've been knitting since they used to call me Madame DeFarge in my college classes for my habit of sitting at a front corner in the classroom whilst endlessly knitting scarves, but my knitting is not my grandmother's knitting because twenty-six years into my practice, I can still only garter-stitch squared-off things with big needles using chunky, variegated yarn to cover up my inconsistencies, whereas my grandmother could turn out the lone thing I'd really love to knit, a proper long-sleeve zipper cardigan (I'm a Fred Rogers man, thank you, and I'll have none of that button-up nonsense), knit to an insanely perfect standard with fucking microscopic No. 4 needles that she somehow managed to wield despite near-complete macular degeneration and arthritic hands turned backwards like a mole's claws.
I don't run in knitting circles because thus far I've found knitting circle small talk insanely dull and I've found too many in the knitting "community" want to include me in the roster of "their gays," which sets my ass hair on fire, and I am genuinely only interested in garter-stitching squared-off things with big needles using chunky, variegated yarn and have no ambition otherwise beyond a desire to one day have a Fred Rogers-style long sleeve zipper cardigan, but I knit constantly, often in public. In general, I'm not even interested in the product, so everyone I know has my scarves, but I've only kept the one I designed to fit perfectly between my motorcycle helmet and my armored jacket and the fifteen-foot-long mossy green mohair one I knit for when I'm feeling like getting my Quentin Crisp on with a long coat and a lot of flouncy, superfluous loops. Tell me you like what I'm knitting and I'll probably give it to you.
The gender thing, though, is ridiculous. In the same way that my being able to sew is apparently seen as a rare mutation for me and my appearance in fabric stores is prone to get that helpful awkward smile from the clerks there that assume that I'm reluctantly on a mission from my wife (or worse, the fluffed-up cat attitude I've gotten from The Official Gay Man™ of the store when I'm able to speak fluent fabric whilst dressing like a grimy lumberjack), knitting in public will get you eyeballs. I spent the last weekend intermittently holding hands with another dude and a little girl at MerleFest, and no one batted an eye, but every time I'd tuck myself into a shady corner for a break from the burning sun and TMF syndrome (too much festival) with my little ball of grey wool and my needles, people would double-take, smile, or, in some cases, look at me as if they'd discovered me drunkenly masturbating there.
It gets me eyeballs that I don't care for and didn't earn, and it's hilarious, because my shaky ability to execute the simplest imaginable stitch with big clunky needles pales in comparison to what my grandmother executed reliably, artfully, and frequently without ever thinking of herself as a master of the craft. Add in the awkward dimension of when, as a dudehumping dude, I'm indulged this eccentricity because it's somehow part of the standard genetic package for being dudehumping dudes while my gearhead activities get their own scrutiny because I'm meant to be more stylish and refined instead of yelling "Get the fucking fuck in there, you goddamn son of a bitch!" to parts of my pickup truck while I'm buried in the engine compartment in positions unimaginable to the authors of the Kama Sutra.
Nonetheless, I treated myself to a wad of nice chunky homespun yarn at MerleFest, after gleefully being taught to spin by a promoter of Appalachian crafts who was clearly intrigued by the juxtaposition of my lumpen bearded-bar-bouncer look and my delight at watching the process by which fluffy fibers become yarn. The turn of attitude was sharp, too, from that sort of bemused patrician patience in the presence of a blundering precocious little boy to a knowing oh-you're-gay nod and wink when Little Miss interrupted the demonstration with frantic shirt tugs and "Joebie! Joebie! Joebie! Daddy wants to get ice cream! What kind do you want?"
"Butter pecan, sweet pea, and tell your Daddy not to take a Daddy tax on mine."
An eyebrow went up and I forced myself not to roll my eyes. Still, I've got this fantastic yarn with a sort of schloofy periodic wadding to it and a twirl of much thinner contrasting yarn binding it all up, and I intend to knit the fuck outta it when I finish my current scarf.
I miss my grandmothers both, and I'll knit that long-sleeve zipper cardigan yet.
In the meantime, I thrive in my mediocrity, and treasure the reminders.
posted by sonascope at 5:46 AM on May 3, 2017 [34 favorites]
I don't run in knitting circles because thus far I've found knitting circle small talk insanely dull and I've found too many in the knitting "community" want to include me in the roster of "their gays," which sets my ass hair on fire, and I am genuinely only interested in garter-stitching squared-off things with big needles using chunky, variegated yarn and have no ambition otherwise beyond a desire to one day have a Fred Rogers-style long sleeve zipper cardigan, but I knit constantly, often in public. In general, I'm not even interested in the product, so everyone I know has my scarves, but I've only kept the one I designed to fit perfectly between my motorcycle helmet and my armored jacket and the fifteen-foot-long mossy green mohair one I knit for when I'm feeling like getting my Quentin Crisp on with a long coat and a lot of flouncy, superfluous loops. Tell me you like what I'm knitting and I'll probably give it to you.
The gender thing, though, is ridiculous. In the same way that my being able to sew is apparently seen as a rare mutation for me and my appearance in fabric stores is prone to get that helpful awkward smile from the clerks there that assume that I'm reluctantly on a mission from my wife (or worse, the fluffed-up cat attitude I've gotten from The Official Gay Man™ of the store when I'm able to speak fluent fabric whilst dressing like a grimy lumberjack), knitting in public will get you eyeballs. I spent the last weekend intermittently holding hands with another dude and a little girl at MerleFest, and no one batted an eye, but every time I'd tuck myself into a shady corner for a break from the burning sun and TMF syndrome (too much festival) with my little ball of grey wool and my needles, people would double-take, smile, or, in some cases, look at me as if they'd discovered me drunkenly masturbating there.
It gets me eyeballs that I don't care for and didn't earn, and it's hilarious, because my shaky ability to execute the simplest imaginable stitch with big clunky needles pales in comparison to what my grandmother executed reliably, artfully, and frequently without ever thinking of herself as a master of the craft. Add in the awkward dimension of when, as a dudehumping dude, I'm indulged this eccentricity because it's somehow part of the standard genetic package for being dudehumping dudes while my gearhead activities get their own scrutiny because I'm meant to be more stylish and refined instead of yelling "Get the fucking fuck in there, you goddamn son of a bitch!" to parts of my pickup truck while I'm buried in the engine compartment in positions unimaginable to the authors of the Kama Sutra.
Nonetheless, I treated myself to a wad of nice chunky homespun yarn at MerleFest, after gleefully being taught to spin by a promoter of Appalachian crafts who was clearly intrigued by the juxtaposition of my lumpen bearded-bar-bouncer look and my delight at watching the process by which fluffy fibers become yarn. The turn of attitude was sharp, too, from that sort of bemused patrician patience in the presence of a blundering precocious little boy to a knowing oh-you're-gay nod and wink when Little Miss interrupted the demonstration with frantic shirt tugs and "Joebie! Joebie! Joebie! Daddy wants to get ice cream! What kind do you want?"
"Butter pecan, sweet pea, and tell your Daddy not to take a Daddy tax on mine."
An eyebrow went up and I forced myself not to roll my eyes. Still, I've got this fantastic yarn with a sort of schloofy periodic wadding to it and a twirl of much thinner contrasting yarn binding it all up, and I intend to knit the fuck outta it when I finish my current scarf.
I miss my grandmothers both, and I'll knit that long-sleeve zipper cardigan yet.
In the meantime, I thrive in my mediocrity, and treasure the reminders.
posted by sonascope at 5:46 AM on May 3, 2017 [34 favorites]
I've mentioned this before, but the gender dynamics of knitting are... odd. It's the only community I've ever been in that simultaneously patronises men and way overvalues their presence.*
Yeeeeah, this is really really true. I worked for a while at a yarn store run by a gay man and customers (98% of the time customers = women) who hadn't been there before were like WHAAAA? Do you KNIT?
OF COURSE HE KNITS he switched careers to open a freaking yarn store. What in the heck.
And then if they became regulars many of them segued directly to that ooky "ooh look now I have a gay BFF" sort of dynamic.
Really the problem was that both owner and employees were happy to knit and chat with one another, but we were not really the outgoing chatty talk about knitting forever people that some knitters come to yarn stores hoping to find.
One day we had a staff meeting where we were talking about the strengths of the different employees -- K is good at teaching! other K is good at setting up beautiful displays! -- and I asked 'but what am I good at?' And they said 'oh, you're the people person!'
And I was like, aha, so then you are doomed.
posted by little cow make small moo at 6:33 AM on May 3, 2017 [7 favorites]
Yeeeeah, this is really really true. I worked for a while at a yarn store run by a gay man and customers (98% of the time customers = women) who hadn't been there before were like WHAAAA? Do you KNIT?
OF COURSE HE KNITS he switched careers to open a freaking yarn store. What in the heck.
And then if they became regulars many of them segued directly to that ooky "ooh look now I have a gay BFF" sort of dynamic.
Really the problem was that both owner and employees were happy to knit and chat with one another, but we were not really the outgoing chatty talk about knitting forever people that some knitters come to yarn stores hoping to find.
One day we had a staff meeting where we were talking about the strengths of the different employees -- K is good at teaching! other K is good at setting up beautiful displays! -- and I asked 'but what am I good at?' And they said 'oh, you're the people person!'
And I was like, aha, so then you are doomed.
posted by little cow make small moo at 6:33 AM on May 3, 2017 [7 favorites]
My grandmother taught me to crochet 40 years ago. I learned to knit about 10 years after that. I am one of the founders of Stitch n' Bitch L.A. Our members are 18 year olds through 80 year olds. Some of our members are grandmothers. Some of them have grandmothers still alive. Many of these women, both teens and grandmothers and everyone in between share patterns and tips and their absolute love of the kitschiest of patterns from the 60s and 70s.
Some of us have been in the group for going on 20 years. One of the things I insisted on when founding the group was that no one would come and feel unwelcome. I don't care how old or young, queer or black or newbie or genderneutral you are. We have seen each other through deaths and marriages, births and miscarriages, multiple cancer diagnoses, and so much more. Not your grandmother's knitting my ass. This is your grandmother's knitting and don't fuck with my grandmother.
posted by Sophie1 at 7:14 AM on May 3, 2017 [14 favorites]
Some of us have been in the group for going on 20 years. One of the things I insisted on when founding the group was that no one would come and feel unwelcome. I don't care how old or young, queer or black or newbie or genderneutral you are. We have seen each other through deaths and marriages, births and miscarriages, multiple cancer diagnoses, and so much more. Not your grandmother's knitting my ass. This is your grandmother's knitting and don't fuck with my grandmother.
posted by Sophie1 at 7:14 AM on May 3, 2017 [14 favorites]
My great-grandmother taught me to knit when I was 8 or so, and then I re-learned in college. I like to think that I AM, in fact, doing my "grandma's knitting" and carrying on a family tradition.
As to the gender dynamics, my straight male boss crochets and he gets a lot of shit for it. He crocheted a blanket for a coworker's baby and as soon as the coworker pulled it out of the bag at the baby shower another coworker squealed, "Ooooh, did your wife knit that????" He just looked at her and said, "Wow, sexist." and I chortled to myself.
posted by chainsofreedom at 7:27 AM on May 3, 2017 [10 favorites]
As to the gender dynamics, my straight male boss crochets and he gets a lot of shit for it. He crocheted a blanket for a coworker's baby and as soon as the coworker pulled it out of the bag at the baby shower another coworker squealed, "Ooooh, did your wife knit that????" He just looked at her and said, "Wow, sexist." and I chortled to myself.
posted by chainsofreedom at 7:27 AM on May 3, 2017 [10 favorites]
I think some of the "not your grandmother's handicraft" (and yes, that's a horrible expression and I liked the article's takedown of it) is about people congratulating themselves on some kind of modern sensibility. Like, our grandmas knitted boring stuff like ugly afghans and mittens, but we knit cool things like cthulhu and internal organs.
It always makes me think of my mom, who was a great handicrafter. She often had a playful attitude toward the things she made. When I was in high school, over several years she crocheted a beautiful but ironic nativity scene, from baby jesus to a shepherd with his sheep (one sheep. She couldn't work up the energy to make more, and it amused her to have a shepherd with a single sheep) to a trio of angels. It was both a beautiful example of what she was capable of, and a sly joke. When I see young knitters and crocheters showing off their playful or ironic creations, I admire them, but also want to tell them they didn't invent this stuff, because people had senses of humor and the spirit of playfulness even as far back as the 70s.
I always have a pang when people talk about their cool ancestors. Until my parents were lifted into the middle class along with so many others after WWII, my family history is nothing but rural poverty, drunkenness, unwanted children, domestic violence, and abuse. I know all the cool people in the past had children, but, sadly, none of them were my ancestors.
posted by Orlop at 7:35 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]
It always makes me think of my mom, who was a great handicrafter. She often had a playful attitude toward the things she made. When I was in high school, over several years she crocheted a beautiful but ironic nativity scene, from baby jesus to a shepherd with his sheep (one sheep. She couldn't work up the energy to make more, and it amused her to have a shepherd with a single sheep) to a trio of angels. It was both a beautiful example of what she was capable of, and a sly joke. When I see young knitters and crocheters showing off their playful or ironic creations, I admire them, but also want to tell them they didn't invent this stuff, because people had senses of humor and the spirit of playfulness even as far back as the 70s.
I always have a pang when people talk about their cool ancestors. Until my parents were lifted into the middle class along with so many others after WWII, my family history is nothing but rural poverty, drunkenness, unwanted children, domestic violence, and abuse. I know all the cool people in the past had children, but, sadly, none of them were my ancestors.
posted by Orlop at 7:35 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]
Not your grandma's knitting is a phrase that's hugely problematic with its inherent ageism and misogyny. We don't hear 'not your grandad's beer brewing' bandied around, do we?
Here in the UK we are not helped by a popular TV advert that show grans knitting breakfast cereal - it cements the idea of knitting as something dotty white-haired ladies do because they have too much time on their hands.
It does my head in.
posted by kariebookish at 7:57 AM on May 3, 2017 [5 favorites]
Here in the UK we are not helped by a popular TV advert that show grans knitting breakfast cereal - it cements the idea of knitting as something dotty white-haired ladies do because they have too much time on their hands.
It does my head in.
posted by kariebookish at 7:57 AM on May 3, 2017 [5 favorites]
As someone who crochets I just wanted to say that I'm terrified and in awe of knitters. Knitters will fuck you up.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:59 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:59 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]
As someone who crochets I just wanted to say that I'm terrified and in awe of knitters.
I've tried for years to learn to crochet and something about it is mathematical in a way that fries my brain, which sucks, because it'd be one less aluminum stick to carry around.
posted by sonascope at 8:03 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
I've tried for years to learn to crochet and something about it is mathematical in a way that fries my brain, which sucks, because it'd be one less aluminum stick to carry around.
posted by sonascope at 8:03 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
Looking back at the kinds of work our grandmothers did, and that our mothers were liberated from, its hard not to get the impression that there are a lot of very important things we didn't at all get right about the transition. Setting aside how the enormous amount of wealth created by the introduction of billions of women into the commercial workforce globally has almost entirely been swallowed up by the rentier classes while the value created by womens' work was previously retained within family units, it seem like many people never really had a sense of the real value that this work once had, and certainly don't now. As a dude presenting person, my experience of attempting quietly knit in public has been roughly the same as other posters in this thread, and it seems to me like a lot of the dumbfounded amazement I get comes from trying to square a deeply rooted sense that this femininely-coded work has so little inherent value with a deeply rooted sense that the work men do has so much inherent value. Nevermind that knitting and the expression of love and emotional labor that it represents is so profoundly awesome, its almost as if work becomes coded as lacking value when women do it and becomes coded as having value when men do it.
When I was an undergrad working in a laboratory without long-staying graduate students, making the turnover run fast, to stabilize the culture I got to see this effect first hand. The lab was really two laboratories under a single professor working with bacteriophage against two different model organisms, E. coli and Pseudomonas, which need to be kept separated from each other in different rooms because more wild Pseudomonas has a nasty way of killing the shit out of more domesticated lab strains of E. coli and contaminating everything. The 'two' labs were connected, shared a professor, shared a break room, shared a common type of research, shared a research community, generally partied together, and did everything but infections together; but from the 90s when work with the second model organism started to a couple years ago when they began to shut down they had always both dramatically self segregated by gender and switched every two to four years.
When I started in the lab as a wee little pipette scratcher, I joined the E. coli lab while it was female dominated rather than the Pseudomonas lab, which was male dominated. It was really hard not to get a general sense that everyone sort of internalized how working with Pseudomonas phages was a hardcore medical thing done by future doctors who were doing serious science, while working with E. coli phages was an almost passive thing to do that was just basic research. Then, as the generation who trained me left and I was still there the male students in the generation I trained ended up flocking to me and constructing their own general internalized impression, where the basic research I was doing with E. coli was suddenly the serious science thing done only by people who could handle it while those in the suddenly female Pseudomonas lab were just glorified future nurses. Never mind that female pre-meds were the ones actually going to medical school while male pre-meds pretty exclusively washed out, or that all of the students who fucked up and couldn't handle it (aside from the one female student who turned out to have a serious problem with heroin) were pretty categorically male, or that the cycles seemed to in general correlate with female student generations needing to clean up various kinds of messes with poorly maintained stocks and useless data as well as male generations limping along by building on female efforts, the generalized impression of the worthiness of effort seems to just only follow dudes.
Having now seen the natural experiment play out a third time before one lab shut down, it seems obvious to me that it isn't so much disparaged tasks that women get pushed into, but tasks that women do that get disparaged. Its like the very fact that a woman is doing something makes that something somehow less important, less successful, and less worthy. The task itself is not the dependent factor, but the fact that women are doing it. It is also not like this was some kind of especially sexist environment students are entering into, the professor, who has been working since the 60s as a woman in molecular biology when it was among the worst of boy clubs, works thoughtfully to fight this sort of thing. Indeed, even though it was really me and my work that the impression of the maleness of the E. coli lab was built around, none of my own efforts seemed to do much other than occasionally provoke some thought - like its just this emergent property inherent to how students are raised.
As dumbfounded as people seem to consistently be when they discover I knit, I'm basically just as dumbfounded when confronted with the question of what to do with all of the privilege that comes with having a male stamp of approval that I couldn't avoid giving to textile work if I wanted to. In the lab I can at least be careful to mindfully encourage and support female students while confronting patriarchy in male students, but aside from stepping super lightly around the female spaces I'm basically always enthusiastically invited to I'm pretty much at a loss.
posted by Blasdelb at 8:18 AM on May 3, 2017 [28 favorites]
When I was an undergrad working in a laboratory without long-staying graduate students, making the turnover run fast, to stabilize the culture I got to see this effect first hand. The lab was really two laboratories under a single professor working with bacteriophage against two different model organisms, E. coli and Pseudomonas, which need to be kept separated from each other in different rooms because more wild Pseudomonas has a nasty way of killing the shit out of more domesticated lab strains of E. coli and contaminating everything. The 'two' labs were connected, shared a professor, shared a break room, shared a common type of research, shared a research community, generally partied together, and did everything but infections together; but from the 90s when work with the second model organism started to a couple years ago when they began to shut down they had always both dramatically self segregated by gender and switched every two to four years.
When I started in the lab as a wee little pipette scratcher, I joined the E. coli lab while it was female dominated rather than the Pseudomonas lab, which was male dominated. It was really hard not to get a general sense that everyone sort of internalized how working with Pseudomonas phages was a hardcore medical thing done by future doctors who were doing serious science, while working with E. coli phages was an almost passive thing to do that was just basic research. Then, as the generation who trained me left and I was still there the male students in the generation I trained ended up flocking to me and constructing their own general internalized impression, where the basic research I was doing with E. coli was suddenly the serious science thing done only by people who could handle it while those in the suddenly female Pseudomonas lab were just glorified future nurses. Never mind that female pre-meds were the ones actually going to medical school while male pre-meds pretty exclusively washed out, or that all of the students who fucked up and couldn't handle it (aside from the one female student who turned out to have a serious problem with heroin) were pretty categorically male, or that the cycles seemed to in general correlate with female student generations needing to clean up various kinds of messes with poorly maintained stocks and useless data as well as male generations limping along by building on female efforts, the generalized impression of the worthiness of effort seems to just only follow dudes.
Having now seen the natural experiment play out a third time before one lab shut down, it seems obvious to me that it isn't so much disparaged tasks that women get pushed into, but tasks that women do that get disparaged. Its like the very fact that a woman is doing something makes that something somehow less important, less successful, and less worthy. The task itself is not the dependent factor, but the fact that women are doing it. It is also not like this was some kind of especially sexist environment students are entering into, the professor, who has been working since the 60s as a woman in molecular biology when it was among the worst of boy clubs, works thoughtfully to fight this sort of thing. Indeed, even though it was really me and my work that the impression of the maleness of the E. coli lab was built around, none of my own efforts seemed to do much other than occasionally provoke some thought - like its just this emergent property inherent to how students are raised.
As dumbfounded as people seem to consistently be when they discover I knit, I'm basically just as dumbfounded when confronted with the question of what to do with all of the privilege that comes with having a male stamp of approval that I couldn't avoid giving to textile work if I wanted to. In the lab I can at least be careful to mindfully encourage and support female students while confronting patriarchy in male students, but aside from stepping super lightly around the female spaces I'm basically always enthusiastically invited to I'm pretty much at a loss.
posted by Blasdelb at 8:18 AM on May 3, 2017 [28 favorites]
We don't hear 'not your grandad's beer brewing' bandied around, do we?
link
Looking back at the kinds of work our grandmothers did, and that our mothers were liberated from
Just how old are you people? Because from where I'm sitting, the women who burnt their bras are now the grandmothers, and they're the generation that rejected homecrafts. The knitting grandmother is a stereotype, and stereotypes, while useful, lag a bit.
Thinking about the stereotypes that are now thoroughly obsolete - the madman who thinks he's Bonaparte, the prisoner in striped clothes, the cane-wielding headmaster - I've got the feeling we're talking roughly three generations to kill one off thoroughly?
posted by Leon at 8:40 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
link
Looking back at the kinds of work our grandmothers did, and that our mothers were liberated from
Just how old are you people? Because from where I'm sitting, the women who burnt their bras are now the grandmothers, and they're the generation that rejected homecrafts. The knitting grandmother is a stereotype, and stereotypes, while useful, lag a bit.
Thinking about the stereotypes that are now thoroughly obsolete - the madman who thinks he's Bonaparte, the prisoner in striped clothes, the cane-wielding headmaster - I've got the feeling we're talking roughly three generations to kill one off thoroughly?
posted by Leon at 8:40 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
I always have a pang when people talk about their cool ancestors. Until my parents were lifted into the middle class along with so many others after WWII, my family history is nothing but rural poverty, drunkenness, unwanted children, domestic violence, and abuse. I know all the cool people in the past had children, but, sadly, none of them were my ancestors.
I mainly talk about my four (precisely four) cool ancestors because the lot of the rest of them were pretty much like yours yep. In my case, it was my twice-paternal-great-grandmother, whose name I carry, her son (my grandfather) and his wife (grandma), and my twice-maternal-great-grandmother. My paternal great-grandma died before I was born, but lived on through the stories of her son/my grandfather. I know she knitted and sewed all sorts of things, and was a badass who protected not only her own children, but her sisters, nieces and nephews from the worst of the abuse meted out by her husband and her sisters' husbands. My great-grandfather was not a nice guy.
Then there was my other great-grandma, the one I grew up knewing. We had twenty years together. She crocheted, knitted, raised aloe vera plants, loved neighbor cats, and stayed with her drunkard abusive husband because it was the Depression and she was a woman, what else could she do? She protected her kids as best she could, and outfitted her entire neighborhood of children with winter hats and gloves as well as clacker toys (jar tops with a knit covering you could press to go "clack") and the odd blanket here and there. She was always knitting and crocheting. Always. My memory of my great-grandma is of a sharp-witted lady who always had a joke to make about something or other, sitting in her rocking chair with the click-click of needles.
Her daughter, my grandmother, also knit but hated her mother (great-grandma) for staying with her father. I... don't have positive memories of her. She covered up her son's horrific abuse of her grandson (my cousin) and shrugged off the hell I went through with my mother (her daughter).
Anyway. For me knitting equates to a tradition of love and strength through my two great-grandmas, one of them via my beloved grandpa who also treasured things she'd made. I'm glad to have known them. (Tangential but my grandma married to that grandpa was big on jewelry. She made some gorgeous stuff!)
posted by fraula at 8:44 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]
I mainly talk about my four (precisely four) cool ancestors because the lot of the rest of them were pretty much like yours yep. In my case, it was my twice-paternal-great-grandmother, whose name I carry, her son (my grandfather) and his wife (grandma), and my twice-maternal-great-grandmother. My paternal great-grandma died before I was born, but lived on through the stories of her son/my grandfather. I know she knitted and sewed all sorts of things, and was a badass who protected not only her own children, but her sisters, nieces and nephews from the worst of the abuse meted out by her husband and her sisters' husbands. My great-grandfather was not a nice guy.
Then there was my other great-grandma, the one I grew up knewing. We had twenty years together. She crocheted, knitted, raised aloe vera plants, loved neighbor cats, and stayed with her drunkard abusive husband because it was the Depression and she was a woman, what else could she do? She protected her kids as best she could, and outfitted her entire neighborhood of children with winter hats and gloves as well as clacker toys (jar tops with a knit covering you could press to go "clack") and the odd blanket here and there. She was always knitting and crocheting. Always. My memory of my great-grandma is of a sharp-witted lady who always had a joke to make about something or other, sitting in her rocking chair with the click-click of needles.
Her daughter, my grandmother, also knit but hated her mother (great-grandma) for staying with her father. I... don't have positive memories of her. She covered up her son's horrific abuse of her grandson (my cousin) and shrugged off the hell I went through with my mother (her daughter).
Anyway. For me knitting equates to a tradition of love and strength through my two great-grandmas, one of them via my beloved grandpa who also treasured things she'd made. I'm glad to have known them. (Tangential but my grandma married to that grandpa was big on jewelry. She made some gorgeous stuff!)
posted by fraula at 8:44 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]
Having now seen the natural experiment play out a third time before one lab shut down, it seems obvious to me that it isn't so much disparaged tasks that women get pushed into, but tasks that women do that get disparaged. Its like the very fact that a woman is doing something makes that something somehow less important, less successful, and less worthy. The task itself is not the dependent factor, but the fact that women are doing it. It is also not like this was some kind of especially sexist environment students are entering into, the professor, who has been working since the 60s as a woman in molecular biology when it was among the worst of boy clubs, works thoughtfully to fight this sort of thing. Indeed, even though it was really me and my work that the impression of the maleness of the E. coli lab was built around, none of my own efforts seemed to do much other than occasionally provoke some thought - like its just this emergent property inherent to how students are raised.
It's a very well-studied historic phenomenon that jobs lose value when they become "feminized." See typewriters, teachers, secretaries, mid 20th-century telecom, computers, and even doctors in Eastern Europe following WWII as examples. Of course, the other side of the coin is that those jobs sometimes became feminized because women were more reliable, could be paid less, and tolerated smaller working spaces than men.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:44 AM on May 3, 2017 [6 favorites]
It's a very well-studied historic phenomenon that jobs lose value when they become "feminized." See typewriters, teachers, secretaries, mid 20th-century telecom, computers, and even doctors in Eastern Europe following WWII as examples. Of course, the other side of the coin is that those jobs sometimes became feminized because women were more reliable, could be paid less, and tolerated smaller working spaces than men.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:44 AM on May 3, 2017 [6 favorites]
"It gets me eyeballs that I don't care for and didn't earn, and it's hilarious, because my shaky ability to execute the simplest imaginable stitch with big clunky needles pales in comparison to what my grandmother executed reliably, artfully, and frequently without ever thinking of herself as a master of the craft."Seriously this.
What really gets me is that "Our Grandmothers' [textile work]" stitching together NASA's spacesuits, performed by seamstresses at Playtex no less, got man to the moon as much as any other male-coded form of engineering did. To get the job done within the extreme tolerances and limitations required they used all manner of mathematically elegant solutions and yet we only ever hear about how it was Kansas farm boys who did it. I'm having trouble finding it, but its like a comment on the blue a while ago discussing how the tech-tree in the Civilization games was similarly misogynistic. Where, particularly in the Ancient Era of the tree its all about the male coded innovations like archery, mining, and sailing but utterly lacks the far more important female-coded innovations like rope-making, weaving, and sailmaking that made them possible. Indeed, until quite late in the age of sail, the sails were often far more valuable and important than the boat but we've never coded the kind of work that really made long distance maritime travel possible as being at all innovative.
posted by Blasdelb at 8:47 AM on May 3, 2017 [13 favorites]
Yesterday I was in a WH Smiths (sells printed magazines) that had the magazines split across an aisle. Male on the left, female on the right.
I spent a good ten minutes discovering what they'd done with the "borderline" material. I can now report that gardening is female, while current affairs and politics is male. Cycling is male, TV is female. History is male (and there are so many history magazines now!), but counties are female.
The most interesting one was interior decorating, which was female unless it was really stylish interior decorating, in which case it was male.
posted by Leon at 9:04 AM on May 3, 2017 [6 favorites]
I spent a good ten minutes discovering what they'd done with the "borderline" material. I can now report that gardening is female, while current affairs and politics is male. Cycling is male, TV is female. History is male (and there are so many history magazines now!), but counties are female.
The most interesting one was interior decorating, which was female unless it was really stylish interior decorating, in which case it was male.
posted by Leon at 9:04 AM on May 3, 2017 [6 favorites]
We do hear "not your father's"--Oldsmobile ad from 1988.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bAJ3-mbP1pY
posted by Ideefixe at 9:39 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bAJ3-mbP1pY
posted by Ideefixe at 9:39 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]
I'm so damn proud that my knitting is my "grandmother's knitting" because these wonderful ladies did so much of the hard work to figure out how to knit, purl, cable, twist, ssk, sso, k2tog, and so on.
To be part of such a long, wonderful tradition of artisans and craftsfolk both humbles and fills me with joy. I took up knitting precisely because I associated it with skilled creatrices from days past.
posted by Excommunicated Cardinal at 9:46 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]
To be part of such a long, wonderful tradition of artisans and craftsfolk both humbles and fills me with joy. I took up knitting precisely because I associated it with skilled creatrices from days past.
posted by Excommunicated Cardinal at 9:46 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]
"Because from where I'm sitting, the women who burnt their bras are now the grandmothers, and they're the generation that rejected homecrafts."
Ahem, I'm part of that now-granny generation. Anyone who says if you remember the sixties it's cause you weren't there is likely a man. The women I knew back then, while we participated in both the women's movement and the hippie drug culture (not to mention the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement), like so many women today ( at least according to the numerous comments in the famous emotional labor metafilter post) we were too busy doing the emotional labor to get and stay as wasted as the men.
We didn't really burn our bras, that was a rumor started by someone, I don't know who. Burning them would have been stinky and gross and offended our nascent environmentalism. We did stop wearing them for a while. My women friends also got into all kinds of homecrafts in those hippie communes, including ones involving needles, hooks, thread, yarn. They beaded, embroidered, sewed, knit, crocheted. They even raised sheep, sheared them, carded and spun their own wool.
I worked briefly with Abby's dad and my kids went to school with her and her sister. Good to see her turn up on here.
posted by mareli at 10:13 AM on May 3, 2017 [12 favorites]
Ahem, I'm part of that now-granny generation. Anyone who says if you remember the sixties it's cause you weren't there is likely a man. The women I knew back then, while we participated in both the women's movement and the hippie drug culture (not to mention the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement), like so many women today ( at least according to the numerous comments in the famous emotional labor metafilter post) we were too busy doing the emotional labor to get and stay as wasted as the men.
We didn't really burn our bras, that was a rumor started by someone, I don't know who. Burning them would have been stinky and gross and offended our nascent environmentalism. We did stop wearing them for a while. My women friends also got into all kinds of homecrafts in those hippie communes, including ones involving needles, hooks, thread, yarn. They beaded, embroidered, sewed, knit, crocheted. They even raised sheep, sheared them, carded and spun their own wool.
I worked briefly with Abby's dad and my kids went to school with her and her sister. Good to see her turn up on here.
posted by mareli at 10:13 AM on May 3, 2017 [12 favorites]
I'm grateful for smoking, which meant that I was lucky enough to grow up in an extended family packed with active, resourceful southern widows and my dad, who, thanks to his father's death when he was eight, was himself raised by a cadre of women who just got things done. It's an ugly thought, I know, but there's something about having a whole generation of negating, critical, gender-reinforcing menfolk wiped out by their fussy little nervous habit that I have to credit for my privilege of having come of age without the shame and relentless pressure applied by the field agents of patriarchy.
My father's lone concession to enforced masculinity was to sniff about my brief flirtation with Robert-Smith-inspired lipstick that I was welcome to do what I liked in the world, but lipstick was dreadfully Weimar. My lone two uncles were more traditionalists, but one lived far away and never traveled to the land of liberalism, and the other was mostly fun, and I enjoyed provoking him with my unorthodoxies because it made him laugh like a frog puppet. My grandmother remarried, but her second husband was immersed in golf, stamp collecting, and activities at the Boumi Temple and regarded me as an alien best left unexamined.
In the meantime, my grandmothers taught me how to cane chairs, enjoy the films of Pam Grier, refinish furniture, slaughter chickens, repair the shift linkage on a transmission, build treehouses, dance like they did on Soul Train, install a light switch, cook German food through an Irish lens, rebuild an electric fan, capture a bat, graft fruit trees, use a pipe-threader on iron pipe, can tomatoes, hand-stitch like a pro, change a tire, install standing seam metal roofing…and it goes on and on. There were times when I had more friends who were women sixty and older than any other kind, and it was amazing. You know who'll listen to a nonsense-spouting breathless ten-year-old boy and be able to parse enough of the conversation while treating said lad as a small and easily distracted adult? Yep.
"Joe-B," asked my great aunt Ruth, as she laid out her gun on the sparkly formica surface of her dinette table in her little brick rancher with a breezeway in the cool shade of giant pines in Thomson, Georgia, "Would you like to help me clean my gun?"
I didn't want to, per se, but my aunt would tell me scandalous local stories from the thirties in the process of any chore, so I sat down and we dismantled a gun, piece by piece, cleaned all the parks, oiled everything that needed it, and meticulously turned it back into a gun that she strapped to the back of her headboard.
Like many things I learned in those days, like making hospital corners and folding cloth diapers, I have no earthly use for the skill I learned, but skills are broad, and carry their weight into new arenas every day.
A year or so ago, when I was installing a classical standing seam roof on a building addition I'd built for a client, I used the same tools that another great aunt had used in the same process while having me help her re-roof part of her barn, which dated back to the turn of the last century, and my knitting sure isn't my grandmother's knitting, but my standing seam roof installation is indeed my great aunt's standing seam roof installation.
posted by sonascope at 10:16 AM on May 3, 2017 [18 favorites]
My father's lone concession to enforced masculinity was to sniff about my brief flirtation with Robert-Smith-inspired lipstick that I was welcome to do what I liked in the world, but lipstick was dreadfully Weimar. My lone two uncles were more traditionalists, but one lived far away and never traveled to the land of liberalism, and the other was mostly fun, and I enjoyed provoking him with my unorthodoxies because it made him laugh like a frog puppet. My grandmother remarried, but her second husband was immersed in golf, stamp collecting, and activities at the Boumi Temple and regarded me as an alien best left unexamined.
In the meantime, my grandmothers taught me how to cane chairs, enjoy the films of Pam Grier, refinish furniture, slaughter chickens, repair the shift linkage on a transmission, build treehouses, dance like they did on Soul Train, install a light switch, cook German food through an Irish lens, rebuild an electric fan, capture a bat, graft fruit trees, use a pipe-threader on iron pipe, can tomatoes, hand-stitch like a pro, change a tire, install standing seam metal roofing…and it goes on and on. There were times when I had more friends who were women sixty and older than any other kind, and it was amazing. You know who'll listen to a nonsense-spouting breathless ten-year-old boy and be able to parse enough of the conversation while treating said lad as a small and easily distracted adult? Yep.
"Joe-B," asked my great aunt Ruth, as she laid out her gun on the sparkly formica surface of her dinette table in her little brick rancher with a breezeway in the cool shade of giant pines in Thomson, Georgia, "Would you like to help me clean my gun?"
I didn't want to, per se, but my aunt would tell me scandalous local stories from the thirties in the process of any chore, so I sat down and we dismantled a gun, piece by piece, cleaned all the parks, oiled everything that needed it, and meticulously turned it back into a gun that she strapped to the back of her headboard.
Like many things I learned in those days, like making hospital corners and folding cloth diapers, I have no earthly use for the skill I learned, but skills are broad, and carry their weight into new arenas every day.
A year or so ago, when I was installing a classical standing seam roof on a building addition I'd built for a client, I used the same tools that another great aunt had used in the same process while having me help her re-roof part of her barn, which dated back to the turn of the last century, and my knitting sure isn't my grandmother's knitting, but my standing seam roof installation is indeed my great aunt's standing seam roof installation.
posted by sonascope at 10:16 AM on May 3, 2017 [18 favorites]
My knitting is not my grandmothers' knitting. My relationship with them has been the subject of hours of therapy and neither of them knitted anyway. It is also not a tradition, a hipster reclaiming of craft, or your trend piece. It is not a performative act of feminism, pro-feminism, femininity, new masculinity, or queer liberation. I do not need validation in the form of mythic connection to grandmother knitters, 19th century fishermen, or ancient cultures.
I knit for the pleasure of wool sliding across my fingers, the mathematical beauty of pattern held in the mind, and the occasional cussing when I'm fixing a mistake.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:02 AM on May 3, 2017 [13 favorites]
I knit for the pleasure of wool sliding across my fingers, the mathematical beauty of pattern held in the mind, and the occasional cussing when I'm fixing a mistake.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:02 AM on May 3, 2017 [13 favorites]
> My women friends also got into all kinds of homecrafts in those hippie communes, including ones involving needles, hooks, thread, yarn. They beaded, embroidered, sewed, knit, crocheted. They even raised sheep, sheared them, carded and spun their own wool
Makers, before "Maker" was a thing.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:53 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
Makers, before "Maker" was a thing.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:53 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
My knitting is not my grandmothers' knitting. My relationship with them has been the subject of hours of therapy and neither of them knitted anyway. It is also not a tradition, a hipster reclaiming of craft, or your trend piece. It is not a performative act of feminism, pro-feminism, femininity, new masculinity, or queer liberation. I do not need validation in the form of mythic connection to grandmother knitters, 19th century fishermen, or ancient cultures.That's great. But your perspective is not any more valid than the perspectives of people for whom knitting is an act of feminism or queer liberation. It isn't any more valid than the perspectives of knitters who do feel connections with their grandmothers. I'm not sure whether the ancient cultures thing is a deliberate swipe at Abby Franquemont, who is deeply invested in the Andean textile traditions that she grew up surrounded by, but your perspective is sure as fuck not any more valid than hers. I'm not sure where you get off expressing so much contempt for other knitters, but your perspective is exactly as valid as that of anyone else who knits and not the tiniest bit more.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 2:35 PM on May 3, 2017 [8 favorites]
Eh? I'm a knitter, and I don't feel insulted at all. We all knit for different reasons and bring different associations to it.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:40 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:40 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
I have two cardigan sweaters that my great-grandmother knitted back in the '40s. They were for my mother and they are gaddamn amazing and just perfect. I didn't even know these sweaters existed til my daughter was born a few years ago when they magically appeared from some relative who had been holding on to them for decades. I'm just really glad to have something that her hands touched.
Conversely, I have been knitting for over 20 years and I laugh at the thought of any of the weird misshapen items I've made being passed down to future generations. (But you never know!)
posted by medeine at 2:42 PM on May 3, 2017
Conversely, I have been knitting for over 20 years and I laugh at the thought of any of the weird misshapen items I've made being passed down to future generations. (But you never know!)
posted by medeine at 2:42 PM on May 3, 2017
We all knit for different reasons and bring different associations to it.Yes, but some of those reasons are good and real, and some of them are "mythic" and "performative" and done out of a need for validation.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 2:49 PM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]
My grandparents moved into a retirement community recently. When they were packing up their house, they found a pair of socks (with a beautiful slipped-stitch plaid pattern) that Grandma made for Grandpa when they were in college together in 1950 or '51. The last time I visited, Grandpa was proudly wearing the socks, which haven't aged a day.
My knitting isn't my grandmother's knitting, but I certainly hope that someone is wearing the things I make 65 years from now.
posted by zeptoweasel at 3:39 PM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]
My knitting isn't my grandmother's knitting, but I certainly hope that someone is wearing the things I make 65 years from now.
posted by zeptoweasel at 3:39 PM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]
(For one thing, I don't think Grandma would have knitted herself into a corner where the only way out is two wedges of short rows, at different rates, in a stripe pattern with odd numbers of rows. Argh!)
posted by zeptoweasel at 3:45 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by zeptoweasel at 3:45 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
I'm not sure whether the ancient cultures thing is a deliberate swipe at Abby Franquemont, ...
You can't get very far in the knitting world without encountering some work or another that attempts to massage fragile masculine egos by referencing a history of knitting from Roman-era textiles to 19th century fishemen. There is a certain performative aspect behind every Knitting with Balls text I encounter. And well, if an author devotes entire chapters or even a book title to locating the art and craft firmly within the boundaries of traditional machismo or SNAGdom, I'm going to be skeptical of this "anything you can do, I can do better" messaging.
My rant wasn't about why you knit, or why Ms. Franquemont knits, or why anyone else knits (well except maybe for the Knitting with Balls group.) It's about how my knitting is often interpreted gender-binary ways that I loathe, experience as distressing, and find absurd. It's about how my knitting is described as performative. Part of that is due to the knitting equivalent of Bronies. But part is just due to the way in which cultural homophobia fixates on any form of gender-nonconformity as a performative affectation.
I think non-knitters do more of that than knitters. But I see enough of it to make me a bit uncomfortable taking my knitting out in public.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 5:08 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
You can't get very far in the knitting world without encountering some work or another that attempts to massage fragile masculine egos by referencing a history of knitting from Roman-era textiles to 19th century fishemen. There is a certain performative aspect behind every Knitting with Balls text I encounter. And well, if an author devotes entire chapters or even a book title to locating the art and craft firmly within the boundaries of traditional machismo or SNAGdom, I'm going to be skeptical of this "anything you can do, I can do better" messaging.
My rant wasn't about why you knit, or why Ms. Franquemont knits, or why anyone else knits (well except maybe for the Knitting with Balls group.) It's about how my knitting is often interpreted gender-binary ways that I loathe, experience as distressing, and find absurd. It's about how my knitting is described as performative. Part of that is due to the knitting equivalent of Bronies. But part is just due to the way in which cultural homophobia fixates on any form of gender-nonconformity as a performative affectation.
I think non-knitters do more of that than knitters. But I see enough of it to make me a bit uncomfortable taking my knitting out in public.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 5:08 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]
obiwanwasabi: A Stitch and Bitch is a term used over here in Oz for an informal gathering of knitters and other yarn crafters, usually held in a pub. Mine's on a Tuesday.
I'm an Aussie, so yeah I know, but it's also not just an Aussie term.
I think it's stupid marketing trying to make knitting look punk and edgy ('hey gir...I mean grrrrls!') while also making clear this is somehow firmly a 'girl' thing, which seems to defeat the purpose. This 'it's not your grandmother's knitting!' on the one hand, somehow distancing the craft from women who were presumably boring doormats, while also staying firmly in 'tee hee girls let's double up on the entendres so risky!' territory makes me grind my teeth.
I own this, and it clearly wasn't marketed at knitters in general - rather, it targeted "...primarily young, creative, connected chicks with sticks". Chicks with sticks? Are you fucking serious?
Ditto the follow up which wins the 'sniggering title' award with its 'Happy Hooker' tag line. 'Ha ha you know like prostitutes it's so empowering'.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 7:26 PM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]
I'm an Aussie, so yeah I know, but it's also not just an Aussie term.
I think it's stupid marketing trying to make knitting look punk and edgy ('hey gir...I mean grrrrls!') while also making clear this is somehow firmly a 'girl' thing, which seems to defeat the purpose. This 'it's not your grandmother's knitting!' on the one hand, somehow distancing the craft from women who were presumably boring doormats, while also staying firmly in 'tee hee girls let's double up on the entendres so risky!' territory makes me grind my teeth.
I own this, and it clearly wasn't marketed at knitters in general - rather, it targeted "...primarily young, creative, connected chicks with sticks". Chicks with sticks? Are you fucking serious?
Ditto the follow up which wins the 'sniggering title' award with its 'Happy Hooker' tag line. 'Ha ha you know like prostitutes it's so empowering'.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 7:26 PM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]
You can't get very far in the knitting world without encountering some work or another that attempts to massage fragile masculine egos by referencing a history of knitting from Roman-era textiles to 19th century fishemen.Honestly, I think we inhabit different knitting worlds.
So look: Abby Franquemont is a fairly big name in my knitting world. (Her thing is spinning, not knitting, but there's a lot of crossover.) She is a feminist. She is profoundly influenced by her parents, who were anthropologists who studied Andean textiles, and she sees her textile work as being tied to a family legacy. She is deeply invested in textile traditions, especially the ones that she encountered as a child in Peru.
I don't know if you bothered to read her piece, but she talks about men who knit, in a way that I don't think is condescending or ego-massaging or whatever you find objectionable about the gender dynamics of knitting culture. After she explains how her knitting is, in fact, her grandmother's knitting, she says this:
And actually, it’s my father’s knitting, too. It’s too sad for me to take a picture, but I have a small bag that I sometimes open and look at, and think about the contents. It was the bag in which he carried around his last knitting project, which he didn’t finish. They were gloves he was making for me when he succumbed to the cancer that killed him — colorwork gloves with a reinterpretation of one of my favourite Chinchero weaving patterns.And that's illustrated with a picture of three men, one of whom is knitting.
You know what else? It’s lots of people’s knitting all over the world. They look all kinds of ways and might be anybody. Like these gentlemen knitting while watching a presentation at the 2010 Tinkuy de Tejedores in Urubamba, Peru:
There's been a lot said elsewhere about the phrase "not your grandmother's knitting": it's such a cliche that the arguments against it have also become a little rote. I think this piece is actually more about the connections that she feels to her family, both the people whom she knew, like her father, mother and grandmother, and those whom she didn't, like her cigar-smoking suffragist great-grandmother. And I get that you can't relate to that, or maybe you didn't bother reading the piece, but I kind of can relate to it, as the granddaughter of a feminist, revolutionary socialist, survivor of shit I can't even wrap my head around who was also a knitter. And I guess I think it would be cool if we could engage at least a little bit with the OP before turning the topic to dudes.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:10 AM on May 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
A few years ago I bought my now wife knitting needles and yarn for Christmas because she'd seemed interested in picking it up, but it never took. The day after the election last November our apartment flooded, and in the process of cleanup I found her knitting stuff in the back of a closet and decided it'd be a fun skill to know how to do. Now it's my knitting stuff, and I've made a few things that I'm extremely proud of.
I told my mom about it, and her first comment was 'Oh, you know grandma knitted a lot before she started sewing all those quilts, I bet she has a ton of old stuff you could have'. I knew one of my cousins crochets and commented that I guess I could settle for being the 3rd best knitter in the family, to which she replied 'Aunt K and B knit also, they're pretty good at it'. I guess 5th best isn't so bad either... A few weeks later I visited my parents and my mom pulled out an enormous, gorgeous knit blanket and asked what I thought. I told her it was really well done, and asked how much it cost and she told me grandma made it and I can't remember the last time I was so impressed.
I don't really broadcast it, but most people just think it's quirky when they find out I'm a guy who knits some. I found a yarn store near me and it's staffed entirely by old ladies who seem very fond of me, but they don't make a big deal of it. I did laugh the second time I went in, when checking out the lady asked for my name for the rewards program, and when I told her my first name, she typed it in and said "And your last name? Oh wait, nevermind..." Seems there's not a lot of boy's names in the rewards program.
posted by DynamiteToast at 7:56 AM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
I told my mom about it, and her first comment was 'Oh, you know grandma knitted a lot before she started sewing all those quilts, I bet she has a ton of old stuff you could have'. I knew one of my cousins crochets and commented that I guess I could settle for being the 3rd best knitter in the family, to which she replied 'Aunt K and B knit also, they're pretty good at it'. I guess 5th best isn't so bad either... A few weeks later I visited my parents and my mom pulled out an enormous, gorgeous knit blanket and asked what I thought. I told her it was really well done, and asked how much it cost and she told me grandma made it and I can't remember the last time I was so impressed.
I don't really broadcast it, but most people just think it's quirky when they find out I'm a guy who knits some. I found a yarn store near me and it's staffed entirely by old ladies who seem very fond of me, but they don't make a big deal of it. I did laugh the second time I went in, when checking out the lady asked for my name for the rewards program, and when I told her my first name, she typed it in and said "And your last name? Oh wait, nevermind..." Seems there's not a lot of boy's names in the rewards program.
posted by DynamiteToast at 7:56 AM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
I don't know if you bothered to read her piece, but she talks about men who knit, in a way that I don't think is condescending or ego-massaging or whatever you find objectionable about the gender dynamics of knitting culture.
As I've already made clear, I don't have a major problem with Abby Franquemont's piece. I mostly agree with it and have forwarded on to multiple people.
I do have a problem with the gender dynamics of how knitting is marketed and discussed, usually in the same trend pieces that Franquemont is criticizing, and a little bit here in this discussion. "Not your grandmother's knitting" often goes hand in hand with attempts to put the practice squarely within post-modern binary gender roles. That doesn't leave much space for nonbinary people who are neither "chicks" or "dudes."
As I wrote already, people writing about knitting from the outside do this more than knitters. It's not hard to find knitting materials that focus just on the knitting without leaping to assumptions about the knitter. That's not always the case. I went home last night to a partner nearly in tears, partly because she can't find much information on how to care for her middle-aged curls that doesn't go out of its way to address a cis and binary audience. So I'll admit that I have a thin skin this week about stuff that's unnecessarily gendered. Speaking of which:
And I guess I think it would be cool if we could engage at least a little bit with the OP before turning the topic to dudes.
Most of my posts here have explicitly talked about how coding knitting within a gender binary contributes to my experiences of gender anxiety. Please don't obliquely refer to me as a "dude" or summarize my criticism of the gender binary applied to knitting as about "dudes."
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:58 AM on May 4, 2017
As I've already made clear, I don't have a major problem with Abby Franquemont's piece. I mostly agree with it and have forwarded on to multiple people.
I do have a problem with the gender dynamics of how knitting is marketed and discussed, usually in the same trend pieces that Franquemont is criticizing, and a little bit here in this discussion. "Not your grandmother's knitting" often goes hand in hand with attempts to put the practice squarely within post-modern binary gender roles. That doesn't leave much space for nonbinary people who are neither "chicks" or "dudes."
As I wrote already, people writing about knitting from the outside do this more than knitters. It's not hard to find knitting materials that focus just on the knitting without leaping to assumptions about the knitter. That's not always the case. I went home last night to a partner nearly in tears, partly because she can't find much information on how to care for her middle-aged curls that doesn't go out of its way to address a cis and binary audience. So I'll admit that I have a thin skin this week about stuff that's unnecessarily gendered. Speaking of which:
And I guess I think it would be cool if we could engage at least a little bit with the OP before turning the topic to dudes.
Most of my posts here have explicitly talked about how coding knitting within a gender binary contributes to my experiences of gender anxiety. Please don't obliquely refer to me as a "dude" or summarize my criticism of the gender binary applied to knitting as about "dudes."
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:58 AM on May 4, 2017
My grandmother knit and sewed, but never when I knew her. Growing up in the 30s, everyone else did, and then she raised 5 kids while her husband was in law school and working full time. I got the impression she basically had to.
I have a hideous cardigan she knit (I'm pretty sure. She was also known to make things up). I wish I still had some of the jeans and jackets she embroidered in the 70s, I saw them but don't know where they went. I have a small collection of bone and ivory tatting shuttles and needle cases and I know she didn't use them, but when I knew her, collecting was more important to her. So they mean a lot to me.
There's the layers of misogyny but I think sometimes the "not your grandma's knitting" touches on the "we're making things for fun, not because we have to" aspect. Just like "artisanal" food is in fashion now, we tend to forget that processed food helped women stop spending all day in the kitchen.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 8:59 AM on May 4, 2017
I have a hideous cardigan she knit (I'm pretty sure. She was also known to make things up). I wish I still had some of the jeans and jackets she embroidered in the 70s, I saw them but don't know where they went. I have a small collection of bone and ivory tatting shuttles and needle cases and I know she didn't use them, but when I knew her, collecting was more important to her. So they mean a lot to me.
There's the layers of misogyny but I think sometimes the "not your grandma's knitting" touches on the "we're making things for fun, not because we have to" aspect. Just like "artisanal" food is in fashion now, we tend to forget that processed food helped women stop spending all day in the kitchen.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 8:59 AM on May 4, 2017
While textile arts added value to a household, I didn't get the sense that they were essential survival skills from the oral history of the Great Depression in my family. A fair bit of it was centered on extending the life of mass-produced clothing and household items.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:17 AM on May 4, 2017
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:17 AM on May 4, 2017
You know, talking about my own experiences of nonbinary dysphoria negotiating the gender politics of knitting has next to nothing to do with other people's grandmothers.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:50 AM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:50 AM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
My knitting is definitely not my grandma's knitting. My grandmother made those heinous 70s acrylic zigzag afghans (actually crochet). They all disappeared pretty quickly, being scratchy and ugly as a mud fence.
I know full well how much work those were, but that doesn't make them useful or decorative.
posted by corvikate at 1:56 PM on May 4, 2017
I know full well how much work those were, but that doesn't make them useful or decorative.
posted by corvikate at 1:56 PM on May 4, 2017
Hey now, I have a zigzag afghan my great grandmother made that's one of my favorite possessions! She was a tough, loner woman who lived into her late 90's by herself and had a house full of dogs and wasn't a good housekeeper, and my mom was never fond of her yet she gave me that woman's first name as my middle name. I've always felt a connection with her, despite barely remembering her.
The afghan is not all that soft, for sure, but it's in grays with a hot pink accent and it's surprisingly stylish. It looks great over the arm of any piece of furniture or when I drape it over my great dane to keep her warm in winter.
I grew up with all sorts of those kinds of afghans, made by both of my parents and both of my great grandmothers. They're in every photograph and every memory of my childhood. I would call them both useful and decorative because of that reason, even if most of them were lacked the lovely colors of the one I've held onto and instead tended towards the unfortunate oranges and brown color scheme of the time they were made.
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 3:21 PM on May 4, 2017 [2 favorites]
The afghan is not all that soft, for sure, but it's in grays with a hot pink accent and it's surprisingly stylish. It looks great over the arm of any piece of furniture or when I drape it over my great dane to keep her warm in winter.
I grew up with all sorts of those kinds of afghans, made by both of my parents and both of my great grandmothers. They're in every photograph and every memory of my childhood. I would call them both useful and decorative because of that reason, even if most of them were lacked the lovely colors of the one I've held onto and instead tended towards the unfortunate oranges and brown color scheme of the time they were made.
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 3:21 PM on May 4, 2017 [2 favorites]
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My friend knitted me a blanket when I was pregnant and it's one of my most loved possessions because it is beautiful and because it was made specially for me and my tastes. It just makes me feel loved and happy.
... I tried to take up crochet during college but wasn't so successful. I want to try again some day.
I don't know why these hobbies get all this stupid patronizing nonsense but it should stop. Anyway all the knitters I've met personally are super cool and I'm jealous of them.
posted by Cozybee at 5:51 PM on May 2, 2017 [17 favorites]