It is my opinion that one of the reasons why needlecraft has such a long history is due to its ability to be stopped and started frequently as well as its versatility. And one only has to go as far as to read Anne Macdonald’s No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting to find that I am not alone.

In the first instance, regarding mid-century knitters, from pp. 142-143:
“Being without work” remained so unthinkable that knitting was still encouraged to employ “minutes which would otherwise be wasted.” Knitting was endorsed for housewives already exhausted from other chores: “A woman who has been at the washtub or at housework all day cannot easily sit down to plain needlework; her hands are ‘out of tune’; she cannot, perhaps, even feel the needle, it is too small; but let her be able to knit readily (having been taught at school), and she will add many an inch, at spare moments, to her husband’s or her children’s stockings, which lies ready to be taken up at any time.”

Trade the words “washtub” and “housework” for “computer” and “the office” and you have today’s milieu. But, by finding something that can be abandoned and worked on at one’s convenience, we have found a way to shrug off the drudgery and banality, if only for a row or line or sleeve. Time spent crafting often takes on a meditative quality for me as I start thinking in colors and patterns and stop thinking about memos and phonecalls. Unlike other pursuits, needlecraft allows you to be able to work for a few minutes on a project and then get back to another (often more tedious) task, feeling a bit more rejuvenated, accomplished and perhaps even, useful.

In the second instance, see p. 330:
“…as huffily as late nineteenth-century women had derided products of the new industrialization; another begged the young to assure that their garments bore their own personal, creative stamp in “this plastic, manufactured world…”

On a more personal note, I turn to “the jerk hat,” as you can see me wearing below.

The joy of this particular garment is that after I made it and didn’t want to waste my efforts on the proposed recipient, I could allow on a 3rd grade sense of creativity to nurse my wounds. Juvenile? Of course. But, it reminded me that at the end of the day, it’s my knitting. And that I can do whatever I want to do with it. (In the end, it was properly restored sans snark, and now lives in Philadelphia.)

I think that people sometimes forget that.

Don’t you, okay?

This entry was fueled as I kicked it old school with Teenbeat 50. I can’t believe that Teenbeat is 20! Rad!