When you hear ‘rock and roll’ and ‘needles’, we’d hazard a guess that the first thing that popped into your mind wasn’t the word ‘knitting’, but the home-counties hobby has had a renaissance over the last few years and has started to feel a bit more – bear with us – cool.
If you were in any doubt, this week the self-styled mother of urban ‘knit bombing’ Magda Sayeg – who creates street art except instead of using paint, uses yarn – revamped an old Routemaster bus with 20 suitcases of yarn and toured it around London. Combine that with the fact that Kate Moss, Scarlett Johansson and Taylor Swift are all at it, the crafty little so-and-sos, and you can see that knitting has well and truly left the domain of the Women’s Institute.
But if you’re not shallow enough to take up a hobby just because the cool kids at school told you, then there are plenty of other reason why now is a better time ever to start knitting. For a start, the health benefits of taking it up as a hobby speak for themselves. ‘Knitting has been proven to reduce stress and anxiety levels and whenever I knit I go into a meditative state – especially if I’m starting a complicated project,’ Jade Hardwood, co-founder of Wool and the Gang explains to The Debrief. ‘Couple that with the fact that it improves dexterity memory and some studied even say it can help reduce your chances of getting dementia and there’s a pretty solid argument for taking it up – people find it addictive. But, especially now when we are constantly connected online and pretty much glued to our phones, knitting actually give you an excuse to spend some time away from your smart phone and be with your own thoughts. I think people are naturally craving the distraction of making something themselves with their own hands.’
Not that you’ll have to totally abandon your social media obsession to get involved. ‘People are naturally proud of anything they create with their hands and there’s a real movement of people sharing what they’ve knitted with a community online. We recruit a network of knitters – or the gang - and we have 2,000 people on waiting list to join the community. And anyone can get involved - alongside our fashion line, we sell Knit Kits that anyone could pick up and knit themselves, our patterns – basically a recipe for the style you’re going to make - are inspired by the Ikea model and an alien could basically pick it up and do it. It’s also fun and inexpensive – I’ll be making a garland of Christmas pom poms this year that will be beautiful and much cheaper than a lot of what you can find on the highstreet.’ You have to look no further than the #knitting hashtag on Insta to see how big the movement – and an apparent worldwide desire to knit penises - has become.
The craft hobby has also come a long way from our living rooms and is now at the forefront of technological development. Barcelona-based designer Gerard Rubio has developed a knitting machine that is able to 3D print your jumper at the click of a button. Called OpenKnit, the machine allows you to put in coloured yarn, digitally design your item of clothing and let the machine basically to its thing. The machine is made up of a bed of needles similar to the type you’d use if you were knitting by hand but in a much larger quantity and a sensor to count stitches. Check out the video of the machine in action below – it makes for pretty mesmerizing viewing.
But 3D Printers and wool penises aside, there’s a genuine philanthropic reason for taking up knitting because, compared to synthetic fibres like acrylic, wool is far better for the environment. As part of the Campaign for Wool, championed by Prince Charles, a lot of research has been done into the environmental footprint of wool, which is a protein fibre and is one hundred per cent natural. According to the charity, ‘at the end of its useful life, wool can be returned to the soil, where it decomposes, releasing valuable nutrients into the ground. When a natural wool fibre is disposed of in soil, it takes a very short time to break down, whereas most synthetics are extremely slow to degrade.’
So knitting is basically trendy, good for us and guilt free. Where do we sign up?
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Picture: Anna Sudit
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.