Best 106 quotes in «knitting quotes» category

Since I became a knitting humor writer, I seem to be understood a little better - at least for the purposes of social discourse.

She'd stopped reading the kind of women's magazine that talked about romance and knitting and started reading the kind of women's magazine that talked about orgasms, but apart from making a mental note to have one if ever the occasion presented itsel

Stepping outside the comfort zone is the price I pay to find out how good I can be. If I planned on backing off every time running got difficult I would hang up my shoes and take up knitting.

Teeth of winter, sinking into my flesh, my own clacking against each other like knitting needles, and I wish they'd knit a heavy shawl around my shoulders before widening into a yawn. Why do I always yawn when I'm cold?

The first time you find yourself having a conversation about moss stitch with a group of people who aren't desperately trying to escape you ... it's like coming home.

Tech people like to stick to their knitting, and they measure their accomplishments by the growth of their company. Now the tech community is popping up and saying, 'We do need to be involved in our surroundings.'

The chances of running out of yarn on a project are directly related to the difficulty that you will have getting more.

There's great value to knitting or digging up your garden or chopping up vegetables for soup, because you're taking some time away from turning the pages, answering your emails, talking to people on the phone, and you're letting your brain process whatever is stuck up in there.

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

...the number one reason knitters knit is because they are so smart that they need knitting to make boring things interesting.

The hardest lesson is Clare’s solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I’ve interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreary silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression on Clare’s face that is like a closed door. She has gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting or something. I’ve discovered that Clare likes to be alone. But when I return from time traveling she is always relieved to see me.

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

The twitch above my right eye will disappear with knitting practice.

You know you knit too much when ... You take knitting to a wedding, in case there's a little time before the bride comes down the aisle. Double points if you are the bride.

When you are knitting socks and sweaters and scarves, you aren't just knitting. You are assigning a value to human effort. You are holding back time. You are preserving the simple unchanging act of handwork.

Despite what we knitters know to be true, the non-knitting world somehow persists in thinking that a "knitter" looks a certain way. Most likely, this picture is one of an elderly woman, grandmotherly and polite, sitting in her rocking chair surrounded by homemade cookies and accompanied by a certain number of cats. In reality, a knitter today is just as likely to be young, hip, male, and sitting at a "Stitch and Bitch" in a local bar. Several of today's best knitting designers are men, and a knitter is as likely to have body piercings as homemade cookies. Despite our diversity, the tendency to be accompanied by a cat is an oddity among knitters that cannot be explained.

...don’t limit your options to only people who share your interests. You might take a painting class and find that you actually love painting, and plus, you might show an artiste type that they actually love science, too. Interests overlap, and sometimes you’ll find people who you like in the unlikeliest of places. It’s never a bad idea to broaden your horizons. In the end, you may find that your best friends are people you met on a knitting website.

This is a tough situation. But it is what it is, and time has an amazing way of knitting together solutions as long as everybody stays calm and resolves to be as gentle and patient as possible.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

A big stash allows me to have a fluid sense of creativity - a looseness that is very much like playing. It opens me up, unlocks things. The creative bit takes all the other pieces - the possibility, the abundance, the connections, and the actual work of making yarn - bundles them, and explodes like a glitter bomb. It gets everywhere, it makes me smile, and a I can't escape it. My stash is the spark. Even if I haven't spun for days or weeks, even when I'm feeling dull-witted or anti-craft, I still spend time with my stash. It pulls on doors that have been locked, slides under the crack and clicks them open from the inside. After an hour tossing my fibers around, I am revitalized for making yarn, yes, but for things well beyond that, too. My sash fees like an extension of me that I sometimes forget about: the part that plays, that connects things that don't seem to go, that experiments and makes things.

A funny thing happens when more than one knitter gathers in a public place. A solo knitter, presuming she is a woman, quickly fades into the backdrop like a potted palm or a quietly nursing mother. ... A single knitter is shorthand for "nothing to see here, move on." But when knitters gather, we become incongruously conspicuous. We are a species that other people aren't used to seeing in flocks, like a cluster of Corgis, a dozen Elvis impersonators waiting for the elevator.

A lady named Maude let me in the back,' he said. 'She's a firecracker, that one. Told me she's knitting trivets as a wild change of pace from scarves. If you're keeping score, that means changing from a rectangle all the way to a square.

All knitting is choreography.

And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history. Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.

And then there's this." He held up a shirt. "It'll protect you." Carrot fingered it carefully. It was made from the wool of Ramtop sheep, which had all the warmth and softness of hog bristles. It was one of the legendary woolly dwarf vests, the kind of vest that needs hinges.

As long as there has been knitting there have been battles about it. There are self-declared "yarn snobs," who frown on using anything but natural fibers; "gauge snobs", who wouldn't be caught dead with chunky yarn; and "experience snobs", who claim you can't declare yourself a real knitter until you abandon novelty yarns. The truth is that the knitting world is a tiny metaphor for the real world. It takes all kinds. I will not allow myself to feel bad if someone disapproves of my knitting. I will also resist the urge to stuff his mailbox full of chunky acrylic fun fur at 3:00 am.

Advice for New Knitters When choosing a pattern, look for ones that have words such as "simple", "basic", and "easy". If you see the words "intriguing", "challenging", or "intricate", look elsewhere. If you happen across a pattern that says "heirloom", slowly put down the pattern and back away. "Heirloom" is knitting code for "This pattern is so difficult that you would consider death a relief".

Five things I'd rather do than swatch for my new project 1. Get a spinal tap. 2. Scrub the bathtub after all three of my daughters have come home from "Sandbox day" at the park. 3. Babysit two-year-old triplets while simultaneously diffusing a bomb. 4. Bathe a cat. 5. KNIT MY NEW PROJECT.

Knitting is still trying to teach me That no matter how well you knit, looking at your work too closely isn't helpful. It's like kissing with your eyes open: nobody looks good that close up.

But unvented - ahh! One un-vents something; one unearths it; one digs it up, one runs it down in whatever recesses of the eternal consciousness it has gone to ground. I very much doubt if anything is really new when one works in the prehistoric medium of wool with needles. The products of science and technology may be new, and some of them are quite horrid, but knitting? In knitting there are ancient possibilities; the earth is enriched with the dust of the millions of knitters who have held wool and needles since the beginning of sheep. Seamless sweaters and one-row buttonholes; knitted hems and phoney seams - it is unthinkable that these have, in mankind's history, remained undiscovered and unknitted. One likes to believe that there is memory in the fingers; memory undeveloped, but still alive.

I can weave words together and create magic,it's like knitting and crocheting words with pen and paper, some call it Poetry.

If a person knits as you speak of the past, you can become mesmerized. As the yarn unwinds from its skein your memories naturally unfold to their full length.

imagine a scarf as an unlimited canvas

I'm a good knitter, and I'm proud of it. I see no point in being modest about things you know you do well. It doesn't indicate humility so much as hypocrisy or lack of perception.

I am a knitting fool. It's a quiet pastime, and a productive one. It enables one to join in the conversation or switch one's brain off, according to the interest or the excruciating dullness of what is being discussed. And the product does keep people warm and comfortable.

I pick up my knitting and wind the yarn around my fingers so I can finish the row. The needles whisper softly as they slide against each other, as if telling secrets.

I sat down and knitted for some time - my usual resource under discouraging circumstances.

Given good yarn, good workmanship, and good care, a knitted shawl and outlive its knitter, providing warmth and pleasure to several generations of family and friends.

I'm cashmere, for God's sake," it grumbles. "I deserve better than Rubbermaid.

I think the difficulty with people who can't follow printed directions for knitting or anything else is that they try to understand them. They read the whole thing through and it doesn't make sense to them, so they start with a defeatist attitude.

In life, as in knitting, don't leave loose ends. Take the time to thank the people who matter in your life.

it is pure potential. Every ball or skein of yarn holds something inside it, and the great mystery of what that might be can be almost spiritual

I think my personal minimum score for anything I'm thinking about doing--knitting or not--is about a seven on the interest scale. If something's scoring a five, like a movie, then I need to add at least two points of knitting to do it for me to be able to hang in. If it's something gripping, like a conversation with a charming and entertaining friend, I may not need to add much knitting at all. If my friend scores a nine, I might only toss in a plain sock, with no patterning or anything, just round and round on autopilot while we visit. (I can only think of one thing I do with another person that really has no room to add any sort of knitting to, but let's not discuss it here.)

It turns out that I will buy any yarn, even yarn I will never use, if the store discounts it by more than 50%. Do not be tricked, not all yarn is meant to be yours. No matter how good a deal it is.

It turns out that knitting isn't about the yarn or the softness or needing a hat (although we really can't argue with these secondary motivators). It's really about this: Knitting is a magic trick. In this day and age, in a world where science and technology take more and more wonder and work out of our lives , and our planet is quickly becoming a place running out of magic, a knitter takes silly, useless string, mundane sticks, waves her hands around (many, many times...nobody said this was fast magic), and turns one thing into another: string into a hat, string into a sweater, string into a blanket for a baby. It really is a very reliable magic.

Many years ago, when I used to smoke, my lighter was often easier to find than my scissors. If I couldn't find the scissors, or was feeling too lazy to get up, I used the lighter to burn the yarn in one place to break it. Other than the smell, this worked fairly well. Later, when I found my scissors, I would cut off the little charred bits. One day, I was knitting a cotton facecloth and needed to cut the end. I flicked my lighter, expecting to singe the one spot, thus breaking the yarn. I will remember that cotton is highly flammable, and that the knitting Fates punish laziness. I will also remember that a flaming facecloth can be extinguished with a cup of coffee...in a pinch.

Maybe knitting is like writing a story-- an act of discovery. But that seems unlikely, given the very precise directions.

Most [Shetland patterns] are fairly small and simple, as textile patterns go. Almost all are symmetrical, with eight smaller parts. As a result, most are geometric rather than representational. ... One last feature, less easy to define but easy enough to recognise ... is the liking for little motifs and for a pattern to be 'finished'.

My mother taught me to knit when I was seven. I forgot about knitting until one day I saw Marion at the counter with hers and confessed that I knew how. Confessed is the right word. In those days, in the early 1980s, knitting was not a hobby a preteen would readily admit to. But Marion, every enthusiastic, pounced upon me and insisted that I show her something I'd made. I did -- a misshapen scarf -- which she priased exravagantly. she lent me a raspberry-colored wool for another project, a hat for myself. Since then I've been knitting pretty continuously. It's addictive and it's soothing, and fora a few minutes anyway, it makes me feel closer to my mother.

Next door was a vegetarian café and deli, and next to that was the Wooly Bear yarn shop. Its logo was a caterpillar in shades of yellow, green, and scarlet. Maggie went in. The shop was warm and bright, with one entire wall given over to cubbyholes filled with yarns of every hue in many weights and fibers. The opposite wall held small skeins and spools of thread on pegs for embroidery and quilting. There were racks of pattern books and magazines, and in the back a mini classroom was set up with a small maple table and folding chairs, now accommodating a group of eight-year-olds wielding fat knitting needles and balls of oversize wool. A girl of about sixteen wearing a Rye Manor sweatshirt was helping a little boy to cast on stitches.