Topic: Knitting

While I knit a lot in college, and for a few years afterwords, my attention to knitting as a hobby kind of trailed off, and I have basically not knit at all in the last five years, but suddenly a bit before Thanksgiving, I found myself listening to an audio book and playing a silly game on my phone really wishing that I could knit, and given that it was 2020 I did, and it’s been a lot of fun and pretty satisfying to get back into knitting.

There were lots of reasons for the hiatus, but the leading reasons were:

• My professional work, first technical writing for software engineers, and then software engineering itself, was actually quite similar to knitting at least conceptually: knitting and software require lots of problem solving and similar kinds of iterative math. Particularly for the first few years where I was teaching myself how to program, I felt like knitting ended up being more like work than I wanted.
• I lived in southern Wisconsin in college, and it was actually cold. Between climate change, and ending up living in New York City--being a huge city that holds heat, and being on a island with the harbor as a heat sink, most buildings in the City have very aggressive heating systems--it felt like I never really wanted to wear wool, because I was often too warm.

These problems seem solveable: my learning curve as a programmer has become less steep, and my day-to-day engineering work tends has shifted to be higher level and organizational in some ways that feel less like knitting. I think the “always too warm” feeling about my city has changed a bit as I’ve acclimated and I think it will be possible to just knit very light weight things and combine them with light weight jackets for increased wearability.

So I’m back.

I’ve finished the sweater I started in 2015 (it’s not exceptional, but I know how to fix it for the future,) knit another sweater that I’m pretty pleased with, and I’ve started a third and I’ve been working on a book about knitting that I’m quite excited about. I never kept a really extensive collection of yarn, but I have enough to keep me busy for a while, and using the yarn I already have has been interesting as a constraining function in planning new projects.

I suspect I’ll be blogging about knitting a bit more over the next little bit, about both specific projects and maybe some higher level things. I hope you don’t mind!

I wrote this post nearly 5 years ago, and have been sitting on the draft for a long time: not for any reason, I think it’s actually pretty good post. For non-knitters, this is kind of a “ask a great cook for their comfort food recpie,” but in a narrative form.

In any case, I haven’t really been knitting very much recently, and while I enjoy writing knitting patterns there’s a lot of work in writing a well formed knitting pattern that I’m poorly positioned for ring now (test knitting! good photography! talking with knitters!) But, perhaps someone will find it useful… Enjoy!

Part of my recent return to knitting has been about taking a much more simple approach to yarn. I think yarn is cool and working with good yarn is awesome but at a certain point, I think yarn distracts from the things that I like most about knitting: the consistency, the dependability, the rhythm of the activity, and coordination of parallel activities.

Novel yarns and yarn variety actually makes the process of knitting less enjoyable for me. It also doesn’t really jive with my taste in clothing: I like plain things that fit well without a lot of adornment. While I enjoy knitting patterned sweaters for the rhythm, I don’t really wear them much. I also, live and spend my time in a climate where a I’m almost always wearing a light sweater (during the cold months) and inside during the rest of the months.

The result of this is that I’ve mostly been working on sock knitting. I like wearing wool socks, and after a period of not wearing them for a few reasons, I didn’t actually have that many wool socks. Which has lead me to get acclimated to knitting fingering weight yarn with size 0 needles.

So I want to make a sweater in this mold: fingering weight, very plain lines, probably knit in the round using the Elizabeth Zimmerman system. Starting from the bottom, I’ve been leaning away from ribbings at the bottom, and have tended to like hems though they sometimes flare. Ususally, I just cast on provisionally and add the hem (or whatever) at the end anyway. There’s time yet to decide.

More importantly, I’m quite interested in having a rolled collar for the neck, but I tend to think that rolled ends mostly have a flare look anyway. I can defer this decision for a while.

For shaping and even most of the styling I intend to copy the Chrome Cobra Zip Up, which is, by far, my favorite article of clothing.

I think really subtle increases (so that the sweater tapers to the waist) is a good feature and might choose to do some of those, particularly if the model sweater has them. The model sweater has a really long back, and I think I might moderate this slightly.

The shoulders are an open question. If this goes well, I think I’d like to knit my way though most of the standard EZ shoulder constructions: I think I’ve knit all of the options at least once, but I’ve not done all of them in plain knitting, and most of the sweaters are a bit odd in one way or another. There’s a long project. I want to start with, and hopefully master, the set-in-sleeve.

For those of you playing along at home, set-in-sleeves are probably what you think of as “normal” sleeves, the garment fits in the shoulders, and the sleeves angle gently down from the shoulders. Most shirts have this shaping but the shapes aren’t terribly natural for knitting.

To knit set in sleeves in the round, you join the sleeves to the body, setting some stitches aside where the pieces meet and then decreasing body snitches into the sleeves as you knit until the body is just as wide as the shoulders. Then decrease the sleeve stitches into the body until you have about 3 inches of sleeve stitches left. Finally, knit knit short rows across the front and back (or just the front) stitches, decreasing the remaining stitches in the short rows ending with a 3 needle bind-off at the appropriate moment. To get a good crew neck, begin shaping the front of the neck every row 1.5 inches before you start the shoulder short-rows, and shape the back of the neck every other row when you start the shoulder short rows.

The shaping and body of the knitting is pretty straightforward from design perspective. The hard part from the perspective of the success of the sweater is the hems and/or ribbing, and figuring out the right thing to for each hem. It’s always something.

For 2013 and some of 2012 and 2014, I mostly stopped knitting and spent the time teaching myself how to really make software. It wasn’t exactly that intentional in the moment, but time is finite and both knitting and coding require similar kinds of attention and thought. In retrospect this is what happened.

I’ve started knitting again, not as much or in the same ways that I used to, but there’s a bit more space in my brain for additional projects. I’ve thought often about writing about similarities between knitting and programming.

A sweater ontology

A photo posted by Sam Kleinman (@tychoish) on Feb 22, 2015 at 5:55am PST

The two activities have much in common. Code and knitting are both highly structured activities, with a reasonably finite syntax of possible component operations. Most programming languages have a few dozen keywords, fundamental types, and built in operations that give rise to all programs (more or less,) and knitting similarly provides a small number of operations (knit, purl, increase, decrease, slip) that you can combine and alter to produce pretty much any kind of fabric.

Knitting patterns are procedural (like programs, generally) and have a standard syntax that shares a number of common elements with contemporary programming languages, including loops, conditionals, map (functional) operations, as well as some non-trivial concurrency.

While each knitting stitch depends on the stitches that happen before and after it, they are all reasonably atomic within the knitted object. At the same time, many knitting projects have lots other objects that happen at the same time, along different dimensions: shaping, stitch patterns, short rows, sleeves/gloves as well as parallel objects like socks. Knitters routinely track multiple things happening at the same time, with some success: a task that many programmers struggle with.

The connection between knitting and programming isn’t terribly surprising or novel: indeed there’s a long history between the development of textile production and technology more broadly, but hand knitting is sort of a technological oddity, so the connections don’t have the same history that you’d have in weaving (say.)

I’ve struggled to write this post for a while and have always had a hard time figuring out what the conclusion is or should be. I think I’ve felt like there should be some potential for synthesis, some way to take the things I’ve learned about software and use that to write programs to support knitting or design work, or vice versa. Increasingly, I think that this is the anti-conclusion.

Sure you can represent knitting patterns using formal languages (such as programming languages,) and it wouldn’t be that hard to write software that converted a pattern, or validated the math, but the math is really the easy part of knitting.

The hard part about knitting things is not figuring out how many stitches you need to knit an object that’s the right size, but rather figuring out what the right size is. It’s easy to know how many stitches you need, and hard to decide how big or small a thing should be. It’s also true that actually knitting things takes the largest amount of time; figuring out the math and making the design decisions are comparatively quick for most projects.

Computers wouldn’t be able to tell how long we should knit the cuffs of our socks or the sleeves of our sweaters, no matter how much code we write.

In any case, I’ll be over here, knitting away at my sweater.