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!