Your Complete Survival Guide To Being Friends With a Knitter

Without getting poked in an eye.

I mean, unless you’d like to see the world a bit differently, like all of us knitters do. We always have needles on hand after all. For us knitters, all time not actively doing something that precisely prohibits knitting, is time that could be spent knitting. And just because there’s something you couldn’t conceive of doing while knitting, doesn’t mean that we haven’t conceived of a way to do just that.

If we don’t have knitting along, we’ve forgotten it. Reminders, please? If we do have knitting, we might not even knit at all, but it’s beside us, just in case. Small projects for working in waiting rooms and in line. Larger projects for being in one place for a few hours. Complicated patterns for times when no one is speaking to us, and easy ones for social gatherings. 

Any space of time between this and that, or here and there is time for knitting. If you find yourself waiting for someone to grab a project bag, always a few steps slower behind you putting needles away…congratulations, you are friends with a knitter.

Here’s a few things you are going to hear a lot.

Just let me finish this row…
This phrase or some variant of it, is probably the one you will hear most often. Most knitting is done on at least two needles. Knitting a row involves slowly moving all the stitches from needle to the other and back. And knitting must be safely stored in order to do, whatever it is you wanted to do, that precipitated this response.

Finishing a row means all the stitches are now on one needle, and this is immensely preferable to storing it on two needles because there is less chance of any stitches falling off. Whenever you hear this, just know that your knitter is absolutely incapable of doing anything else until the row is finished. Expect delays of a few seconds to several minutes depending on the complexity of the pattern. It is only okay to proceed and assume they are behind you if you have been given the all clear. Otherwise, if you continue, you will soon find yourself, alone, talking to absolutely no one, even though you might have thought otherwise.

If you already understand what hearing this phrase entails, you are either already a knitter, and you should really share this with your friends, or you have been hanging out with knitters for way too long and it’s time to become one yourself, so you too can delay non-knitters.

Technically unrelated, but similarly principled, is when, all of sudden, your knitter becomes instantly frozen in time, completely motionless, current pose not withstanding, with only a slight wiggling of a pointer finger above one needle, and barely moving lips, to show that they are still alive. They are counting stitches, and the earth doesn’t start spinning again until they are finished. If you start deliberately interjecting with random numbers for humorous effect, I refer you back to the first few sentences of this article.

Will you give me a hand?
This is the phrase you will probably hear the next most often. You don’t knit after all, so you can’t give advice on stitch-work, patterns, fabric gauge, needle sizes, fixing mistakes or anything of the sort. At best you are only useful for opinions on look and colour. Because, as knitters, we generally feel that if a non-knitter can identify the garment or item we’re making,  and also thinks it looks alright, then we are on the right track.

However, a really industrious knitter is still going to find a use for your idle hands. To knitters, no matter what you are doing, hands that are hands without knitting needles in them are idle and can be made use of.

Politely decline. Better yet. Clutch your book tight. Your coffee tighter. The last thing you want is to end up as a human yarn rack so that we can wind a skein of yarn¹ into a ball, which is fiddly and annoying, you must hold and move your hands just so, and takes forever. It’s better to just pre-empt the question altogether by just never giving the appearance of having an extra hand at all.

If you happen to be married to your knitter, you already know that absence is the only foolproof method for avoiding any and all of the above. If you see your other half come home from your local yarn shop…you already know what to do.

This second half of this guide is where you, as a non-knitter, get to sit back and enjoy all the knitting drama unfold, and watch all your knitter friends get tangled up in it, literally, at times. Feel free to offer as many suggestions as you wish, as helpful or unhelpful as they may or may not be. And watch your knitter or knitters get all in a tither over things.

I won yarn chicken!
(Or, alternatively: dang² I lost yarn chicken and now I have to frog this!)

Occasionally you’re going to hear this one. Especially if you have been hanging around with your knitter quite frequently while they have been working on the same project, and it’s starting to look pretty complete, or they are getting to the end of the yarn.

Watch closely, they’ll get really tense, keep checking the length of yarn, and how much knitting they’ve done, back to the yarn, back to the knitting, back to the yarn, faster and faster until…see the above phrase and alternatives.

Your knitter has either finished to the end of a row, pattern repeat, section, etc. before the yarn ran out, or the yarn has run out, and now they are stuck in the middle of the row, section, in a place we cannot possibly attach more, or even worse, we were trying to get to the very end of a project, and there is no yarn left at all and no more of the same can be obtained.  

We all play this game, in full knowledge of the fact that if we do lose, we will have to frog³ a possibly very significant amount of work, which will then have to be either re-knitted with a new colour or can’t re-knitted at all because the yarn has run out, which made the last bit of knitting pointless, or even worse, we’ve lost at the end of a sock or a sleeve and now if we want two to match we have to frog and re-knit, both the first, and the second toe or cuff. But we still do it. Because hope is eternal. And we have faith. And we are stubborn. And if we just knit faster, the yarn will ru n  o u t   s  l  o  w  e   r…

I’m stash-busting!
And then there’s this one.

The Stash is defined as basically all the yarn one knitter owns. It may or may not be all in one room, place, or even house. It consists of everything a knitter couldn’t help walking away a store without, pretty yarn that just had to be purchased even though there was no project idea whatsoever, yarn for projects that haven’t been started. The contents of two or three other people’s stashes, usually dead or quitted knitters, and also from the inability to say no to non-knitters who exclaim, “Oh you’re a knitter I have some…”

So at a certain point every year you will probably notice that every knitter you know is walking around very smug, and altogether way too proud of themselves. We are all feeling smug over what we intend to accomplish, but we are altogether way too proud for what is actually going to get accomplished. If you see your knitter wearing a determined grin, and constantly searching for wilder and wilder patterns, don’t worry, they are just stash-busting.

Stash-busting consists of your knitter attempting to use up their stash by finding projects to turn it into, instead of finding new or fun projects and patterns, and doing it the other way around. This generally does not result in all the yarn being gone. Again, if you are married to your knitter you already know this. The true purpose of stash-busting is to make your knitter feel organized, productive, thrifty, and less guilty over all the money they have spent on this hobby.

Even if you couldn’t tell what we were up to by all of this already: we get very proud of it, and we will tell you! Probably multiple times.

Don’t worry though, the insufferable optimism can be waited out. You can also possibly end it early by casually suggesting you’d like a tour of the local yarn shop. If they make a purchase, consider yourself successful. Just be aware it will come with a little more guilt on their part than usual, that you might have to listen to. You also might avoid gifts of things that are fuzzy, covered in pompoms, or actually just pompoms.⁴

I’m really excited about the frolic!
Every year in the spring, all knitters head out to the meadows in long skirts and flowered crowns, to skip barefoot in the grass, while playing gold harps, in amongst bounding young goats and lambs. We must simply frolic.⁵

Seeing as you have now read to the end of this supplemented and comprehensive guide, you, the now knitter-savvy non-knitter–or knitter who is enjoying a good chuckle at themselves–you probably haven’t fallen for that last one. You will find the real answer to that one, and other unfamiliar terms, explained in these comprehensively ridiculous footnotes:

• ¹A skein is a length of yarn that has been wound into a long loop, pulled straight and twisted tightly, allowed to double back on itself, and then one end put through the other. Handmade and hiyarns are generally wound this way as it’s simple to do, displays the composition and colours of yarn beautifully, and doesn’t stretch it, as the twist relaxes when it winds back on itself. In order to use it for a project, its undone back into a loop which must then be held straight while its wound into a ball.
  
• ²You can substitute any not-really-a-swear-word here. Darn, shoot, darn-shootin’, shucks, rats, drat (my buttons)! We’re all creative, but very polite. No not really. There’s just something about knitting that goes along with reading, librarians, teachers, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, and Doctor Who. I don’t know why that that last one is, maybe it’s the scarf? Kids also go along with a lot of those things, which makes for some really colourful not-rude vocabulary that I’ve heard come out of knitters’ mouths.
  
• ³Frogging is ripping back or un-ravelling knitting. If your knitter friend is sitting in front of you doing this, its because watching you cringe is more fun that doing it by ourselves and stressing out over how much we have to re-do.
  
• ⁴Actually if someone hands you a knitted object, they secretly love you. Even if they outright deny it. They picked out yarn, picked a pattern, spent a lot of hours twiddling needles together.⁶ Knitting to us, twiddling to you. Unless you want to learn: then the twiddling of the needles will slowly reveal itself to be a magical system of movement of needles that if practiced slowly and repetitively over and over, will slowly result in the transfiguration of wool string into clothing. Knitting is truly as close to actual magic, that you, a muggle, will ever get.
  
• ⁵If you won’t believe that, then the Knitters’ Frolic is a huge knitting market that takes place on one weekend out of every year, in Toronto, where you can buy anything and everything remotely to do with knitting, is actually in the fall, and really only applies to knitters who live in driving distance from it. However, maybe us Canadian knitters really do frolic with the spring lambs. You’ll never really know unless you visit us.
  
• ⁶Other knitters do this. I, however, as the author of this guide do not. I find a pattern I like, or mostly like skip the pattern altogether, knit something I find entertaining, then wait for someone to walk by and exclaim, “Oh I love that!” And then poof! That very thing turns up in their stocking at Christmas. This is my foolproof method of finding out whether someone is worthy of knitting: someone who will really fall in love with magically created knitted things.

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