Quotes & Sayings About Knitters

The larger part of the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years. — Henry Hazlitt

The number one reason knitters knit is because they are so smart that they need knitting to make boring things interesting. Knitters are so compellingly clever that they simply can't tolerate boredom. It takes more to engage and entertain this kind of human, and they need an outlet or they get into trouble.
... knitters just can't watch TV without doing something else. Knitters just can't wait in line, knitters just can't sit waiting at the doctor's office. Knitters need knitting to add a layer of interest in other, less constructive ways. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

In the nineteeth century, knitting was prescribed to women as a cure for nervousness and hysteria. Many new knitters find this sort of hard to believe because, until you get good at it, knitting seems to cause those ailments.
The twitch above my right eye will disappear with knitting practice. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

The people who think I'm famous are knitters. Most of my life, I'm wildly unrecognized. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Portland is a place where you can find a community as a feminist, a vegan or a fat activist. Artists, musicians, knitters, and filmmakers can all meet like-minded souls. It's proved the perfect place for me and all my punk friends. — Beth Ditto

There is, however, something odd about this pattern. Other than joining a political party, it is hard to think of any other sort of community that people join by agreeing to a set of principles. Imagine joining a knitting group. Does anyone go to a knitting group and ask if the knitters believe in knitting or what they hold to be true about knitting? Do people ask for a knitting doctrinal statement? Indeed, if you start knitting by reading a book about knitting or a history of knitting or a theory of knitting, you will very likely never knit. — Diana Butler Bass

Some knitters say that they buy yarn with no project in mind and wait patiently for the yarn to "speak" to them. This reminds me of Michelangelo, who believed that every block of stone he carved had the statue waiting inside and that all he did was reveal it. I think I've had yarn speak to me during the knitting process, and I've definitely spoken to it. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong, or maybe my yarn and I aren't on such good terms, but it really seems to me that all I say is "please" and all it ever says is "no". — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Knitting has a profound connective power. The culture and people and rituals around it, the values, they all contribute to an immediate and profound trust in one another. It's home. You belong and are accepted, which rings true no matter where you are. — Clara Parkes

It is a little known fact that much like birds, who can always find north, knitters can always find yarn. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

It is important for knitters to know two things about frogging: that cats are capable of this knitting action, and even seem to enjoy it and seek opportunities to do it; and that foul language is a normal, healthy accompaniment to frogging, whether it is you or the cat that accomplished the task. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

I do know that there isn't ever going to be a time when there aren't any knitters. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

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. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Knitters use knitting to value-add to the world. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Watch out, knitters have balls.... — Penny Reid

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". — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

There are twice as many knitters as golfers in North America. Still, if you walk into any airport in North America, you can find a golf magazine but not a knitting magazine, even though you can't golf on a plane. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

It is a peculiarity of knitters that they chronically underestimate the amount of time it takes to knit something. Birthday on Saturday? No problem. Socks are small. Never mind that the average sock knit out of sock-weight yarn contains about 17,000 stitches. Never mind that you need two of them. (That's 34,000 stitches, for anybody keeping track.)
Socks are only physically small. By stitch count, they are immense. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

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. — Clara Parkes

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. — Elizabeth Zimmermann

I will not let the non-knitters of the world decide how normal I am. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee