Quotes & Sayings About Knitting

I make a habit of setting aside some time each evening to take out my knitting and work quietly on it, happily relaxing. I believe that it prepares me for sleep and washes away the cares of my day.
I will consider that intarsia, or Fair Isle with three or more colors in a row, prepares nobody for sleep and cursing loudly while flinging knitting around the living room is about as far away from soothing as you can get. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

(knitting while on a motorcycle)
For several years she knitted in secret (my father would not approve; she was to concentrate on motorcycling and LEAN into the curves, etc), and used a small circular needle (socks and mittens) in order to keep the knitting in her pocket until they were under way; then she leaned back slightly so Gaffer couldn't feel the movement of her hands.
On the interstate one day, they were slowly passing a semi and my father happened to see the truck driver laugh and point out my mother's knitting to his passenger. Whoops- — Elizabeth Zimmermann

Yes, I love September,' agreed Belinda, guilty at having let her thoughts wander from her guest. 'Michaelmas daisies and blackberries and comforting things like fires in the evening again and knitting. — Barbara Pym

All knitting is choreography. — Clara Parkes

Her case worker had once suggested knitting as a means of anger management. — Debbie Macomber

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. — Virginia Woolf

How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I'd go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I'd pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost. — Cheryl Strayed

Your average knitter, obsessed as we are with the art form, is quickly going to begin producing far more in the way of warm things than are needed by even an arctic-bound knitter. Knitting breeds generosity, true ... but perhaps in a hurry to avoid burying ourselves in hand-knits. There are only so many scarves one knitter can use. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Far out, Bobby wrote back. Next thing I know, you'll be knitting socks with Whistler's Mother. — Tom Robbins

hippo. Like something that basks, anyway. Even her knitting is going better than — Margaret Atwood

I would love to close my eyes and see myself with my girlfriend when we're 99 years old and I have a pipe and she's knitting a sweater, and I hope that's the way it goes. I think it's a challenge every day. — Chris Messina

[If] you are ready enough to pull my knitting to pieces, but provide none of your own, the only sock is a sock in the jaw! — J.R. Ackerley

You've heard about the knitter's handshake? Two hands go in for the grab-and-shake, but at the last minute, they veer to the closest sleeve or band and grab it instead while we ask, "Did you knit this? — Clara Parkes

If my landlord hadn't been so vehement about the no-pets clause in my lease, I probably would already have at least two cats roaming my apartment. I was considering taking up knitting. Well, no, not the last one, but I did miss having a pet. And the dating situation was becoming dire. — Debra Dunbar

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. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

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

I love the way knitting brings people together. — Debbie Macomber

When Javert finally realized that Valjean had something he himself didn't - mercy - did he shrug and find a new obsession, like knitting or Game of Thrones? No. Because without Valjean to hate, he didn't know who he was anymore. — Jodi Picoult

As usual, the sock yarns have no idea what is going on. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

I'm not a detective from Baker Street or an old lady who solves crimes while she's knitting in an easy chair. I'm just a book girl. So I can't make a deduction, only take a flight of fancy
er, forget I said that. I meant, I can only take a guess. — Mizuki Nomura

If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm. — J.D. Salinger

Her face worked in an odd way, like knitting coming undone. — Barbara Comyns

I want a sword not a knitting needle
-Kalen — David Eddings

Angela had never really got on with modern poetry. Even stuff like Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and the other book. He seemed such a lovely man and she really did try, but it sounded like prose you had to read very slowly. Old stuff she understood. Rum-ti-tum. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white ... Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack ... Something going all the way back. Memorable words, so you could hand it down the generations. But free verse made her think of free knitting or free juggling. This, for example. She extracted a book at random. Spiders by Stanimir Stoilov, translated by Luke Kennard. She flipped through the pages ... the hatcheries of the moon ... the earth in my father's mouth. — Mark Haddon

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. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Dozens of my own friends and acquaintances
ambitious, educated women who might have turned up their noses at anything domestic had they been born a generation earlier
have blogs dedicated to cupcakes or knitting or vintage home decor. — Emily Matchar

How're the cats?" he asked, smiling a little. He did miss Angel Marie. Hell, he missed them all.
"Feral," Benny sniffed. "And horny. Every time one of us walks in, they all start humping our shoes."
"They're fixed," Shane mumbled, but the conversation was oddly reassuring. It sounded normal, and like home.
"Tell that to the big fuzzy brown one ... ."
"Orlando Bloom?"
"Yeah, whatever. Last time I was there that damned animal violated my knitting."
Shane lost a battle with a laugh and then whined because it hurt his ribs.
"Violated?"
[ ... ]
"Let's just say that wool is no longer virgin," she quipped dryly, and Shane's chest shook. — Amy Lane

A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our naivete-that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity. — Vaddey Ratner

When I was old enough to take baths in the bathtub, and to know I had a penis and a scrotum and everything, I asked her not to sit in the room with me. "Why not?" "Privacy." "Privacy from what? From me?" I didn't want to hurt her feelings, because not hurting her feelings is another of my raisons d'etre. "Just privacy," I said ... She agreed to wait outside, but only if I held a ball of yarn, which went under the bathroom door and was connected to the scarf she was knitting. Every few seconds she would give it a tug, and I had to tug back
undoing what she had just done
so that she could know I was OK. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Fifty-two XIV. The Knitting Done XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever Book the First - Recalled — Charles Dickens

She was passionate about knitting because it allowed her to reach a state of peacefulness, and she loved to embroider because it let her express her creativity. Both activities were liberating. They allowed her to exist outside of time. — Laura Esquivel

O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud. — Siegfried Sassoon

I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting. — Amanda Seyfried

Madame Defarge immediately called to her husband that she would get them, and went, knitting, out of the lamplight, through the courtyard — Charles Dickens

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

It's only knitting and it's one of the few times in your life when there are no bad consequences to a mistake. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

If I gave my mother a knitted scarf she'd be worried I was wasting my time doing stupid stuff like knitting instead of school work. Presenting a homemade knitted object to my parents was actually like handing them a detailed backlog of my idleness. — Mindy Kaling

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

I think we just need to stick to our knitting on the topics and the subjects the American people care about. — Sam Brownback

Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. — Cheryl Strayed

In America they have to know just what you are
novelist, poet, playwright ... Well, I've been all of them ... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting. — Robert Penn Warren

The Knitting Done XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever Book the First - Recalled to Life — Charles Dickens

There is practically no activity that cannot be enhanced or replaced by knitting, if you really want to get obsessive about it. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

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.' — Ron Conway

No Delicacy XIV. The Honest Tradesman XV. Knitting XVI. Still — Charles Dickens

His Lady sad to see his sore constraint,
Cried out, "Now now Sir knight, shew what ye bee,
Add faith unto your force, and be not faint:
Strangle her, else she sure will strangle thee."
That when he heard, in great perplexitie,
His gall did grate for griefe and high distaine,
And knitting all his force got one hand free,
Wherewith he grypt her gorge with so great paine,
That soone to loose her wicked bands did her constraine. — Edmund Spenser

Fancy finding you here," he said jauntily.
Nothing about it was fanciful, and she suspected he might have followed her. Why else would he be there?
"You've taken up knitting, have you?" she countered as she walked to the yarn section of the shop.
"No,I've taken up finding you alone. Nice of you to accommodate me."
His answer pleased her more than she could say, but she warned him, "I'm not alone."
"For the moment you are. — Johanna Lindsey

It's only because I feel like such a philistine spending all that time in hair and makeup that I started to knit. I used to spend that time studying Italian and French. Then after I had two kids, my brain turned to mush and I took up knitting. — Felicity Huffman

But I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting. It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained. — Margaret Atwood

Fellow of No Delicacy XIV. The Honest Tradesman XV. Knitting XVI. — Charles Dickens

Honey, have you ever seen a man knitting socks? — Ezer Weizman

But sooner or later people have to take up their own lives, not disperse them out as though they were knitting wool that a clever knitter might handle better. — Elizabeth Harrower

Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions. — Vita Sackville-West

And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe. — Anthony Doerr

So you vampires living forever," I said. "You must need lot of hobbies to keep from going completely mad. My grandma swears by knitting. Do you knit, Francis?"
"I do not," said Francis.
"Ah," I said. "Do you crochet?" This time he didn't bother to answer. — Justine Larbalestier

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

But when it comes to most skills, failure is the only way to become better at something. Knitting teaches you that. You may have to unwind all of your stitches and start anew. That doesn't mean you've wasted your time. You learn from every stitch, even those that don't amount to anything. All writers should be made to knit a hat before they start writing a novel. It would help with understanding the importance of revision, and that the process is what can bring you the most — Alice Hoffman

While you sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life. — Charles Simic

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

It took me years and years of trial efforts to work out that there is absolutely no knitting triumph I can achieve that my husband will think is worth being woken up for. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Mr Howard Saxby, literary agent, was knitting a sock. He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep himself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep himself from knitting. — P.G. Wodehouse

She knew she had become the strange sort of lady that she remembered noticing as a child, the sort of lady who was always neat and kind, whose house was quiet because there were no children, who hosted the knitting circle and kept small treats around in case some child might be in need of a licorice whip or a shortbread cookie. — Jane Smiley

I will always buy extra yarn. I will not try to tempt fate. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

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. — Chellie Pingree

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

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. — Amy Dickinson

Salem"

In salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips
to the canvas flapping on the seaward panes
until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's
asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
lashes the oily slick about your head,
beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon's raft
dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,--
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks
and fought the British Lion to his knees? — Robert Lowell

But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. — Charles Dickens

SABLE- A common knitting acronym that stands for Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

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. — Audrey Niffenegger

Is this true on smaller scales too? Apart from a visible fragment is everybody largely invisible - invisible like the magic part of magic mushrooms and the song part of songbirds? Maybe the balance between one's visibility and invisibility is like the balance between the salt and the water in the blood, delicate and critical, as becomes obvious when the balance deteriorates: people with an invisibility deficiency seem like paper dolls, subject to crumple. Other people have the opposite problem: they cannot be seen building a bicycle, nor making lentil soup, nor knitting a green wool sweater by candlelight; neither can you look down from your second-story window in the morning and see them tromping off through the snow — Amy Leach

Okay," I said,hoping I sounded confident, like taking the life force out of ghouls was one of my favorite hobbies, right up there with knitting and sudoku. — Rachel Hawkins

Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss? — Susan Gordon Lydon

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can't do? Has she fallen in love with me?
As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that she has. — Mohsin Hamid

I did this scene in 'Lars and the Real Girl' where I was in a room full of old ladies who were knitting, and it was an all-day scene, so they showed me how. It was one of the most relaxing days of my life. — Ryan Gosling

I do wish you wouldn't argue with me when I'm knitting. — Gerald Durrell

She could feel her mind pulling loose like knitting, the neat stitches of her artificial days unravelling to become one mangled thread. — Frances Hardinge

You don't knit because you are patient. You are patient because you knit. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Winter is for women The woman still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think. — Sylvia Plath

There is no wrong way to knit ... We should all agree to stop correcting each other and deal with the more important issue. How wrong crochet is. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

And of course there was no help for it, except recalling bits of conversations she had overheard from time to time about marriage. That's what knitting groups and sewing groups were for, wasn't it? Commiserating about marriage. — Jane Smiley

Some people meditated. Some people ran laps around a track. When I was tense, I turned yarn into socks. Lots of socks. More socks than any sane woman with the standard-issue pair of feet could possibly use in a lifetime. — Barbara Bretton

Special circumstances." She surveyed him for a long moment, her brows knitting together. "Murder?" His grin grew. "Thank you, but no. I started a riot on the yard." He adjusted his collar, before adding, "We were protesting the soap. — Marissa Meyer

By 7:28, all the guests had arrived, and there were three empty seats: one for Eve, who had yet to show up, another for John, who would have a seat after he gave his daughter away, and a third that would remain empty, save for the ball of soft white yarn with two silver knitting needles in it. — Debra Anastasia

The Friday Night Knitting Club — Kate Jacobs

People stared more than ever on the train. Hagrid took up two seats and sat knitting what looked like a canary-yellow circus tent. — J.K. Rowling

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

I think also people in states like Pennsylvania know that a lot of money and effort and time needs to be spent on knitting America back together, on the bridges and the roads and the infrastructure and the education. — Chris Matthews

Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me - still knitting with downcast eyes - and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and preceded me into a waiting-room. — Joseph Conrad

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

I am to be converted to the joys of knitting,' said Mrs. Ali, smiling at the Major.
'My condolences,' he said. — Helen Simonson

When an old shepherdess in Greece can do it, why do you think I cant? (About knitting a sweater). — C. Hampton Jones

Looking at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have thought that the usual order of things was reversed, and that the felons were trying the honest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst populace of a city, never without its quantity of low, cruel, and bad, were the directing spirits of the scene: noisily commenting, applauding, disapproving, anticipating, and precipitating the result, without a check. Of the men, the greater part were armed in various ways; of the women, some wore knives, some daggers, some ate and drank as they looked on, many knitted. Among these last, was one, with a spare piece of knitting under her arm as she worked. — Charles Dickens

Sweaters need to be imagined, dreamed over. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

The scarf could go on and on and on and on, and it could be the harlot-red banner of shame that wrapped him up and kept him warm when the nights grew lonely and cold. — Amy Lane

Amazing what the application of a knitting needle could do for one's manners. — Lauren Willig

It sounds a bit sad, but my new hobby is knitting. I love it. I find it really relaxing. — Ella Henderson

I will continue to freak out my children by knitting in public. It's good for them. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Maketa Groves has a strong, bright lyric gift. Her poems come out of music and are full of music. They bring us the sounds of the streets and the sounds of nature, and make us see once again that they are parts of the same song. She celebrates American lives as they are lived today: the mother scrubbing her kitchen floor at midnight, the drag-queens in the Tenderloin, the homeless woman knitting in the courtyard. This is poetry that relentlessly shows us the beauty in the world, with all its struggles and complexity, and demands that we go out to meet it with open hearts. — Diane Di Prima

After consciously enduring a twelve-inch knitting needle navigated into the unseen recesses of my pelvis and almost passing out at the sensation of my hip inflating with fluid and somehow clinging to my sanity through the hour-long, migraine-inducing blare of the imaging contraption, which resembled a compact wind tunnel, possessed the amplification capability of a Marshall stack, and pushed my patience beyond the limits of superhuman endurance, I was
informed by my orthopedist that the image of my still-smoldering hip had revealed, and I quote, "just a little inflammation." In the world of orthopedic medicine, "a little inflammation" apparently qualifies as sound diagnosis. — Daniel Stern