The Needle & the Damage Undone

In between the yarn-stuffed aisles there were a half-dozen customers fretting over supplies for their projects. Mostly, they were exactly the kind of people you would expect to see at Depth of Field, a Minneapolis knitting store: older women choosing needles for baby blankets and rifling through patterns for cardigans. And then there was Anne Kimball. Kimball, who is young and urban and kind of punky, does not seem like the kind of person who would be buying supplies in a knitting store. She seems like the kind of person who would be buying Camus instead of cashmere.

Kimball is 28. She started knitting five years ago when she found some yarn and needles at her mom’s house. She’s been hooked ever since, and she teaches her friends the craft whenever she has a chance. “I know a lot of people who do it as a stress reliever, but I have one friend who started knitting because she was trying to quit smoking,” she said. “It gave her something to do with her hands.”

Kimball and her friends aren’t freaks. Knitting has suddenly and unexpectedly become cool. According to the Craft Yarn Council of America, more than three million people began knitting or crocheting between 1994 and 2000. More than half of them were under the age of 35.

Doris Wickstrom, a staff member at Depth of Field who teaches a beginning knitting class, isn’t surprised. “We had a big group of students from St. Thomas, and it went through the dorms at Augsburg,” she said. While most young knitters favor traditional projects like hats, scarves, and sweaters, Wickstrom said that updated patterns and novelty yarns keep young knitters coming back. “People like it because it’s so portable,” Wickstrom pointed out. “They can be working on a project on the bus, in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, or in front of the TV.”

The trend isn’t limited to young women. Increasing numbers of men are also taking up the needles. Chris Wernimont, who teaches math at Anwatin Middle School in Minneapolis, began knitting in 1996, when he was 20. He thinks it’s catching because it’s both creative and relatively easy. “Knitting is accessible—it doesn’t require a lot of skill or many tools, but people can still make something.”

Kimball has a more complex theory about knitting’s appeal. “I think that, as everything becomes more mass-merchandised, people want something that’s unique,” she said. “It’s a way for people to make something by hand—and even design it themselves—so they can feel like it’s really their own.” That may not qualify as a revolutionary act against commercialism and anomie, she conceded. Then again, maybe it does. She ran her hand sensuously over a shelf of earth-toned skeins. Revolution, they say, starts at home.—Erin Peterson