knitta

Today I’m digging out pictures from a trip my girlfriend and I took a year ago to visit one of our best friends. We were seriously hating New York City and fled to the great state of Texas for a little vacay. I knitted my first pair of socks (rav link) on that trip and visited a really big yarn store and knit all over the city.

Here’s a picture of me and my clapotis in my favorite museum:

We not only visited the great state of Texas, we visited Houston, the home of Knitta, Please — which is basically the group that got me interested in public knitting.

That’s me knitting my socks in front of a tree wrapped in some sparkly sparkly knitting. All the trees in this cafe’s courtyard were wrapped in knitting and sparkly lights and most of the people sitting out there were just sitting among them as if it were the most normal thing in the world. I posed for pictures in front of almost all the knit tags we saw:

This one area of Houston is thoroughly tagged with these crazy scraps of knitting, and it was really cool to walk around running errands and shopping and eating out and finding them on all the door handles, wrapped around trees and light poles, etc. Probably you’ve heard about Knitta before, but I just had to write about seeing them almost exactly a year before. I would love to go to one of the other cities they’ve tagged and hunt down their marks there.

where I usually knit

There are three main places where I do the majority of my knitting: On the couch, in my bed, while riding the subway.

I read on the Ravelry forums all the time about people who knit in meetings, but I’ve never been able to do this. A big part of that is that I am an obsessive note taker in meetings, on the phone, and in any other situation where things are being planned. Mostly I make lists and checklists to remind myself to do all the things I’m volunteering to do.

But let me ask you this: Do you feel at all distracted when you knit at meetings or in social situations? I understand that there are certain projects you probably wouldn’t undertake in these types of interactions – complicated lace, aran sweaters, a big blanket. I knit whenever we are watching TV shows or movies at home, but even if I’m knitting a plain stockinette sock (which, admittedly, I’m usually not), I can get really caught up in my knitting and tune out entire major plot points. I’m afraid that in the middle of a meeting, I would get off track with the conversation. Maybe meeting knitters are not also meeting doodlers? Maybe meeting knitters are going to really long, really boring meetings with lots of other people, and not doing the majority of the talking?

I’m not even talking here about whether or not it is respectful or distracting to other people in those meetings, although I recognize that that is at issue for some people. I just don’t really think I could function in a meeting and knit at the same time.

But back to where I AM knitting recently. I’m writing this post from my couch, in the middle of my workday. I looked up from the computer to see this:

Wool all around me! Closer inspection reveals:

Library CDs and the beginnings of my second Pomatomus sock (rav link).

(The knitting lying along the back and arm of my couch are steamblocked neck warmers knit in the My-So-Called-Scarf stitch pattern. Both are gifts, recently steamed and laid out to dry.)

These days, I spend most of the day waiting for people to email me back. I also read a lot of budgets and funding information. So I’ve been knitting on my couch with my laptop. Not a very exciting place to be knitting. Clearly I don’t feel that I can’t get work done while knitting, but still no knitting at meetings.

I’ve been using that voice that lets you know not to listen.

I’ve been thinking about starting a knitting blog for over a year, ever since I started reading knitting blogs from other people in Brooklyn. At this point I have over 70 blogs in my bloglines, I listen to Stash and Burn podcast every week, and I knit all the time…but I don’t have any knitting friends in my real life. Plus, my girlfriend does not share my knitting / pattern / yarn / stitch dictionary obsessions, and I’m basically starting to talk to myself about this stuff. I’m hoping this blog can help me cut back on the crazy talk.

Why knitwhere?  I am really drawn to public knitting/knitting in public, to knit graffiti, and to knitting groups.  I want to share my own knitting projects, yarn ruminations, and general knitting chatter, but I also plan to write about knitting from a perspective of the places that it can occur…and how those places have an impact on the process.  I also just love too-precious word play.