RSSHomespun hobby back in style
For the Yakima Herald-Republic
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Strands of yarn from two skeins -- one a chocolate brown, the other a light taupe -- spin in dizzying circles around the bamboo needles in Laura Sevigny's hands.
The striped scarf she's holding is a knit, two-purl, two-rib stitch, and it's obvious she's proud of it.
And why wouldn't she be?
The 18-year-old has joined the burgeoning number of young adults who have taken up knitting as a hobby, and this scarf is just another of her creations.
A sophomore at Yakima Valley Community College, Sevigny has been knitting since she was 15, when she decided one lazy Sunday that it was just something she wanted to learn. She had noticed the many celebrities who would knit in public, and she bought a book and taught herself.
"I just thought, 'Madonna knits, therefore I must knit!'" she says, laughing.
The celebrity influence is one factor contributing to the growth of knitting as a hobby in recent years. Once associated with grandmothers, knitting has enjoyed a resurgence as a hip and fun hobby. It's become popular among the college and young adult crowd. There are knitting humorists, slightly subversive knitting circles, knitting TV shows, and even knitting graffitti activist groups.
To learn more about her craft, Sevigny attended a knitting workshop at a local yarn shop, The Little Red Hen. She spent an afternoon accomplishing a new feat: a soft and delicate lavender alpaca wool hat. In a few hours, and with some help.
Owned by David and Melinda Shoop, The Little Red Hen is entirely devoted to yarn. Shelves and shelves of beautiful, multi-colored yarns cover the walls. There is a table for customers to practice or learn new stitches, and displays of yarn and specialty magazines and books make it a tight squeeze around every corner.
And it's impossiible to deny that every ball and tightly bound loop of yarn holds a story and a purpose.
Melinda Shoop can explain every object in her store -- from hemp blended yarn to soy blends, from 100 percent organic yarn to yarn recycled from saris. The yarns come from New Zealand, Canada, Peru, India, China and many points in between.
Fifty-eight-year-old Melinda Shoop has been knitting since she was 12. It was a hobby she learned from her mother, and she's held a passion for it throughout her life. Finally, two years ago, she was able to make a longtime aspiration into a reality when she opened the shop with her husband.
There are hanging knit purses and scarves and bags that Melinda Schoop has completed herself as well as a few finished pieces by her husband, who only recently picked up the hobby after watching his wife produce knit crafts for 30 years.
Knitting is a culture, Melinda Shoop says. "There is a camaraderie among knitters and a willingness to help one another," she explains, before adding with a smile, "And also to compete."
People who knit have a network of specialty magazines and Web sites that foster playful competition like "Sock Wars," described on its Web site as the "bloodiest extreme knitting tournament," in which knitters compete to be the first to complete sock patterns posted on the Web.
Melinda Shoop says she believes it's fun activites like this, as well as the vastly diverse array of color and texture in yarns, that appeal to younger knitters.
"It is so wonderful to see this big boom of teenagers and twenty-somethings knitting and designing and bringing their friends in, wanting different yarns," she says. "Knitting is not
going to die."
Especially not if more and more people take up the hobby.
Mimi Applebaum, 29, the events coordinator at Inklings Bookshop, has only recently begun knitting her simple, one-skein scarves. After joining a craft group, Applebaum says she realized she was the only person who didn't knit. Now, she stocks the hobby shelves at Inklings and makes sure trendy, youth-driven knitting books are just as available as more traditional pattern books.
Knitters, in their newly varied forms, certainly agree on one thing. It's a craft worth sharing.
Sevigny has sought out other knitters her age as much as her schedule will allow.
"I tried to teach a friend, but I think I scared her with how excited I was," she says. "If people want to learn, I'm willing if they can get past my enthusiasm.
"I've wanted to for awhile. To form a group of people who love coffee and knitting. People come into my job with knitting and I get so excited and ask them so many questions about their projects."
If she ever did manage to form her own group, she already knows what she would call it.
"We'd be called the Skein Heads. It was my great idea," she says laughing into the yarn pooled in her lap.
