Knitting thick and thin energized yarn.
One reason is as a quiet form of protest. This morning I found something that reminded me of that. It's from Rebecca Solnit and I found it via Keri Smith's Blog.
The article is about how our culture is being changed by electronics. The part that especially resonated with me is:
"The real point about the slow food movement was often missed. It wasn't food. It was about doing something from scratch, with pleasure, all the way through, in the old methodical way we used to do things. That didn't merely produce better food; it produced a better relationship to materials, processes and labour, notably your own, before the spoon reached your mouth. It produced pleasure in production as well as consumption. It made whole what is broken.
Some of the young have taken up gardening and knitting and a host of other things that involve working with their hands, making things from scratch and other doing things the old way. It is a slow everything movement in need of a manifesto that would explain what vinyl records and homemade bread have in common. We won't overthrow corporations by knitting - but understanding the pleasures of knitting or weeding or making pickles might articulate the value of that world outside electronic chatter and distraction, and inside a more stately sense of time."