Your shoulders drop somewhere around the third round. Everyone who knits knows it. Now it turns out that someone has done research on why.
I have said it to customers for years without having a word for it. That knitting does something to your head. That you sit down with something unfinished in your lap and get up a little different from how you sat down.
The Danes have given it a name: craft psychology.
Who is behind it
Anne Kirketerp is a craftsperson, a textile teacher and a psychologist, with a doctorate from Aarhus University. She teaches on the master's in positive psychology there, and she started building the field because she couldn't find one that already existed. There was no theory about what handcraft does to people. So she made one.
That combination is the whole point. This is not a psychologist who has read up on what knitting is. It is someone who sits with the needles herself.
What she builds on
Craft psychology draws on four things, and you will recognise all four the moment you hear them:
Flow. Complete absorption. You forget the time, your thoughts and the fact that you are hungry. Flow happens when your skills and the challenge are in balance — too easy and you get bored, too hard and you get stressed.
Self-determination. We need to feel that we are good at something, that we chose it ourselves, and that we belong somewhere. A knitting project gives you all three at once.
Mindfulness. Deliberate, non-judgemental attention to what is happening right now. That is more or less a definition of counting stitches.
The next best step. You don't need to know how the sweater will turn out. You only need to know what the next round is. It is a way of handling uncertainty, and it works far beyond the knitting basket.
This is why the level of the pattern matters more than you think
Notice that one sentence about flow: your skills and the challenge have to be in balance.
That is exactly why I have spent so much time marking my patterns with a level. Not to keep anyone out, but because the wrong level ruins the very state you are after.
Choose something too easy and you get restless and put it down. Choose something too hard and you sit with your shoulders up by your ears, ripping back for the third time. Neither one gives you the calm.
If you are unsure, the level guide was made for exactly this. Beginner means you can knit and purl, and that is enough. Beginner plus means one new technique to learn. Lightly experienced means two things to keep track of at the same time.
And then there are the numbers
There is one large study on this. Jill Riley, Betsan Corkhill and Clare Morris asked 3,545 knitters around the world, and published it in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy in 2013.
Before they sat down with their knitting, 34 per cent described themselves as happy. Afterwards, 81.5 per cent said they felt anything from a little to very happy. Fewer than one per cent were still sad.
Those who knitted daily felt calmer than those who knitted rarely. The same went for happiness. And of those who knitted together with others, nine out of ten said knitting had given them more friends.
Almost six out of ten thought knitting was good for their memory, and a little over six out of ten that it made them better at concentrating.
What the numbers don't say
This is a survey of people who already knit, not a trial where someone was randomly assigned to knit or not to knit. It shows what knitters experience. It does not prove that knitting cures anything, and I am not going to claim that it does.
But 3,545 people saying more or less the same thing is worth listening to. And it fits everything I hear from you.
What I think it is really about
Knitting is one of the few things that occupies your hands and your eyes at the same time. That lets your head off the hook. Not because you force it, but because there isn't room.
And then there is the fact that something gets finished. We spend our days on so much that never gets finished. A sweater gets finished. It lies there, and it is warm, and someone can wear it.
If you want to feel it for yourself
If it has been a while, I would start with something small. A project you finish in an evening or two does more for your mood than a sweater lying half done for three months.
- Pure – the dishcloth, finished in one evening
- The Moss – the beginner's scarf, calm and repetitive all the way
- The CosyMonday Beanie, the really simple hat
You will find more of the same under Quick projects and Beginner. If you have leftover yarn lying about, that goes a long way: see Knitting with leftover yarn.
And if you get stuck along the way, the technique is explained with video in Knittipedia. It is free. Being stuck on round three is the opposite of calm.
Anne-Turid
Sources: Anne Kirketerp, craftpsykologi.dk · Riley, J., Corkhill, B. & Morris, C. (2013): The Benefits of Knitting for Personal and Social Wellbeing in Adulthood: Findings from an International Survey, British Journal of Occupational Therapy 76(2).