selfish making and motivation shifts

“And who are you making that for?”

Any crafter who’s been caught in conversation mid project will be familiar with the question. Over this past weekend, I spent the weekend at the coast with some lovely friends from my school days; mostly from the very first tentative steps into a large primary school on the first day of kindergarten, but even the most “recent” arrival – a friend since the beginning of year seven – has been part of our group for thirty years.

(goodness that’s a big number; I don’t feel old enough to have high school friends i’ve known for thirty years – until I look in the mirror)

Until last month, girls weekends meant quilt camp which meant packing more projects than I can poke a stick at and/or possibly get to over the space of a few days. This time, I was the only crafter and so I packed lightly (by my standards), and mostly focused on one project – knitted socks. Socks are one of my go-to travel and hang out projects. Aside from certain points (and obviously being pattern dependant), it’s pretty easy to knit away while chatting and being sociable with just a bit of a count every now and then.

The first question that came up, obviously, was “what are you working on?” at which point I explain I’m knitting socks. Odd, but ok, I am after all known to be the “weird one” of the group, and apparently the current weirdness is hand knitted socks. Then, of course, the next question invariably comes.

“And who are you making those for?”

Me. The socks are for me. Eyebrows go up – but that response is not unique to this group, I’ve had similar responses to knitting a jumper at homeschool group, where the other mums were surprised it was for me and do I knit for my kids and why not?

I knit for me. I knit because it’s fun and because I like to treat myself a bit. And, to be blunt, because teenagers are oblivious, festy little grots, and I’m not spending good money on merino yarn and hours of knitting time just for lovingly crafted socks to end up smushed in the bottom of a gym bag, or worn until they are both holey and at the same time, able to walk themselves to the laundry.

(I genuinely did not expect the phrase “and are those CLEAN socks” to feature quite so heavily in my parenting vocab)

It hit me, as I stood at the washing line hanging the post-holiday loads of washing, why it felt weird to me that people would consistently be surprised I knit for myself. Or why the term “selfish sewing”, or any other pejorative for makers making for themselves, rubs me the wrong way (beside some obvious and well worn discourse on the value and perception of women’s labour and the domestic arts, but that’s not the thread my mind was going down as I pondered said domestic arts during domestic labour).

What struck me, was quite often, the same people who are surprised that I’m knitting for myself, also hold an attitude that knitting is an old lady craft, a nanna hobby. And I can’t quite decide if those are contrary or complementary thoughts.

On one hand, the unconscious idea that knitting should be for other people strikes me as a holdover from the days when knitting was a crucial part of running a family. Mums would have to knit socks for their family as a matter of course, or jumpers, or blankets. And we mums are good at putting our family’s needs above our own, so of course the socks for the kids and the husbands would be knitted first.

On the other, knitting feels like a nanna hobby, because it’s no longer a necessity, it’s something our grandmothers and great grandmothers did all the time – because they had to. If your family needed clothing, it came from your needles or your sewing machine. With the advent and relentless spread of big box stores, clothing and hosiery is cheaper and more accessible than ever, and we don’t need to knit socks and jumpers for our family any more.

And yet, even when we knit socks by choice, for fun, there’s still that old hangover from the days of necessary knitting; the idea that we should knit for others before ourselves. We’ve grasped the idea that we don’t need to knit but that it can be a fun hobby, but the the other half of the process still seems to be catching up – if I’m knitting for fun, just because I can, just because I want to, why shouldn’t I knit what I want, and reap the benefits of my own labour?

It was an interesting dichotomy to me, that “knitting for fun” quite often sits alongside “knitting should be for other people”. Maybe it’s just because we’re so used to doing everything for our families that it can be a bit out of the ordinary to do something for ourselves. But for me, knitting is my “me thing”, the way I carve out time to do something that’s mine even as I’m sitting on the sidelines of a drama class or waiting in a pick up line. I’m not averse to knitting or making for others, don’t get me wrong, but my downtime relaxing knitting (or crochet or quilting or whatever)? That I’m going to claim both the process and the outcome for my very own.