We have now moved to our new town, and I am taking a much-deserved vacation before my job starts in July. So far, the vacation has involved more or less setting up the new apartment, failed attempts at finding a couch that is neither ugly nor expensive, and spending inordinate amounts of time with the dogs, uttering phrases like "Molly, please stop killing our umbrellas" and discovering that Murphy is a grass snob and only stands on the coffee table when he really wants your attention.
I've also managed to squeeze in some knitting and yarn shopping as well. One of my biggest accomplishments in the past few months has been the completion of a series of hats knit for a local women's shelter.
There are many names for this kind of knitting. Charity knitting, service knitting, RAKs (Random Acts of Kindness- this term doesn't only apply to knitting). But no matter what you call it, whether the recipient is anonymous or known, whether the knitting was requested or truly a surprise, I love, and often require myself, to have something on my needles that is not for me.
Why knit for others? The impetus for the hat project was to use up yarn left over from a project that failed catastrophically several years ago, leaving hundreds of small yarn balls in its wake. (There are still hundreds more of these balls of yarn, to continue to be used in smaller projects until they are gone... or until the Sun starts revolving around the Earth. You know, whichever comes first. Probably the latter.) Knitting for others also allows me to use yarn or patterns that I don't want to make for myself, but that I want to try.
There are far less practical, but far more important, reasons why I knit for others. Any kind of work for others gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling (insert debate about whether or not true altruism exists here), and being able to combine that act with a craft that I love makes it all the better.
Then again, there are just as many reasons to not knit for others. A Ravelry group called "Selfish Knitters" recounts hundreds of stories of handknit gifts being called "cheap," sold at yard sales, thrown away, and insulted. Experiences such as these could make any gift-giver want to curl into a ball and down an entire pint of ice cream with a vodka chaser. I'm lucky not to have experienced this myself- I have had wonderful friends and family that always adore, and sometimes even request, knitted work from me. I wonder, though, if an experience like that would bother me. Undoubtedly yes, but at the same time, I revel in the process of knitting and the feeling that I'm knitting for someone else. And when I'm knitting for charity, someone else gets to decide if they like my work, and I'll never know either way!
And so I continue on my quest to knit as much for others as for myself. But what about you? Gift-giving, knitting gifts for others, knitting gifts for charity. Whatcha think?
