Back in the mid-90s, I asked my mother to teach me how to knit. Like many women of their time, both she and her mother were skilled at Aran knitting¹ and I was always impressed at the complex patterns that could be created from a length of yarn with two knitting needles – or three for the more complicated stitches. Even though this was the 90s and mindfulness wasn’t something anyone would have heard of in rural Ireland, it served the same function for me. I knitted an Aran scarf and a jumper (sweater in American) but didn’t actually wear either of them so I eventually gave it up as a hobby.
Regardless, I think it’s important for those of us who work using computers to have hobbies where you get away from the screens and use your hands in a tactile way – ideally to make something. Cooking, baking and bread-making are things that almost anyone can do. We all have to eat and it’s great to be able to share what you’ve made with others (I find the best hobbies also have some degree of social interaction).
When I cycled and mountain-biked, I used to do all my own bike maintenance and built my own wheels; I got a lot of satisfaction from building a perfectly balanced wheel. I also did a wood-work course and would have liked to have kept it up but I live in a small house without the space for a work-bench and tools.
More recently, during Covid, I started to learn guitar. Even though it doesn’t come naturally and progress happens at a very slow pace, I get a lot of enjoyment from it. My goal is to get good enough that I feel confident jamming/playing with other friends who are amateur musicians.
Why do you consider playing guitar as something tactile but not programming? Genuine question really. Isn't playing guitar also not producing anything tangible?
I’m both an amateur musician and a professional coder.
Definitely IMO code is a real physical thing that produces tangible results. (I personally think that code operationally is a physical thing, down to basics like logic gates and stuff. We abstract far away from that with high level languages but even making a pixel change colors is inherently, to me, altering physical reality)
But the experience of writing code and making music with your body is such a different one. You will feel and think about the code in a more imaginary and thoughtful way (you could write all your code in a notebook or a text editor and you would just be writing or typing on a keyboard) whereas the music (I play a wind instrument) is a tactile experience in the sense that it will physically be something you hear and you can actually feel the vibrations in your body; I might be wrong but I think that is what hearing is. And there is a real bio-feedback thing going on because you use your body to physically make it happen and you get immediate or very near immediate feedback (auditory, etc. You may even hear or see feedback from other musicians or even listeners). It’s just a viscerally different experience.
There’s nothing fake about seeing metrics on a dashboard or tests going from red to green or money or bits of data flowing around, at all. But it is experientially much different from the feeling of playing an instrument.
tiniuclx answered this very eloquently in a separate comment¹ so I’ll quote them in full:
> The point about being disconnected with tactile sensation is very poignant. I've experimented with crafts before, but my go-to hobby has always been music - stringed instruments like the guitar. There's something very rewarding about the instant feedback you get when you fret down a string, and how much nuance you can get out of the smallest movements of your hands.
Currently, I’m trying to learn how to improve my dynamic range: being able to play softer and louder and/or accent a particular beat while keep a steady rhythm. I found it hard not to strike the strings more quickly to make them sound louder and I still find it challenging to play evenly with consistent loudness and tone.
I’ve found the more I play, the more attuned I become to the subtleties of the sound being produced, e.g., I’ve learned that pressing down on a string too much results in the pitch being sharper than what it should be. I’ve been experimenting with different thicknesses of plectrums and if not using a plectrum, noticing how the tone is different depending on whether the string is struck with the nail or the fleshy part of the finger. That’s all on an acoustic guitar; so far, I’ve purposely avoided the rabbit-hole of how electric guitar tone can be modified by amplifier and effects.
Programming – for me – doesn’t really have the same nuances and challenges. Even though I don’t produce anything tangible, I guess the main benefit for me is that learning and playing the guitar exercises completely different parts of my brain than those I use as a system administrator or programmer. I’m completely focussed on what I’m doing when I’m learning and practising and there’s a real buzz from nailing something that I first thought was impossible.
As a side-effect, it has also improved my appreciation for different styles of music and my understanding of how music is made (e.g., I can tell the difference between music in 4:4 and 6:8 time signatures) and what other instruments are doing in a piece of music, e.g., drummers often play the snare on beats 2 and 4 in many genres of popular music.
it's not about producing tangible stuff, it's about working with physical materials and getting tangible feedback from the interactions between your body and the stuff you're working with. working with a computer didn't have that physical feedback loop.
I think with guitar it is easy to enter flow state because it is easy to avoid playing the "wrong" notes. Probably similar to these other hobbies. Perhaps they just happen to have a tactile component, although it is nice to do something a little different from time to time. It seems computer games probably provide a similar form of satisfaction.
The other answers describe the process well but here’s my personal perspective on how I got into it:
When cycling off-road, wheel rims would regularly go out of shape so I purchased spoke spanners to correct the side-to-side wobble by adjusting the spoke tension. This was important as back in the 90s as almost all non-professional mountain bikes used some form of rim brake: cantilever, and later, V-brakes. I would fix the wheels by removing the tyre and tube and mounting the wheel in the forks (front wheel) or wheel stays (rear wheel) so I could see where the wobbles were.
I eventually realised that the rims also needed to be trued radially, i.e., the rim forms a perfect circle and is consistently equidistant from the flanges of the hub. I was doing this often enough that I ended up buying a proper truing stand and I became the go-to guy for fixing wheels for friends.
Given enough abuse from mountain-biking, eventually wheels can no longer be trued by adjusting spoke tension. It seemed a shame – and environmentally wrong – to discard a wheel when it had a good-quality hub so I graduated to buying new spokes and rims to build on to the old hub (which would usually last for years) using the instructions from Sheldon Brown (as linked to in a sibling comment).
The process of building a wheel requires an understanding of the physical forces acting on the spokes and rim but the practice is more like an art. The more you did it, the better you got at avoiding issues like residual twist. It’s a bit like tuning a stringed instrument. I would even pluck the spokes and compare the pitch to get a feel for the amount of tension the individual spoke was under. It was very satisfying to get a consistent tone.
Wheelbuilding in this case uses "building" to convey the measurement and adjustment required to assemble parts of the wheel. Building from parts, not from scratch materials.
Sheldon Brown was my inspiration for many bike-related endeavours and his website is what drew me to Internet and the WWW in the first place. I used to to into Internet cafés and print out pages from his site – including this very guide. This was what I used for the first few wheels I built. Eventually, I got a copy of The Bicycle Wheel, by Jobst Brandt from my local library.
I like crotcheting (tried it again for the first time since childhood during Covid). My main problem is that, unless you have already mastered it and can do it in your sleep, I have to fully concentrate on it to not fuck things up, which means I can't do something else at the same time, e.g. listen to an audiobook. And because I'm so slow it takes too much time for me to not think that it's a waste of time because I could have done something more meaningful instead. Objectively, I know it is wrong to think so because the whole point of it is to get away from other stuff and let your brain rest for a while, but it just doesn't work for me and creates extra stress, sadly.
> And because I'm so slow it takes too much time for me to not think that it's a waste of time because I could have done something more meaningful instead.
I struggle with this too, especially because knitting is so slow and I'm in the unusual but fortunate position of having my other hobby (writing a couple of books) clearly having had much more impact.
There's a part of my brain when I knit that's like, "You know if you spent this hour working on another book, it would leave a bigger mark in the world."
But I also know that part of that impulse is unhealthy. I wrote those books for a lot reasons, many of which were good. But some of that drive did come from a sense that I'm not enough just being me and I need to be making something of value for as many people as possible to consider myself worthy.
I'm trying to grow out of that mindset and accept myself just as I am. So I consider time spent knitting as sort of exposure therapy for getting used to the idea that I deserve to take time for my selfish joys.
If I may ask, do you suffer from anxiety and depression?
I do. As part of that whole package, I find it exceedingly difficult to focus on more than one thing at a time. As much as I would love to sit and code a bit while watching tv or listening to an audio book, I simply cannot do it. I've tried many times and find it impossible to focus on my project while my brain is more interested in the easy attention economy of the television.
Conversely, my wife is very talented in the fiber arts. She seems to be able to sew, crochet and knit while watching tv without any effort at all, paying attention to both whatever show we have on and what she's doing. Granted, she's been at it for well over a decade so there's some learned adaptation there, but as far back as I can remember she has never had the same problem I do. She also does not suffer from anxiety and depression on the level that I do.
I've been wondering if there's a correlation for awhile now. Interesting that this popped up on HN and pulled me out of lurk mode.
I've never suffered from anxiety nor depression, and yet can't focus on more than one thing at a time. I can't imagine coding while watching tv or listening to an audio book. Nor would I want to!
If I tried doing two things at once, it'd be painful and also I wouldn't be doing either properly. I believe the "multitaskers" aren't that much better, they just learned to context-switch quickly. I'm not the least envious.
I do, but I'm not convinced there is correlation. In front of the computer I can easily multitask and I can just as easily sit for 10 hours straight and code with focus. Outside the digital realm I find it harder to multitask - if I talk to someone on the phone and try to do something at the same time I immediately lose focus on the conversation, I drift away and no longer know what the other person is talking about. I've been wondering if the difference is that there is external input which I can't anticipate - if I do multiple things on the the computer by myself all state exists in my head and it's just a matter of random read access. On the other hand, I also find it hard to cook and go back to the computer for "just one second", every other time I immediately forget that there is food on the stove. I'd say that my attention span has suffered since Covid and I find it generally harder to keep focus, for example when watching TV, but if the focus is there I can still hold it for a very long time, e.g. when programming.
I sort of wonder if it is just a matter of multitasking imposing a cost, maybe one that you can afford in the cases where you are really good at the thing?
Like I’m pretty good at programming, bad at writing, and ok at following the plot of a TV show (that’s hardly a skill I’m proud of, haha). But, I can code fine with a TV on in the background (I will be decent at programming and forget the plot of the TV show/miss plot beats). Or I can slow my writing even further, to an absolute crawl, while simultaneously missing TV plot points. Multitasking!
I also don't multitask well, but I think it's a little more complex than just not doing more than one thing at a time. Different tasks seem to occupy different brain regions, and it's really that I can't allocate one region to multiple things.
I can listen to music while I program, but it can't be anything with lyrics because programming requires too much of my language center.
Knitting doesn't touch my language center, so I can listen to music with lyrics or an audiobook. But it's too visual for me to watch anything else while I do it.
> As much as I would love to sit and code a bit while watching tv or listening to an audio book, I simply cannot do it
> She seems to be able to sew, crochet and knit while watching tv without any effort at all, paying attention to both whatever show we have on and what she's doing
Multitasking is just a "personality trait".. and predominantly women are more able to multitask than men. You should simply ask around and see the correlations. Some of the happiest people I know can't multitask at all
I don't want this to sound derogatory but my experience is that simpler minds are generally happier in life, and I'd guess that this often (not always) comes with an inability to multitask, so I believe you are right. I had a friend in school (great dude, very grounded and happy person) who couldn't eat ice cream and walk at the same time (I swear I'm not making this up).
Consider, though, one of the unique aspects of crochet or knitting -- you can fuck things up and it's not a big deal. Unlike woodworking or sewing, where once something is cut it cannot be uncut, with these crafts if you zone out while watching Wheel of Fortune and do a few rows wrong, you can always just ... undo it and try again. Nothing is lost but your time, and if you are doing it to relax while watching TV, you haven't really lost anything at all.
This was probably my issue as well. I grew up seeing my grandma crochet. She’d do it while watching TV (though I’m not sure if she was actually watching or just in proximity to others watching), and she was quick. I have a couple afghans she made. She probably made a couple dozen.
The learning curve was higher than I expected, especially without someone to be there showing me stuff. I just tried watching some YouTube videos. I got frustrated and quit rather quickly.
I’ve heard knitting is easier, but I like the idea of crochet better.
Both knitting and crochet are very difficult and frustrating at first. Harder, I think, than your first time picking up a guitar.
The initial hump is steep but fairly small. It took me about four or five tries before I could make stitches. Once I got over that initial challenge, it got a lot smoother. Since then, there have been continuous incremental challenges, but all fairly small.
I haven't gotten over the hump with crochet. I'm left-handed but knit right-handed because mirroring everything is very hard. The entire knitting world presumes right-handed knitting. However, I knit Continental style which uses both hands and engages the left hand a lot, so I don't find that it feels very "wrong".
However, with crochet, I don't think I could ever hold the hook with my right hand. But also mirroring everything while trying to learn is not easy.
My mom also knits while watching TV, and she is super fast. I think one secret ingredient is that she doesn't care about making mistakes. Tinier mistakes she just ignores (even if they are visible in the end [I don't like that, so that's something I try to avoid, which adds pressure and slows me down]) and she doesn't mind backtracking and re-doing several rows if she really fucks up.
My grandma seemingly didn’t ignore or tolerate mistakes. That’s why she ended up stopping. People tried to get her to crochet or knit toward the end of her life and if she made a mistake, she’d start ripping it all apart. When the mistakes became too frequent, that was it. Maybe that’s where I get it from, lol.
> I'm so slow it takes too much time for me to not think that it's a waste of time because I could have done something more meaningful instead.
That's the funny thing about the idea of meaningful things. It is solely determined by what you think is meaningful. Personally, just sitting and making something is an extremely meaningful activity to me.
Could you try crocheting something for a purpose? Say, make small stuffed toys to donate to a local charity?
That way, the task becomes "meaningful" and thus worthy of the additional time and focus that it demands, without becoming a pressing obligation on you to cause additional stress...
I did have a purpose and it didn't help much in this regard, it only helped with keeping up the friendly pressure to actually finish them. But generally, your advice is good nonetheless.
I absolutely did it for fun and to learn something new, it just didn't feel like as much fun as I had anticipated to me personally. I want it to be fun and relaxing, there is some fun in it but it's not relaxing.
Until you're more experienced, listen to music or something else where it's okay if you take your focus off of it to focus on counting your stitches. Yes, it won't be "productive," but your crocheting is already productive.
Absolutely! The difference is that with other things the learning curve can be part of the fun while you are in the process of figuring things out. With crotcheting, it only really takes a couple of minutes to get going, but doing it fast and consistently takes time, but you aren't really learning anything new other than becoming faster, so the emotional return isn't as big compared to, let's say, learning a new language or playing an instrument. It's just very mechanical by nature; which is a good thing, but for me personally, it takes away a bit of the joy.
Knitting and other fiber arts are the grandmother of computer programming, and I'd go so far as to say your CS education is incomplete without at least passing knowledge of fabric weaving and especially weaving machine history.
Ignorance is not your fault, unfortunately they can't teach you everything in college, and people tend to downplay the importance and history of "women's work", much to all our detriment.
You won't have a full and comprehensive education as an author without spending a few months copying texts by hand in a scriptorium like monks did back in the 500s.
I'm not even that much of a fiber artist - I can crochet, and I can weave shepherd's slings out of plant fiber/paracord/other strings. But I believe the thinking patterns help me, especially in large-but-not-complex systems thinking.
The point about being disconnected with tactile sensation is very poignant. I've experimented with crafts before, but my go-to hobby has always been music - stringed instruments like the guitar. There's something very rewarding about the instant feedback you get when you fret down a string, and how much nuance you can get out of the smallest movements of your hands.
Likewise with physical instruments vs digital; it's very tempting for someone working in tech to stay there and use a DAW and the like, but a physical instrument has so much more depth. I've got a bodhrán which on the surface is one of the simplest instruments, but the variety of sounds you can get out of it is really stimulating (depending on where you hit it, how, how hard, how fast, how you hold it, where / whether you press your hand, etc). And it's living, depending on temperature, humidity, how long you've handled it, etc the sound changes.
A dishcloth is a great place to start, and I've learned ~90% of my knitting from Norman. He's great.
I will caution you that cotton yarn is definitely not the easiest yarn to start with. It has very little stretch which makes it hard to keep good tension and form stitches. Not impossible, just sort of difficult.
It's very much like learning to play guitar starting with an acoustic compared to an electric. Everything is a little stiffer and requires a little more finger strength.
So if you feel like it's more difficult than you expected, it may partially be because of the yarn.
I find woodworking fun for basically all the same reasons. Plus there's still the math of adding up things to predict cut layouts, and you end up with a new shelf or box or table. I'm not sure I would use anything I knitted.
I also found woodworking recently as a software engineer and it's incredibly rewarding. Both the tactile feeling of the activity, the idea of building something that _exists_ in physical form and exists in your or a loved one's home, and the pride that you feel about a finished product and having overcome challenges and learned something.
Unlike knitting, I love its usefulness. There are so only many use cases for knitwear, but furniture, man, everyone needs furniture. And being in a home that I built by my two hands is infinite joy.
The three aspects where it falls short to knitting:
- It can't be done mindlessly. It would be unsafe and you'd make costly mistakes that you can't undo by pulling on the yarn.
- It's more expensive. The materials are a bit more pricy (compared to hours spent on working them), but the machines certainly are.
- You are confined to space and time. Whether it's your garage or wood shop where you have machines and can make noise and dust, or it's your living room where you exclusively use hand tools – you surely can't do it in your car while waiting for the kids, or at the university, or on the public transport. Whittling small objects is the one exception.
Agree on all accounts. I very much enjoy the limited woodworking I've done, but the logistics are much trickier than knitting.
I do find whittling to be an interesting middle point. Like knitting, you don't need a dedicated workshop. It doesn't take a lot of set up and tear down for a given session. You can fit the project and tools in a small space.
Of course, you're shedding wood chips the whole time, so you can't really whittle on the couch. And you sure as hell can't do it on an airplane. But you can do it when, say, camping with friends, or sitting on the back porch when it's nice out.
I find woodworking extremely alluring. I'd love to do woodworking, but that requires space for an environment which I don't have. I like to think that in a parallel universe I build guitars and restore old wooden furniture.
I have only just started out but it feels nice indeed! A hindrance is that I am not very artistically gifted, but as long as I make it mostly for myself, I don't mind too much.
Depending on where you live, there might be workshops nearby where you can sign up to use shared spaces (along with shared tools).
They're also the kind of places where they have lessons where you can sign up, so if you're interested in both classes and a space to work, they're a great fit.
I have this problem. I did three things. First, I joined a makerspace that had a woodshop. This seems like it should cure all your problems but it won't. There's limited storage, unpredictable tool availability, the motivational issues of driving to a new place to work, etc.
Second, I joined another makerspace out of town! Redundancy and the availability of friends in the area to work with helps. Plus, supporting makerspaces feels good and the cost is not much compared to other hobbies.
Finally, there are some very basic, not large tools that can get you through 90% of projects, including very nice looking bookshelves, desks, cabinets, etc:
* Circle saw + track guide for rip cuts
* Saw horses for adhoc tables
* Power drill (+ you'll want one for all kinds of useful things anyway)
* Nice drill bit set
* Pocket hole jig (saves you time and assembly space)
* Drill block (takes the place of a drill press in a pinch)
* Painting blankets to put stain / glue-ups on
All of the above can fit in a small area of a closet, available when motivation strikes. Far and away the biggest storage headache is wood, which you'll have to get creative about, but for restoration or even modification, you won't need much. And for smaller projects you'll probably use most of what you buy on the same day if you plan it out.
Upgrades (which a makerspace would provide anyway):
* If you have a little space (like a desktop), you can get a chop/miter saw which makes repeated precise cuts much easier
* A router + bit set (esp keyhole bit! This makes hanging this much easier)
* Shopvac for dust (+ shopvacs are super useful anyway)
That's really it. You can do almost all the projects you'd want with just those, from the living room, patio, backyard, driveway, garage, or a parking spot out front.
What I get from the makerspace is access to drill presses, router tables, and table saws. Table saws are a game changer and are the best way to level up your precision and cut accuracy, but require so much space that I could never justify it at home (and small portable table saws are not the same).
I'm definitely still learning, but the main lessons are that good wood ($), precise cuts, adding layers from trim / recessed boards, hiding screws, and tons of sanding will make anything look really, really nice.
EDIT: One last thing: You can easily practice woodworking fundamentals without space by making joints, practicing stain matching (try to get veneer plywood to match a stained board), or practicing right-angle, precise cuts.
Programmers (and other full time computer users) should be careful with this and similar yarn-based hobbies. I gave myself an apparently permanent RSI issue in my shoulder from knitting with bad technique (had too much tension in my yarn I think). I learned from you tube videos, a human probably could have told me I was doing it wrong but I didn't ask anyone.
The injury does affect my computer use, when it gets real bad I have to switch my mouse pad to the other side of my desk. I haven't knitted in years and its still there.
I started making cosplay accessories and custom plushies for furries. There’s almost an unlimited range of stuff to make. 3D printed glasses, oversized beanies, custom bags, etc. Feels very satisfying to make a physical thing and hand it over to the buyer.
100%. There’s quite a few things I’ve got now which would be thousands of dollars to have someone else make for me but cost very little to make myself. Just requiring a few weekends of work. Stuff that feels quite luxury to own.
I wanted a custom kigurumi like these[1] but didn’t want to fork over thousands of dollars for one. Ended up buying a sewing machine and fleece, learning to sew while making it. Was a bit of a brutal first project but after about 2 months off and on work in my free time I was able to complete it. Was then able to make 5 more of them for friends. The later ones were significantly easier.
Also made myself a custom plushie which would have cost around $1000AUD had I commissioned someone to make it.
After doing it all, I can say, yeah the prices actually are fair if you need to actually make a living off it, but also you can just do it yourself with a $300 sewing machine and some determination.
The thing knitting taught me is that you can have something beautiful and useful even tho literally every part of the piece is a single point of failure.
No redundancy, no backstop. If any of the stitches gets cut, the entire piece can unravel completely.
We're so used to redundancy, but sometimes you just need to get things done, and it's ok if it's all a deck of cards.
It depends on your medium. A good wool has little hooks along the shaft of its staple so once knit the yarn will cling. Cutting a single stitch will not cause a loss of coherency. In fact, a classic knitting technique for crafting something like a cardigan made with wool involves knitting in the round (making a spiral tube, essentially) and then slicing it open for the button band and sleeves. It's called "steeking".
Knitting is actually very nicely repairable. Home made sweaters were super popular here in the past, pretty much the only affordable way to get them. They survived for many many years, because you can always patch them, either visibly or invisibly. Even knitted socks, which get a lot of abuse, were patched and repatched.
When I visited Sweden I stumbled across nålebinding. It predates knitting and crochet, and from what I read, it didn’t suffer from this issue of unraveling. Though I think that is a double edged sword, as it also means it’s hard to go back and fix a mistake if one is made.
While I'm very open-minded to knitting, also consider picking up a musical instrument. Guitar, ukulele, keyboard. There are apps that'll teach you, and it's immensely gratifying -- if like me you obsess over certain songs -- to then be able to work towards playing those.
Knitting has the advantage that you can do it anywhere and at any time without 'bothering' anybody else. Sitting on the bus, watching TV, having a conversation. Most people I know who knit use it almost as a 'fidget toy' that they're subconsciously playing with while simultaneously doing something else. Only looking down every few minutes or so to make sure they're on the right track or to make some change
I recently picked up an analog drum machine - Arturia Drumbrute Impact. I play guitar a little already and picked this up to play some industrial music. It's turned out to be a such a fun device on it's own I'm considering picking up a bass machine, sequencer, and synth.
I can totally zone out creating and tweaking beats on the Drumbrute Impact. I also find it oddly comforting to have on when I'm working.
No better time in history to learn guitar. Amazing online resources, the world is flooded with cheap guitars as well if you’re happy with 2nd hand. There is a technical side to it (tuning, restringing) and plenty of toys, pedals and computer integration to any nerd hearts content. Even if you get stuck at 3 chords it’s amazing the number of pop songs you can suddenly play. Plus if you get past there you still have classical, jazz or whatever super hard path you want to travel to explore.
I sometimes wonder if I'm broken in some way. I bought my first guitar in 1996 (a Mexican Fender Stratocaster) and my last guitar in 2018 (a Gibson SG). I've taken lessons with three different teachers. I've worked through a Hal Leonard book series. I've subscribed to Guitar Tricks for a while then switched to Justin Guitar. I have YouTube playlists a mile long where I try to learn songs. I keep a guitar in my office to help me stop thinking about a problem when I get stuck.
After all this, I don't know any (real) songs from start to finish. The closest I come is playing Nirvana's About a Girl.
I might have some kind of rhythm disability. If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
It's so frustrating, especially when I see how fast my kids learned to play an instrument. They make it look so easy.
If you're not looking for random person's advice feel free to ignore :-)
> If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
Are you able to play any strumming patterns (however simple) with just the metronome? Ideally you'd practice this enough that you are able to do it consistently with almost zero thinking, and then check if it has improved your ability to play along with the record.
Another thing that has helped me when learning new strumming patterns (and just rhythm in general) was practicing just the strumming, muting the strings with my left hand instead of playing chords. First with the metronome, then along the record (all without any chords, just muted strings). Give that a try if you feel like it.
You are describing some of the exercises from the Justin Guitar Strumming SOS course. I bought that course and worked my way through it and enjoyed doing it, but it didn't have a big impact.
To answer your metronome question - I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync. I start to focus on how my arm feels strumming and I can feel the pick vibrating in my fingers and feel the air I'm moving with my arm and I notice the vibration in the guitar body and as my attention moves around, I lose track of the click.
> You are describing some of the exercises from the Justin Guitar Strumming SOS course.
Not surprised that these are in there!
> I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync
Huh, I never actually did that for more than a few minutes at the time (when just using the metronome), I can imagine it gets boring and attention wanders. I did try to do it frequently (couple of times a day, spread throughout the day), but only for two minutes or so.
Anyway, I thought you might have tried all of that already, considering you took lessons and bought courses, but still wanted to throw it out there. Good luck!
Start in a very slow fashion, like you're teaching kindergardeners songs, and key here is to use both feet to tap, every other beat on each foot, and do it slow as molases, count it 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 while alternating the feet. You can also move the body to that slow rhythm. After some time of doing this you'll realize you don't need to go that slow. Good luck!
Do you have any recommendations for online resources? A few years ago my wife and I started with Justin guitar, but then we switched to piano to tempt our daughter. Is that a good choice, or are there better options?
I (op) restarted guitar recently, and Justin Guitar definitely seemed to be the internet's recommendation. I found it to be OK! The content is good but the app was a bit janky. I switched to online Zoom classes. Two people I know have used Simply Piano (and there's a guitar version of the same app) and swear by it, so probably also worth a look.
Guitar definitely. An acoustic guitar is ideal since you just pick it up and start playing any time (even plugging something in can be a barrier sometimes). My rule is I always play for 10 minutes minimum every day, even when I'm not feeling it.
The great thing about guitars is that you can buy really well made ones, brand new, for only $100-300. That and a $10 tuner and watching free online tutorials is all you need.
I agree, musical instruments also have the benefit of a much higher skill ceiling. That can also be a downside though, since it can make it frustrating to learn
You're talking years of work to complete it. You may be thinking, "well, sure, but it's just doing the same relatively easy thing over and over for a really long time." But that's not quite it. You're making a single physical object where it's easy to make mistakes and also easy to not realize you've made a mistake. Knitting builds on the previously knitted stitches. If you miscount something early on or forget a stitch, you can end up diverging irrevocably from the pattern. A moment's inattention early on can mean you have to undo literally months of work.
A large complex project like that shawl is like a giant oil painting. It's not just the scale and time, it's the ability to consistently avoid making mistakes which requires incredible patience and discipline.
And that's just knitting the work. Now consider the mastery required to design a project like this.
My mum knits and while yes the skill ceiling is still high no I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels
Knitting has a lower skill ceiling doesn’t mean knitting or design is easy. I know that well, my mum ran a knitting shop and still works on patterns part time. She still knits a lot of stuff for us and it takes a lot of skill and work
But it’s not Glenn Gould on piano, is it? It’s not playing Bach fugues
> I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels
There is a very old, very relevant observation that when men do something we call it "art" and when women do it we call it "craft".
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to compare a performative art like playing an instrument to a constructive art like knitting because the skillsets are so different. It's like trying to decide if ice cream is better than stand up comedy.
But I do think you can reasonably compare constructive arts like painting and knitting. For those, there are two aspects: coming up with the design for what you want to make, and implementing that design. Historically, the latter was given more weight than the former. The most famous painters of the Renaissance mostly just painted pictures of normal people, but it was the execution of those paintings that made them famous. Today, thanks to the invention of reproductive technology like cameras, we mostly prize originally of thought over execution. Andy Warhol is not a particularly skilled painter. (One way to think of the modern conception of "high art" versus "low art"—think Damien Hirst versus Thomas Kinkade—is exactly the distinction between concept and execution.)
Given all that, I would the best knitting designers on the same level as the best furniture designers or portrait painters. Most knitting is deliberately not conceptual, so it's hard to compare it to explicitly conceptual art. But if you think anything can reasonably be called art when it is mostly focused on quality and difficulty of execution, then knitting is an art with a ceiling as high as any other.
How you feel about those probably reflects mostly how you feel about much of modern art. But I don't see any reason it should be considered a lower rung of art than other sculpture media just because it uses fibers and not metal or glass.
I came back to guitar after being self-taught and not very good, and was pleasantly surprised that the Trinity Guitar Initial Grade (eg the first book you'd start a kid on) had some awesome music that you could make the melodies of very quickly. Like, 2-3 hours of practice and you can slowly pick out the melody from Runaway Train, Orange Crush, and Where did you sleep last night.
I guess my point is you can get some good sounds out of the guitar very quickly, which can be very intrinsically motivating.
Yep! Any type of desk/knowledge work job tends to be more cerebral and less... Sensory. If you have this type of job, any sort of hobby that unlocks the senses can be very rewarding and add balance to your life. For me it's lifting weights and singing.
When our work is looking at screens, our games are looking at screens, our entertainment is looking at screens, etc., getting away from that and doing something that doesn't involve screens is refreshing.
In the same vein, I've been enjoying making plushies recently, when my body allows me to. You end up with something you made yourself, even if it sometimes looks a bit skrunkly, and they're great gifts (for my friend group anyway, which mostly consists of trans girls that need more plushies in their lives)
That's a great idea, I took apart a sacrifical blahaj and created patterns from all the panels so I could make my own. They came out a little skrunkly though, I used fabric that was a lot stretchier than I expected
My girlfriend has been getting into crocheting recently, and I've been learning a lot about it and craft stuff in general.
I've always been a computer guy... I'm bad with my hands. Could never do origami. Part of the reason I dropped out of Boy Scouts was I didn't want to learn how to make knots. I was terrible in art class, I can't draw and I honestly have trouble just visualizing things (I was not great in geometry either). It's difficult for me to be creative like that. So that's my background, lol.
I could play music (and that's a hobby I still want to pursue), but lately I've been wondering if there was a craft that was better for people like me. Like, I got these cute handmade plushies as a gift recently, and I want to do something like that.
(honestly it seems like crocheting and knitting might not be bad options, but just wondering what else is out there!)
e; one thing I've considered is making something with electronics (I know enough about circuits to be dangerous), but the thing you run into quickly is you don't really want to just give somebody a circuit board, lol. At some point, it seems like all the interesting projects move towards 3D printing which I find intimidating.
I've found painting mini's (like Warhammer) to be really fun. You get the structure of the model to work from, but you get a creative outlet with the painting. There is a ton of painting technique to work on and learn, and you get a game to play for extra motivation. Plus at the end of the day you have a nice display piece to look at for the shelf.
My mother, a knitter for many decades, says to me about this -
>They are comfort chickens, good for cuddles for those going thru breast cancer treatment. A nice shape to hold, I understand. You might have to learn to knit..
I'm more of a cross-stitch person myself, but the feelings really resonated, especially that craving for tactile, analog creation after spending all day in the digital ether. There's something incredibly grounding about watching a piece come together, stitch by stitch, knowing your hands made it real.
This is much less complex but I'm a 40 year old guy who recently took up sock darning. I'm not very good at it yet but the repairs are good enough and it's nice not to throw out otherwise good socks.
This is great. I picked up weaving right before the pandemic and it carried me through. I've fallen off the past few years but hope to get back to it. Like any hobby it has the "I could do X if only I had a Y!" feature/curse that can potentially eat your bank account.
I would knit all the time and alternate with coding while working remotely. I found that doing something tactile was very helpful for giving my mind a break while working through problems or waiting for things to build/compile. Now I’m in office and kind of embarrassed to bring a knitting project.
If you live in a climate with at least somewhat cold winters, I'd highly recommend starting with a hat. It's a simple project, but you can already incorporate some patterns, there are millions guides online and if you use real wool, you end up with something really comfy, warm and most importantly practical.
My mom taught me how to crochet when I was a young boy and every now and then I still get out the yarn and pass some time. Even without attempting to make anything specific, it's quite engaging while simultaneously relaxing.
One I do occasionally that I feel like gets a great mid point between the passiveness of knitting and more thoroughly engaged effort of things like woodworking has been making pop up cards.
I seem to have an intuitive competency at it but the combination of figuring out the layout, getting the measurements down and preparing the materials (I'll usually use basic card and style the individual pieces of card to match what I need e.g. making a card of floor-boarding for the wooden floor base) gives a huge amount of repetitive work that can be done while watching something.
The obvious next step is to invest time getting into origami so I can do more complex layouts.
> Because regardless of how good the object itself is, it is an inarguable testament to the fact that I chose to spend dozens of quiet hours making stitch after stitch, all the while thinking about her and how much she means to me. A fraction of my life’s wick that I burned for her and no one else.
That's lovely.
When I moved to Portland in 2004, we went to the bank (Umpqua) to open accounts and found out that they have a knitting group at the bank every week. It was so weird and felt very Portland.
Anyway, loved the post but I do have one question: how do you make coffee?
* French press. Makes great coffee easily (but not super quickly), but the clean-up is a huge hassle and makes the total iteration time not worth it. I gave up on this quickly.
* Aeropress. Makes good coffee and the clean-up isn't too bad. Pretty quick and not too fiddly to do. I did this for a couple of years.
* Mr. Coffee drip coffee. Makes mediocre coffee very easily, pretty quickly, and with fairly easy clean-up. I did it this way for several years, but the coffee gradually got worse and worse. I tried cleaning it out with vinegar a few times but eventually ditched it.
* Pour-over. Very simple, fast clean-up. Can make good coffee but it took me many iterations to dial in the parameters and making it was always fiddly and somewhat mentally taxing. I don't particularly like the fresh and fruity flavor that pour-over leans towards, otherwise I might have stuck with this.
* Keurig. I hate the old DRM-based business model, but now they have reusable K-cups and take regular coffee. This is what I do now. The coffee is only mediocre, but it is very fast. Faster than microwaving a cup of hot water. Like wizardry. The clean-up is very simple and fast.
I think I prefer the coffee from an Aeropress more, but the convenience of the Keurig is hard to beat. Really, I just need a tolerable unit of caffeine first thing in the morning in order to be a functioning human.
> I think I prefer the coffee from an Aeropress more, but the convenience of the Keurig is hard to beat.
I do dirty field work a fair bit. Large drone test flight campaigns in the middle of nowhere for a week at a time. I've got an Aeropress Go with the stainless filter, a hand grinder, and a small electric kettle that I keep in my suitcase. I'll usually grab a bag of locally-sourced beans. Man oh man has that little kit ever brought a lot of joy into the world. When someone seems like they're starting to burn out I'll make them a fresh ground cup of coffee and you can just see their eyes light up when they take that first sip. Such a wonderful piece of plastic made by a frisbee company :D
Well, for just $2500-$4000 more have you considered a mid-range espresso machine & grinder? You might need an electrician to install a 20 amp circuit and it’s totally not portable and takes a long time to heat up, but you know, it’s another option. Or Aeropress. Either way works…
But absolutely don't have room in my kitchen or time in the morning for that. If I was the kind of person who had a leisurely second cup of coffee in the afternoon, I probably would. But I have exactly one caffeine unit as soon as I wake up and I'm done for the day. My brain chemistry doesn't allow me to deviate from that.
I really enjoyed this article. I liked what the person had to say about “care” especially, and the sort of crappy scarf that his mother-in-law still loved.
The idea of sitting and quietly knitting is appealing but whenever I look at knitted goods I think there's no way I would spend hours making some rubbish tea towel/sweater etc
Scarves and hats are useful, though. Knit sweaters can be very comfortable and look good, if done well.
Granted, I say that as a person who lives in a cold-half-the-year climate, but my point is that, just like coders, there's plenty of shitty knitters out there.
The key with any skill is to approach it as a student, ready to improve. If this is something you wanted to try, get ready to make a few rubbish tea towels before you refine your understanding.
That's fair. If I didn't live in the Pacific Northwest where scarves and hats are eminently useful and part of the local style, I'd probably be less interested.
But, also, I've found my tastes changed some as I got into knitting. There's a sort of "see through the Matrix" effect where as I learned more about knitting, I could see things about what other people are wearing that I didn't notice before. I can often tell when someone is wearing a hand-knitted garment and every now and then even notice what yarn or pattern it is.
That makes knitted clothing and accessories more interesting to see and then more interesting for myself to wear: I'm not sending a signal to other knitters about who I am.
But if I still lived on the Gulf Coast where it's hot all the time? Yeah, probably not knitting as much.
Yeah. It's similar with origami, very fun to make, but the end result looks unescapably like "something someone made", not a fully cooked "thing". Some musical styles also feel that way, jazz most notably. Wonder if there are any books or articles analyzing this fully cooked / not fully cooked feeling.
This article misses a point that I really like knitting - that it is a lot like executing software.
There are a small number of knitting techniques - knit, purl, a few increases and decreases etc. Knitting patterns give you sequences to apply these primitives and at the end you have a complex, useful item, potentially in 3D.
You're doing a few simple things repeatedly and you end up with complex behaviour. That's a CPU!
I thought about discussing the connection between knitting and programming. You're exactly right that following a pattern is exactly like being a human virtual machine for a tiny programming language. There is something delightful about that.
At the same time, I don't knit because it reminds me of programming. If I want to scratch the programming itch, I'll program. So I ended up not mentioning it in the article, but there's definitely an overlap.
I haven't been writing much the past couple of years for a number of reasons and I'm trying to get back into that habit. Part of that is lowering the effort required to get a post out, so I decided to not bother with adding photos even though I agree it would be better with them. Maybe I'll go back and add some if I find the time.
Knitting was a hipster thing in London (and elsewhere most likely) for about 6 months back in the dark days of peak hipsterism (2000-2010?). It takes rather a lot of time and effort, so I guess they got bored of it pretty quick.
Back in the mid-90s, I asked my mother to teach me how to knit. Like many women of their time, both she and her mother were skilled at Aran knitting¹ and I was always impressed at the complex patterns that could be created from a length of yarn with two knitting needles – or three for the more complicated stitches. Even though this was the 90s and mindfulness wasn’t something anyone would have heard of in rural Ireland, it served the same function for me. I knitted an Aran scarf and a jumper (sweater in American) but didn’t actually wear either of them so I eventually gave it up as a hobby.
Regardless, I think it’s important for those of us who work using computers to have hobbies where you get away from the screens and use your hands in a tactile way – ideally to make something. Cooking, baking and bread-making are things that almost anyone can do. We all have to eat and it’s great to be able to share what you’ve made with others (I find the best hobbies also have some degree of social interaction).
When I cycled and mountain-biked, I used to do all my own bike maintenance and built my own wheels; I got a lot of satisfaction from building a perfectly balanced wheel. I also did a wood-work course and would have liked to have kept it up but I live in a small house without the space for a work-bench and tools.
More recently, during Covid, I started to learn guitar. Even though it doesn’t come naturally and progress happens at a very slow pace, I get a lot of enjoyment from it. My goal is to get good enough that I feel confident jamming/playing with other friends who are amateur musicians.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_knitting_patterns
Why do you consider playing guitar as something tactile but not programming? Genuine question really. Isn't playing guitar also not producing anything tangible?
I’m both an amateur musician and a professional coder.
Definitely IMO code is a real physical thing that produces tangible results. (I personally think that code operationally is a physical thing, down to basics like logic gates and stuff. We abstract far away from that with high level languages but even making a pixel change colors is inherently, to me, altering physical reality)
But the experience of writing code and making music with your body is such a different one. You will feel and think about the code in a more imaginary and thoughtful way (you could write all your code in a notebook or a text editor and you would just be writing or typing on a keyboard) whereas the music (I play a wind instrument) is a tactile experience in the sense that it will physically be something you hear and you can actually feel the vibrations in your body; I might be wrong but I think that is what hearing is. And there is a real bio-feedback thing going on because you use your body to physically make it happen and you get immediate or very near immediate feedback (auditory, etc. You may even hear or see feedback from other musicians or even listeners). It’s just a viscerally different experience.
There’s nothing fake about seeing metrics on a dashboard or tests going from red to green or money or bits of data flowing around, at all. But it is experientially much different from the feeling of playing an instrument.
That’s my take anyway.
tiniuclx answered this very eloquently in a separate comment¹ so I’ll quote them in full:
> The point about being disconnected with tactile sensation is very poignant. I've experimented with crafts before, but my go-to hobby has always been music - stringed instruments like the guitar. There's something very rewarding about the instant feedback you get when you fret down a string, and how much nuance you can get out of the smallest movements of your hands.
Currently, I’m trying to learn how to improve my dynamic range: being able to play softer and louder and/or accent a particular beat while keep a steady rhythm. I found it hard not to strike the strings more quickly to make them sound louder and I still find it challenging to play evenly with consistent loudness and tone.
I’ve found the more I play, the more attuned I become to the subtleties of the sound being produced, e.g., I’ve learned that pressing down on a string too much results in the pitch being sharper than what it should be. I’ve been experimenting with different thicknesses of plectrums and if not using a plectrum, noticing how the tone is different depending on whether the string is struck with the nail or the fleshy part of the finger. That’s all on an acoustic guitar; so far, I’ve purposely avoided the rabbit-hole of how electric guitar tone can be modified by amplifier and effects.
Programming – for me – doesn’t really have the same nuances and challenges. Even though I don’t produce anything tangible, I guess the main benefit for me is that learning and playing the guitar exercises completely different parts of my brain than those I use as a system administrator or programmer. I’m completely focussed on what I’m doing when I’m learning and practising and there’s a real buzz from nailing something that I first thought was impossible.
As a side-effect, it has also improved my appreciation for different styles of music and my understanding of how music is made (e.g., I can tell the difference between music in 4:4 and 6:8 time signatures) and what other instruments are doing in a piece of music, e.g., drummers often play the snare on beats 2 and 4 in many genres of popular music.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44178391
it's not about producing tangible stuff, it's about working with physical materials and getting tangible feedback from the interactions between your body and the stuff you're working with. working with a computer didn't have that physical feedback loop.
I think with guitar it is easy to enter flow state because it is easy to avoid playing the "wrong" notes. Probably similar to these other hobbies. Perhaps they just happen to have a tactile component, although it is nice to do something a little different from time to time. It seems computer games probably provide a similar form of satisfaction.
How do you built your own wheels? Isn’t that super hard without industrial tools? Sincere question.
The other answers describe the process well but here’s my personal perspective on how I got into it:
When cycling off-road, wheel rims would regularly go out of shape so I purchased spoke spanners to correct the side-to-side wobble by adjusting the spoke tension. This was important as back in the 90s as almost all non-professional mountain bikes used some form of rim brake: cantilever, and later, V-brakes. I would fix the wheels by removing the tyre and tube and mounting the wheel in the forks (front wheel) or wheel stays (rear wheel) so I could see where the wobbles were.
I eventually realised that the rims also needed to be trued radially, i.e., the rim forms a perfect circle and is consistently equidistant from the flanges of the hub. I was doing this often enough that I ended up buying a proper truing stand and I became the go-to guy for fixing wheels for friends.
Given enough abuse from mountain-biking, eventually wheels can no longer be trued by adjusting spoke tension. It seemed a shame – and environmentally wrong – to discard a wheel when it had a good-quality hub so I graduated to buying new spokes and rims to build on to the old hub (which would usually last for years) using the instructions from Sheldon Brown (as linked to in a sibling comment).
The process of building a wheel requires an understanding of the physical forces acting on the spokes and rim but the practice is more like an art. The more you did it, the better you got at avoiding issues like residual twist. It’s a bit like tuning a stringed instrument. I would even pluck the spokes and compare the pitch to get a feel for the amount of tension the individual spoke was under. It was very satisfying to get a consistent tone.
Wheelbuilding in this case uses "building" to convey the measurement and adjustment required to assemble parts of the wheel. Building from parts, not from scratch materials.
https://sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html
Sheldon Brown was my inspiration for many bike-related endeavours and his website is what drew me to Internet and the WWW in the first place. I used to to into Internet cafés and print out pages from his site – including this very guide. This was what I used for the first few wheels I built. Eventually, I got a copy of The Bicycle Wheel, by Jobst Brandt from my local library.
Putting a rim, hub (possibly in parts) and spokes together is (rightfully) called “wheel building” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelbuilding).
I guess that’s what they did.
I like crotcheting (tried it again for the first time since childhood during Covid). My main problem is that, unless you have already mastered it and can do it in your sleep, I have to fully concentrate on it to not fuck things up, which means I can't do something else at the same time, e.g. listen to an audiobook. And because I'm so slow it takes too much time for me to not think that it's a waste of time because I could have done something more meaningful instead. Objectively, I know it is wrong to think so because the whole point of it is to get away from other stuff and let your brain rest for a while, but it just doesn't work for me and creates extra stress, sadly.
> And because I'm so slow it takes too much time for me to not think that it's a waste of time because I could have done something more meaningful instead.
I struggle with this too, especially because knitting is so slow and I'm in the unusual but fortunate position of having my other hobby (writing a couple of books) clearly having had much more impact.
There's a part of my brain when I knit that's like, "You know if you spent this hour working on another book, it would leave a bigger mark in the world."
But I also know that part of that impulse is unhealthy. I wrote those books for a lot reasons, many of which were good. But some of that drive did come from a sense that I'm not enough just being me and I need to be making something of value for as many people as possible to consider myself worthy.
I'm trying to grow out of that mindset and accept myself just as I am. So I consider time spent knitting as sort of exposure therapy for getting used to the idea that I deserve to take time for my selfish joys.
If I may ask, do you suffer from anxiety and depression?
I do. As part of that whole package, I find it exceedingly difficult to focus on more than one thing at a time. As much as I would love to sit and code a bit while watching tv or listening to an audio book, I simply cannot do it. I've tried many times and find it impossible to focus on my project while my brain is more interested in the easy attention economy of the television.
Conversely, my wife is very talented in the fiber arts. She seems to be able to sew, crochet and knit while watching tv without any effort at all, paying attention to both whatever show we have on and what she's doing. Granted, she's been at it for well over a decade so there's some learned adaptation there, but as far back as I can remember she has never had the same problem I do. She also does not suffer from anxiety and depression on the level that I do.
I've been wondering if there's a correlation for awhile now. Interesting that this popped up on HN and pulled me out of lurk mode.
I've never suffered from anxiety nor depression, and yet can't focus on more than one thing at a time. I can't imagine coding while watching tv or listening to an audio book. Nor would I want to!
If I tried doing two things at once, it'd be painful and also I wouldn't be doing either properly. I believe the "multitaskers" aren't that much better, they just learned to context-switch quickly. I'm not the least envious.
"To do two things at once is to do neither"
~Attributed to Confucius, but I first heard it from fortune cookies :^)
I do, but I'm not convinced there is correlation. In front of the computer I can easily multitask and I can just as easily sit for 10 hours straight and code with focus. Outside the digital realm I find it harder to multitask - if I talk to someone on the phone and try to do something at the same time I immediately lose focus on the conversation, I drift away and no longer know what the other person is talking about. I've been wondering if the difference is that there is external input which I can't anticipate - if I do multiple things on the the computer by myself all state exists in my head and it's just a matter of random read access. On the other hand, I also find it hard to cook and go back to the computer for "just one second", every other time I immediately forget that there is food on the stove. I'd say that my attention span has suffered since Covid and I find it generally harder to keep focus, for example when watching TV, but if the focus is there I can still hold it for a very long time, e.g. when programming.
I sort of wonder if it is just a matter of multitasking imposing a cost, maybe one that you can afford in the cases where you are really good at the thing?
Like I’m pretty good at programming, bad at writing, and ok at following the plot of a TV show (that’s hardly a skill I’m proud of, haha). But, I can code fine with a TV on in the background (I will be decent at programming and forget the plot of the TV show/miss plot beats). Or I can slow my writing even further, to an absolute crawl, while simultaneously missing TV plot points. Multitasking!
I also don't multitask well, but I think it's a little more complex than just not doing more than one thing at a time. Different tasks seem to occupy different brain regions, and it's really that I can't allocate one region to multiple things.
I can listen to music while I program, but it can't be anything with lyrics because programming requires too much of my language center.
Knitting doesn't touch my language center, so I can listen to music with lyrics or an audiobook. But it's too visual for me to watch anything else while I do it.
> As much as I would love to sit and code a bit while watching tv or listening to an audio book, I simply cannot do it
> She seems to be able to sew, crochet and knit while watching tv without any effort at all, paying attention to both whatever show we have on and what she's doing
Those combinations don't seem at all comparable.
Has nothing to do with anxiety or depression
Multitasking is just a "personality trait".. and predominantly women are more able to multitask than men. You should simply ask around and see the correlations. Some of the happiest people I know can't multitask at all
I don't want this to sound derogatory but my experience is that simpler minds are generally happier in life, and I'd guess that this often (not always) comes with an inability to multitask, so I believe you are right. I had a friend in school (great dude, very grounded and happy person) who couldn't eat ice cream and walk at the same time (I swear I'm not making this up).
Consider, though, one of the unique aspects of crochet or knitting -- you can fuck things up and it's not a big deal. Unlike woodworking or sewing, where once something is cut it cannot be uncut, with these crafts if you zone out while watching Wheel of Fortune and do a few rows wrong, you can always just ... undo it and try again. Nothing is lost but your time, and if you are doing it to relax while watching TV, you haven't really lost anything at all.
This was probably my issue as well. I grew up seeing my grandma crochet. She’d do it while watching TV (though I’m not sure if she was actually watching or just in proximity to others watching), and she was quick. I have a couple afghans she made. She probably made a couple dozen.
The learning curve was higher than I expected, especially without someone to be there showing me stuff. I just tried watching some YouTube videos. I got frustrated and quit rather quickly.
I’ve heard knitting is easier, but I like the idea of crochet better.
Both knitting and crochet are very difficult and frustrating at first. Harder, I think, than your first time picking up a guitar.
The initial hump is steep but fairly small. It took me about four or five tries before I could make stitches. Once I got over that initial challenge, it got a lot smoother. Since then, there have been continuous incremental challenges, but all fairly small.
I haven't gotten over the hump with crochet. I'm left-handed but knit right-handed because mirroring everything is very hard. The entire knitting world presumes right-handed knitting. However, I knit Continental style which uses both hands and engages the left hand a lot, so I don't find that it feels very "wrong".
However, with crochet, I don't think I could ever hold the hook with my right hand. But also mirroring everything while trying to learn is not easy.
My mom also knits while watching TV, and she is super fast. I think one secret ingredient is that she doesn't care about making mistakes. Tinier mistakes she just ignores (even if they are visible in the end [I don't like that, so that's something I try to avoid, which adds pressure and slows me down]) and she doesn't mind backtracking and re-doing several rows if she really fucks up.
My grandma seemingly didn’t ignore or tolerate mistakes. That’s why she ended up stopping. People tried to get her to crochet or knit toward the end of her life and if she made a mistake, she’d start ripping it all apart. When the mistakes became too frequent, that was it. Maybe that’s where I get it from, lol.
Where did you hear knitting is easier? I was under the impression that crocheting is much easier.
I’m not sure where exactly, just something I heard a few times and it stuck.
I just looked around and found mixed opinions. Though, I found this one which may sum up the debate.
> Crochet is harder to go from 0 to 1 but knitting is harder to go from 1 to 10.
> I'm so slow it takes too much time for me to not think that it's a waste of time because I could have done something more meaningful instead.
That's the funny thing about the idea of meaningful things. It is solely determined by what you think is meaningful. Personally, just sitting and making something is an extremely meaningful activity to me.
Could you try crocheting something for a purpose? Say, make small stuffed toys to donate to a local charity?
That way, the task becomes "meaningful" and thus worthy of the additional time and focus that it demands, without becoming a pressing obligation on you to cause additional stress...
I did have a purpose and it didn't help much in this regard, it only helped with keeping up the friendly pressure to actually finish them. But generally, your advice is good nonetheless.
Done something meaningful instead?
Why don't you just do it for fun or while relaxing? I don't quite understand why it wouldn't be meaningful.
I absolutely did it for fun and to learn something new, it just didn't feel like as much fun as I had anticipated to me personally. I want it to be fun and relaxing, there is some fun in it but it's not relaxing.
Until you're more experienced, listen to music or something else where it's okay if you take your focus off of it to focus on counting your stitches. Yes, it won't be "productive," but your crocheting is already productive.
While I agree with you, I don't think that "mastering" crocheting takes very long at all. Maybe two weeks of an hour a day - MUCH less than knitting.
The early stages of any craft can feel more like mental gymnastics than relaxation
Absolutely! The difference is that with other things the learning curve can be part of the fun while you are in the process of figuring things out. With crotcheting, it only really takes a couple of minutes to get going, but doing it fast and consistently takes time, but you aren't really learning anything new other than becoming faster, so the emotional return isn't as big compared to, let's say, learning a new language or playing an instrument. It's just very mechanical by nature; which is a good thing, but for me personally, it takes away a bit of the joy.
It's more about flow than discovery after a point
Hardest possible concur with everything OP said.
Knitting and other fiber arts are the grandmother of computer programming, and I'd go so far as to say your CS education is incomplete without at least passing knowledge of fabric weaving and especially weaving machine history.
Ignorance is not your fault, unfortunately they can't teach you everything in college, and people tend to downplay the importance and history of "women's work", much to all our detriment.
https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...
>I'd go so far as to say your CS education is incomplete without at least passing knowledge of fabric weaving
Why?
The first programmable computer, using punchcards, was a loom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
I'm going to go ahead and say that you can have a complete CS education without studying fabric looms.
You won't have a full and comprehensive education as an author without spending a few months copying texts by hand in a scriptorium like monks did back in the 500s.
Hard agree.
I'm not even that much of a fiber artist - I can crochet, and I can weave shepherd's slings out of plant fiber/paracord/other strings. But I believe the thinking patterns help me, especially in large-but-not-complex systems thinking.
The point about being disconnected with tactile sensation is very poignant. I've experimented with crafts before, but my go-to hobby has always been music - stringed instruments like the guitar. There's something very rewarding about the instant feedback you get when you fret down a string, and how much nuance you can get out of the smallest movements of your hands.
Likewise with physical instruments vs digital; it's very tempting for someone working in tech to stay there and use a DAW and the like, but a physical instrument has so much more depth. I've got a bodhrán which on the surface is one of the simplest instruments, but the variety of sounds you can get out of it is really stimulating (depending on where you hit it, how, how hard, how fast, how you hold it, where / whether you press your hand, etc). And it's living, depending on temperature, humidity, how long you've handled it, etc the sound changes.
Indeed, the subtlety of musical instrument is so special.
ps: And then there's playing with other people, the lock-in is one of the few near esoteric experience I experienced, but I digressed.
Author here. You can thank nosecreek for prompting me to write this up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44137085
:)
Thanks. This has been on my todo list for a while. I've ordered some supplies and will attempt a dishcloth (https://nimble-needles.com/patterns/easy-dishcloth-knitting-...) and work my way up from there.
A dishcloth is a great place to start, and I've learned ~90% of my knitting from Norman. He's great.
I will caution you that cotton yarn is definitely not the easiest yarn to start with. It has very little stretch which makes it hard to keep good tension and form stitches. Not impossible, just sort of difficult.
It's very much like learning to play guitar starting with an acoustic compared to an electric. Everything is a little stiffer and requires a little more finger strength.
So if you feel like it's more difficult than you expected, it may partially be because of the yarn.
I find woodworking fun for basically all the same reasons. Plus there's still the math of adding up things to predict cut layouts, and you end up with a new shelf or box or table. I'm not sure I would use anything I knitted.
I also found woodworking recently as a software engineer and it's incredibly rewarding. Both the tactile feeling of the activity, the idea of building something that _exists_ in physical form and exists in your or a loved one's home, and the pride that you feel about a finished product and having overcome challenges and learned something.
Unlike knitting, I love its usefulness. There are so only many use cases for knitwear, but furniture, man, everyone needs furniture. And being in a home that I built by my two hands is infinite joy.
The three aspects where it falls short to knitting: - It can't be done mindlessly. It would be unsafe and you'd make costly mistakes that you can't undo by pulling on the yarn. - It's more expensive. The materials are a bit more pricy (compared to hours spent on working them), but the machines certainly are. - You are confined to space and time. Whether it's your garage or wood shop where you have machines and can make noise and dust, or it's your living room where you exclusively use hand tools – you surely can't do it in your car while waiting for the kids, or at the university, or on the public transport. Whittling small objects is the one exception.
But yes, woodworking is awesome.
Agree on all accounts. I very much enjoy the limited woodworking I've done, but the logistics are much trickier than knitting.
I do find whittling to be an interesting middle point. Like knitting, you don't need a dedicated workshop. It doesn't take a lot of set up and tear down for a given session. You can fit the project and tools in a small space.
Of course, you're shedding wood chips the whole time, so you can't really whittle on the couch. And you sure as hell can't do it on an airplane. But you can do it when, say, camping with friends, or sitting on the back porch when it's nice out.
I find woodworking extremely alluring. I'd love to do woodworking, but that requires space for an environment which I don't have. I like to think that in a parallel universe I build guitars and restore old wooden furniture.
I'm trying out an alternative currently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodcut.
It is well suited for me because
- I like wood
- I like knives
- I'm into typography
- it doesn't require that much work space
I have only just started out but it feels nice indeed! A hindrance is that I am not very artistically gifted, but as long as I make it mostly for myself, I don't mind too much.
Depending on where you live, there might be workshops nearby where you can sign up to use shared spaces (along with shared tools).
They're also the kind of places where they have lessons where you can sign up, so if you're interested in both classes and a space to work, they're a great fit.
I have some advice!
I have this problem. I did three things. First, I joined a makerspace that had a woodshop. This seems like it should cure all your problems but it won't. There's limited storage, unpredictable tool availability, the motivational issues of driving to a new place to work, etc.
Second, I joined another makerspace out of town! Redundancy and the availability of friends in the area to work with helps. Plus, supporting makerspaces feels good and the cost is not much compared to other hobbies.
Finally, there are some very basic, not large tools that can get you through 90% of projects, including very nice looking bookshelves, desks, cabinets, etc:
* Circle saw + track guide for rip cuts
* Saw horses for adhoc tables
* Power drill (+ you'll want one for all kinds of useful things anyway)
* Nice drill bit set
* Pocket hole jig (saves you time and assembly space)
* Drill block (takes the place of a drill press in a pinch)
* Painting blankets to put stain / glue-ups on
All of the above can fit in a small area of a closet, available when motivation strikes. Far and away the biggest storage headache is wood, which you'll have to get creative about, but for restoration or even modification, you won't need much. And for smaller projects you'll probably use most of what you buy on the same day if you plan it out.
Upgrades (which a makerspace would provide anyway):
* If you have a little space (like a desktop), you can get a chop/miter saw which makes repeated precise cuts much easier
* A router + bit set (esp keyhole bit! This makes hanging this much easier)
* Shopvac for dust (+ shopvacs are super useful anyway)
That's really it. You can do almost all the projects you'd want with just those, from the living room, patio, backyard, driveway, garage, or a parking spot out front.
What I get from the makerspace is access to drill presses, router tables, and table saws. Table saws are a game changer and are the best way to level up your precision and cut accuracy, but require so much space that I could never justify it at home (and small portable table saws are not the same).
I'm definitely still learning, but the main lessons are that good wood ($), precise cuts, adding layers from trim / recessed boards, hiding screws, and tons of sanding will make anything look really, really nice.
EDIT: One last thing: You can easily practice woodworking fundamentals without space by making joints, practicing stain matching (try to get veneer plywood to match a stained board), or practicing right-angle, precise cuts.
Some light wood types have golden shades if looked at closely. It's quite beautiful. And when sanded very fine, it's silky smooth.
Programmers (and other full time computer users) should be careful with this and similar yarn-based hobbies. I gave myself an apparently permanent RSI issue in my shoulder from knitting with bad technique (had too much tension in my yarn I think). I learned from you tube videos, a human probably could have told me I was doing it wrong but I didn't ask anyone.
The injury does affect my computer use, when it gets real bad I have to switch my mouse pad to the other side of my desk. I haven't knitted in years and its still there.
I started making cosplay accessories and custom plushies for furries. There’s almost an unlimited range of stuff to make. 3D printed glasses, oversized beanies, custom bags, etc. Feels very satisfying to make a physical thing and hand it over to the buyer.
There's something uniquely satisfying about making something weirdly specific that only exists because you made it
100%. There’s quite a few things I’ve got now which would be thousands of dollars to have someone else make for me but cost very little to make myself. Just requiring a few weekends of work. Stuff that feels quite luxury to own.
And bonus: no one else has the exact same version
This sounds interesting! Are you able to share any specifics, or would that be too personal?
I wanted a custom kigurumi like these[1] but didn’t want to fork over thousands of dollars for one. Ended up buying a sewing machine and fleece, learning to sew while making it. Was a bit of a brutal first project but after about 2 months off and on work in my free time I was able to complete it. Was then able to make 5 more of them for friends. The later ones were significantly easier.
Also made myself a custom plushie which would have cost around $1000AUD had I commissioned someone to make it.
After doing it all, I can say, yeah the prices actually are fair if you need to actually make a living off it, but also you can just do it yourself with a $300 sewing machine and some determination.
[1] https://www.curlworks.net/kigurumi
The thing knitting taught me is that you can have something beautiful and useful even tho literally every part of the piece is a single point of failure.
No redundancy, no backstop. If any of the stitches gets cut, the entire piece can unravel completely.
We're so used to redundancy, but sometimes you just need to get things done, and it's ok if it's all a deck of cards.
It depends on your medium. A good wool has little hooks along the shaft of its staple so once knit the yarn will cling. Cutting a single stitch will not cause a loss of coherency. In fact, a classic knitting technique for crafting something like a cardigan made with wool involves knitting in the round (making a spiral tube, essentially) and then slicing it open for the button band and sleeves. It's called "steeking".
Knitting is actually very nicely repairable. Home made sweaters were super popular here in the past, pretty much the only affordable way to get them. They survived for many many years, because you can always patch them, either visibly or invisibly. Even knitted socks, which get a lot of abuse, were patched and repatched.
When I visited Sweden I stumbled across nålebinding. It predates knitting and crochet, and from what I read, it didn’t suffer from this issue of unraveling. Though I think that is a double edged sword, as it also means it’s hard to go back and fix a mistake if one is made.
> it's ok if it's all a deck of cards
The idiom you're looking for may be "house of cards": https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/house+of+cards
after that comment i hope he gets his deck in order
At least the yarn has more han one strand. It's redundant at some level :)
While I'm very open-minded to knitting, also consider picking up a musical instrument. Guitar, ukulele, keyboard. There are apps that'll teach you, and it's immensely gratifying -- if like me you obsess over certain songs -- to then be able to work towards playing those.
Knitting has the advantage that you can do it anywhere and at any time without 'bothering' anybody else. Sitting on the bus, watching TV, having a conversation. Most people I know who knit use it almost as a 'fidget toy' that they're subconsciously playing with while simultaneously doing something else. Only looking down every few minutes or so to make sure they're on the right track or to make some change
Thought the same thing. Sounds like a fidget toy, but with the benefit that it can produce something useful.
Knitting is definitely the O.G. fidget toy for neurodiverse women
I recently picked up an analog drum machine - Arturia Drumbrute Impact. I play guitar a little already and picked this up to play some industrial music. It's turned out to be a such a fun device on it's own I'm considering picking up a bass machine, sequencer, and synth.
I can totally zone out creating and tweaking beats on the Drumbrute Impact. I also find it oddly comforting to have on when I'm working.
No better time in history to learn guitar. Amazing online resources, the world is flooded with cheap guitars as well if you’re happy with 2nd hand. There is a technical side to it (tuning, restringing) and plenty of toys, pedals and computer integration to any nerd hearts content. Even if you get stuck at 3 chords it’s amazing the number of pop songs you can suddenly play. Plus if you get past there you still have classical, jazz or whatever super hard path you want to travel to explore.
I sometimes wonder if I'm broken in some way. I bought my first guitar in 1996 (a Mexican Fender Stratocaster) and my last guitar in 2018 (a Gibson SG). I've taken lessons with three different teachers. I've worked through a Hal Leonard book series. I've subscribed to Guitar Tricks for a while then switched to Justin Guitar. I have YouTube playlists a mile long where I try to learn songs. I keep a guitar in my office to help me stop thinking about a problem when I get stuck.
After all this, I don't know any (real) songs from start to finish. The closest I come is playing Nirvana's About a Girl.
I might have some kind of rhythm disability. If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
It's so frustrating, especially when I see how fast my kids learned to play an instrument. They make it look so easy.
If you're not looking for random person's advice feel free to ignore :-)
> If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
Are you able to play any strumming patterns (however simple) with just the metronome? Ideally you'd practice this enough that you are able to do it consistently with almost zero thinking, and then check if it has improved your ability to play along with the record.
Another thing that has helped me when learning new strumming patterns (and just rhythm in general) was practicing just the strumming, muting the strings with my left hand instead of playing chords. First with the metronome, then along the record (all without any chords, just muted strings). Give that a try if you feel like it.
You are describing some of the exercises from the Justin Guitar Strumming SOS course. I bought that course and worked my way through it and enjoyed doing it, but it didn't have a big impact.
To answer your metronome question - I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync. I start to focus on how my arm feels strumming and I can feel the pick vibrating in my fingers and feel the air I'm moving with my arm and I notice the vibration in the guitar body and as my attention moves around, I lose track of the click.
> You are describing some of the exercises from the Justin Guitar Strumming SOS course.
Not surprised that these are in there!
> I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync
Huh, I never actually did that for more than a few minutes at the time (when just using the metronome), I can imagine it gets boring and attention wanders. I did try to do it frequently (couple of times a day, spread throughout the day), but only for two minutes or so.
Anyway, I thought you might have tried all of that already, considering you took lessons and bought courses, but still wanted to throw it out there. Good luck!
Start in a very slow fashion, like you're teaching kindergardeners songs, and key here is to use both feet to tap, every other beat on each foot, and do it slow as molases, count it 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 while alternating the feet. You can also move the body to that slow rhythm. After some time of doing this you'll realize you don't need to go that slow. Good luck!
Agreed. I picked up mine about a year ago after not playing for years. The resources are incredible. Super fun time to be playing.
Do you have any recommendations for online resources? A few years ago my wife and I started with Justin guitar, but then we switched to piano to tempt our daughter. Is that a good choice, or are there better options?
I (op) restarted guitar recently, and Justin Guitar definitely seemed to be the internet's recommendation. I found it to be OK! The content is good but the app was a bit janky. I switched to online Zoom classes. Two people I know have used Simply Piano (and there's a guitar version of the same app) and swear by it, so probably also worth a look.
Guitar definitely. An acoustic guitar is ideal since you just pick it up and start playing any time (even plugging something in can be a barrier sometimes). My rule is I always play for 10 minutes minimum every day, even when I'm not feeling it.
The great thing about guitars is that you can buy really well made ones, brand new, for only $100-300. That and a $10 tuner and watching free online tutorials is all you need.
I agree, musical instruments also have the benefit of a much higher skill ceiling. That can also be a downside though, since it can make it frustrating to learn
> a much higher skill ceiling.
As someone who both knits and plays a couple of instruments, I suspect you are underestimating the skill ceiling of knitting.
Take a look at something like this: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-sha...
You're talking years of work to complete it. You may be thinking, "well, sure, but it's just doing the same relatively easy thing over and over for a really long time." But that's not quite it. You're making a single physical object where it's easy to make mistakes and also easy to not realize you've made a mistake. Knitting builds on the previously knitted stitches. If you miscount something early on or forget a stitch, you can end up diverging irrevocably from the pattern. A moment's inattention early on can mean you have to undo literally months of work.
A large complex project like that shawl is like a giant oil painting. It's not just the scale and time, it's the ability to consistently avoid making mistakes which requires incredible patience and discipline.
And that's just knitting the work. Now consider the mastery required to design a project like this.
My mum knits and while yes the skill ceiling is still high no I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels
Knitting has a lower skill ceiling doesn’t mean knitting or design is easy. I know that well, my mum ran a knitting shop and still works on patterns part time. She still knits a lot of stuff for us and it takes a lot of skill and work
But it’s not Glenn Gould on piano, is it? It’s not playing Bach fugues
> I don’t think it goes as high as art and music which is literally up to like virtuoso, unattainable levels
There is a very old, very relevant observation that when men do something we call it "art" and when women do it we call it "craft".
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to compare a performative art like playing an instrument to a constructive art like knitting because the skillsets are so different. It's like trying to decide if ice cream is better than stand up comedy.
But I do think you can reasonably compare constructive arts like painting and knitting. For those, there are two aspects: coming up with the design for what you want to make, and implementing that design. Historically, the latter was given more weight than the former. The most famous painters of the Renaissance mostly just painted pictures of normal people, but it was the execution of those paintings that made them famous. Today, thanks to the invention of reproductive technology like cameras, we mostly prize originally of thought over execution. Andy Warhol is not a particularly skilled painter. (One way to think of the modern conception of "high art" versus "low art"—think Damien Hirst versus Thomas Kinkade—is exactly the distinction between concept and execution.)
Given all that, I would the best knitting designers on the same level as the best furniture designers or portrait painters. Most knitting is deliberately not conceptual, so it's hard to compare it to explicitly conceptual art. But if you think anything can reasonably be called art when it is mostly focused on quality and difficulty of execution, then knitting is an art with a ceiling as high as any other.
And, to be clear, there are fine artists whose medium is textiles as well. For example: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-textile-art...
How you feel about those probably reflects mostly how you feel about much of modern art. But I don't see any reason it should be considered a lower rung of art than other sculpture media just because it uses fibers and not metal or glass.
I came back to guitar after being self-taught and not very good, and was pleasantly surprised that the Trinity Guitar Initial Grade (eg the first book you'd start a kid on) had some awesome music that you could make the melodies of very quickly. Like, 2-3 hours of practice and you can slowly pick out the melody from Runaway Train, Orange Crush, and Where did you sleep last night.
I guess my point is you can get some good sounds out of the guitar very quickly, which can be very intrinsically motivating.
I agree but I find with these things there is a plateau that then requires real work to push through
Yep! Any type of desk/knowledge work job tends to be more cerebral and less... Sensory. If you have this type of job, any sort of hobby that unlocks the senses can be very rewarding and add balance to your life. For me it's lifting weights and singing.
When our work is looking at screens, our games are looking at screens, our entertainment is looking at screens, etc., getting away from that and doing something that doesn't involve screens is refreshing.
In the same vein, I've been enjoying making plushies recently, when my body allows me to. You end up with something you made yourself, even if it sometimes looks a bit skrunkly, and they're great gifts (for my friend group anyway, which mostly consists of trans girls that need more plushies in their lives)
I can't believe I never thought of trying to crochet a blahaj until just now
That's a great idea, I took apart a sacrifical blahaj and created patterns from all the panels so I could make my own. They came out a little skrunkly though, I used fabric that was a lot stretchier than I expected
My girlfriend has been getting into crocheting recently, and I've been learning a lot about it and craft stuff in general.
I've always been a computer guy... I'm bad with my hands. Could never do origami. Part of the reason I dropped out of Boy Scouts was I didn't want to learn how to make knots. I was terrible in art class, I can't draw and I honestly have trouble just visualizing things (I was not great in geometry either). It's difficult for me to be creative like that. So that's my background, lol.
I could play music (and that's a hobby I still want to pursue), but lately I've been wondering if there was a craft that was better for people like me. Like, I got these cute handmade plushies as a gift recently, and I want to do something like that.
(honestly it seems like crocheting and knitting might not be bad options, but just wondering what else is out there!)
e; one thing I've considered is making something with electronics (I know enough about circuits to be dangerous), but the thing you run into quickly is you don't really want to just give somebody a circuit board, lol. At some point, it seems like all the interesting projects move towards 3D printing which I find intimidating.
I've found painting mini's (like Warhammer) to be really fun. You get the structure of the model to work from, but you get a creative outlet with the painting. There is a ton of painting technique to work on and learn, and you get a game to play for extra motivation. Plus at the end of the day you have a nice display piece to look at for the shelf.
building complicated lego set could be an interesting start.
Related:
Why is everybody knitting chickens?
172 points, 122 comments (5 days ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44108139
My mother, a knitter for many decades, says to me about this -
>They are comfort chickens, good for cuddles for those going thru breast cancer treatment. A nice shape to hold, I understand. You might have to learn to knit..
Yup! That's the article that gave me the nudge to finally write this post.
Shameful plug, made an app to learn knitting called Knitting Genius https://apps.apple.com/us/app/knitting-genius-knit-easy/id13...
Indeed knitting is not so much different from programming and you have the whole touch aspect that is very pleasing.
I'm more of a cross-stitch person myself, but the feelings really resonated, especially that craving for tactile, analog creation after spending all day in the digital ether. There's something incredibly grounding about watching a piece come together, stitch by stitch, knowing your hands made it real.
Read to the end and did a double-take: that's the game programming patterns guy!
He has a voice I enjoy and I'm glad I got the chance to read this.
This is much less complex but I'm a 40 year old guy who recently took up sock darning. I'm not very good at it yet but the repairs are good enough and it's nice not to throw out otherwise good socks.
This is great. I picked up weaving right before the pandemic and it carried me through. I've fallen off the past few years but hope to get back to it. Like any hobby it has the "I could do X if only I had a Y!" feature/curse that can potentially eat your bank account.
I feel like HN really wants me to knit ;-) I was already considering taking knitting lessons because of this comment thread[0] from a week ago.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44128576
p.s. Oh, I just realized that "munificent", who posted the top-level comment in that thread, is also the author of this article.
I would knit all the time and alternate with coding while working remotely. I found that doing something tactile was very helpful for giving my mind a break while working through problems or waiting for things to build/compile. Now I’m in office and kind of embarrassed to bring a knitting project.
I cook to fill the same gap, having to do something with your hands definitely helps me.
If you live in a climate with at least somewhat cold winters, I'd highly recommend starting with a hat. It's a simple project, but you can already incorporate some patterns, there are millions guides online and if you use real wool, you end up with something really comfy, warm and most importantly practical.
My mom taught me how to crochet when I was a young boy and every now and then I still get out the yarn and pass some time. Even without attempting to make anything specific, it's quite engaging while simultaneously relaxing.
Fiber arts are great! Just finished crocheting an amigurumi Ferris (from rust), immensely satisfying.
One I do occasionally that I feel like gets a great mid point between the passiveness of knitting and more thoroughly engaged effort of things like woodworking has been making pop up cards.
I seem to have an intuitive competency at it but the combination of figuring out the layout, getting the measurements down and preparing the materials (I'll usually use basic card and style the individual pieces of card to match what I need e.g. making a card of floor-boarding for the wooden floor base) gives a huge amount of repetitive work that can be done while watching something.
The obvious next step is to invest time getting into origami so I can do more complex layouts.
> Because regardless of how good the object itself is, it is an inarguable testament to the fact that I chose to spend dozens of quiet hours making stitch after stitch, all the while thinking about her and how much she means to me. A fraction of my life’s wick that I burned for her and no one else.
That's lovely.
When I moved to Portland in 2004, we went to the bank (Umpqua) to open accounts and found out that they have a knitting group at the bank every week. It was so weird and felt very Portland.
Anyway, loved the post but I do have one question: how do you make coffee?
Haha, good question. I have tried:
* French press. Makes great coffee easily (but not super quickly), but the clean-up is a huge hassle and makes the total iteration time not worth it. I gave up on this quickly.
* Aeropress. Makes good coffee and the clean-up isn't too bad. Pretty quick and not too fiddly to do. I did this for a couple of years.
* Mr. Coffee drip coffee. Makes mediocre coffee very easily, pretty quickly, and with fairly easy clean-up. I did it this way for several years, but the coffee gradually got worse and worse. I tried cleaning it out with vinegar a few times but eventually ditched it.
* Pour-over. Very simple, fast clean-up. Can make good coffee but it took me many iterations to dial in the parameters and making it was always fiddly and somewhat mentally taxing. I don't particularly like the fresh and fruity flavor that pour-over leans towards, otherwise I might have stuck with this.
* Keurig. I hate the old DRM-based business model, but now they have reusable K-cups and take regular coffee. This is what I do now. The coffee is only mediocre, but it is very fast. Faster than microwaving a cup of hot water. Like wizardry. The clean-up is very simple and fast.
I think I prefer the coffee from an Aeropress more, but the convenience of the Keurig is hard to beat. Really, I just need a tolerable unit of caffeine first thing in the morning in order to be a functioning human.
> I think I prefer the coffee from an Aeropress more, but the convenience of the Keurig is hard to beat.
I do dirty field work a fair bit. Large drone test flight campaigns in the middle of nowhere for a week at a time. I've got an Aeropress Go with the stainless filter, a hand grinder, and a small electric kettle that I keep in my suitcase. I'll usually grab a bag of locally-sourced beans. Man oh man has that little kit ever brought a lot of joy into the world. When someone seems like they're starting to burn out I'll make them a fresh ground cup of coffee and you can just see their eyes light up when they take that first sip. Such a wonderful piece of plastic made by a frisbee company :D
Ugh, you're tempting me to switch back to an Aeropress.
Well, for just $2500-$4000 more have you considered a mid-range espresso machine & grinder? You might need an electrician to install a 20 amp circuit and it’s totally not portable and takes a long time to heat up, but you know, it’s another option. Or Aeropress. Either way works…
I mean... I live in Seattle, so yes.
But absolutely don't have room in my kitchen or time in the morning for that. If I was the kind of person who had a leisurely second cup of coffee in the afternoon, I probably would. But I have exactly one caffeine unit as soon as I wake up and I'm done for the day. My brain chemistry doesn't allow me to deviate from that.
I really enjoyed this article. I liked what the person had to say about “care” especially, and the sort of crappy scarf that his mother-in-law still loved.
The idea of sitting and quietly knitting is appealing but whenever I look at knitted goods I think there's no way I would spend hours making some rubbish tea towel/sweater etc
Scarves and hats are useful, though. Knit sweaters can be very comfortable and look good, if done well.
Granted, I say that as a person who lives in a cold-half-the-year climate, but my point is that, just like coders, there's plenty of shitty knitters out there.
The key with any skill is to approach it as a student, ready to improve. If this is something you wanted to try, get ready to make a few rubbish tea towels before you refine your understanding.
That's fair. If I didn't live in the Pacific Northwest where scarves and hats are eminently useful and part of the local style, I'd probably be less interested.
But, also, I've found my tastes changed some as I got into knitting. There's a sort of "see through the Matrix" effect where as I learned more about knitting, I could see things about what other people are wearing that I didn't notice before. I can often tell when someone is wearing a hand-knitted garment and every now and then even notice what yarn or pattern it is.
That makes knitted clothing and accessories more interesting to see and then more interesting for myself to wear: I'm not sending a signal to other knitters about who I am.
But if I still lived on the Gulf Coast where it's hot all the time? Yeah, probably not knitting as much.
Yeah. It's similar with origami, very fun to make, but the end result looks unescapably like "something someone made", not a fully cooked "thing". Some musical styles also feel that way, jazz most notably. Wonder if there are any books or articles analyzing this fully cooked / not fully cooked feeling.
For myself, I mostly knit a lot of socks. Padding around the house in winter, in woollen socks that I have made myself is very satisfying.
This article misses a point that I really like knitting - that it is a lot like executing software.
There are a small number of knitting techniques - knit, purl, a few increases and decreases etc. Knitting patterns give you sequences to apply these primitives and at the end you have a complex, useful item, potentially in 3D.
You're doing a few simple things repeatedly and you end up with complex behaviour. That's a CPU!
I thought about discussing the connection between knitting and programming. You're exactly right that following a pattern is exactly like being a human virtual machine for a tiny programming language. There is something delightful about that.
At the same time, I don't knit because it reminds me of programming. If I want to scratch the programming itch, I'll program. So I ended up not mentioning it in the article, but there's definitely an overlap.
That post would really have benefitted from some photos. It is quite the challenge to talk about knitting, and patterns, and materials, so abstractly.
I meant to do that, but didn't get around to it.
I haven't been writing much the past couple of years for a number of reasons and I'm trying to get back into that habit. Part of that is lowering the effort required to get a post out, so I decided to not bother with adding photos even though I agree it would be better with them. Maybe I'll go back and add some if I find the time.
>I got into knitting a few years after the pandemic.
So very recently?
As an engineer you might also create your very own punch-card programmable Jacquard loom.
It kind of defeats the meditation thing though :-)
Knitting was a hipster thing in London (and elsewhere most likely) for about 6 months back in the dark days of peak hipsterism (2000-2010?). It takes rather a lot of time and effort, so I guess they got bored of it pretty quick.
Consider climbing!
Just no, programmers need something categorically different. Trekking, bicycle riding, gardening, are all nice hobbies.
But I don't take my advice as well, my hobbies are reading(kindle), games etc. So both work and hobbies are in front of computer. Don't recommend it.
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