May 11, 2018
How do we get the entire world knitting? It's a mission of mine
and today we discuss the five pillars of knitter assimilation:
marketing, self-belief, tools and materials, medium and motivation
and access to decent resources.
Of course, this are the Shinybees Pentagon of Knitting Assimilation
and I think these are the things we need to be considering if we do
want knitters to take over the world. More specifically, if we want
the entire world to knit. Think how awesome that would be.
Pillar one is marketing. No, it's not just for sleazy snake oil
salesmen and here's why: knitting has an image problem. Every man
and his dog this that knitting is for Nanas and pregnant ladies and
the media and film do nothing to change that view. Everything
people see is stereotyped like this and that is a big
issue.
Knitting needs to become more relevant and desirable if we want
everyone to do it.
Pillar two - self belief. Sit in public and knit and you will get
an array of comments like 'oh, I could never do that' and 'I tried
to learn when I was a kid and I was terrible at it' and 'It looks
so hard!'. Curiosity os the first step to learning, but we also
need to deal with the issue of self belief in order to get people
to actually try and learn the skill, instead of telling themselves
repeatedly that it is too hard.
Pillar three - materials and tools. Very often, a first foray into
knitting is a cheap kit with low end acrylic (not all acrylic is
created equal) and bendy plastic needles. The instructions are
almost always total pants and the whole thing is set up to
encourage failure.
Yes, this may be cheap failure but failure is not what is needed
for assimilation (see pillar two). We need to be setting newbies up
with better tools and nicer yarn, to encourage continuing, and to
make the end product worth it.
Pillar four is medium and motivation aka Death to the Dr Who Scarf.
How many times have you seen others to have been yourself taught to
knit using the Whovian method? Let's just all knit a massive boring
scarf that will take forever and hope they stick at it!
Yes scarves are easy and allow for (a lot) of repetition but they
are so large they are insurmountable. We need to be bringing the
Shinybees Trifecta of project awesome into this: a quick win +
right level of complexity + desire for finished item = knitting
dreams.
Pillar five is access to decent resources. Most of the freebie
videos on YouTube are crap. They are too fast, badly lit, too far
away to see what is going on or lately, have an alarming array of
props in there. Learning is not about perfectly styled shots; it's
about getting the information across in an accessible a way as you
can. We need decent resources to point newbies towards.
You can find full links and show notes at www.shinybees.com/111