Why knitting groups are so important

World Wide Knit in Public Day is a great way of getting
knitters together. Photo from commons.wikimedia.org.

Every knitter should have a knitting group. They’re an essential part of knitting life, offering support, friendship and even a link back to knitters of old.

In fact, knitting groups have played quite a big role in my life in the last few years. About three and a half years ago I broke up with my then boyfriend and moved out of the flat we’d been living in. I moved into a a new place in Harringay. I didn’t know anyone in the area and I was living alone. There were times when I got incredibly lonely. Until I had the great idea of finding a knitting group. Using Ravelry I managed to track down a group in Stroud Green, a short tube ride away.

We met once a week on a Thursday night in a pub, first at The Noble and later The Stapleton. The group started off rather sedately, as you might imagine a knitting group to be. We knitted, we chatted, we drank a couple of glasses of wine. It escalated, and we were soon ending up a local late-night bar and struggling into work the next day with serious hangovers. We also started seeing each other at weekends. The ‘core’ members of that group are now some of my closest friends and they helped me get through some incredibly tough times.

These days I spend as much time in Walthamstow as I do Harringay so I wanted to find another group. Back to Ravelry I went. There was a Walthmstow Knitters group, but no meet up. A couple of forum posts later and a meet was organised. The group has met twice now, the people are all lovely and we’ve got lots more interest from Ravelry. The next meeting is at The Bell on 18 March, for anyone who’s around.

I honestly believe that these groups are an important part of knitting. They provide friendship, but more than that, they mean that we’re not knitting in isolation. We can offer each other support and advice, talk about our projects, get ideas for the next project, share tips on the best yarn stores, both brick and online, learn how to be better knitters and so on and so on.

I like to think that by meeting up in this way we’re carrying on a tradition of fisher wives knitting together while their husbands were out on their boats. Fishing back then was an incredibly risky business, and these early knitting groups provided a support network for worried wives. They’re also how many traditional knitting styles, such as guernsey, came about, with family patterns passed down from mother to daughter.

Toronto ladies gather to knit for World War I soldiers in 1914.
Photo from commons.wikimedia.org.