Knitting in Coffeehouses as the Sun Goes Down

I love to knit in coffeeshops after work. My work is done in my quiet apartment, usually alone. I write hoping I will create a narrative that will resonate with someone. Reading chapters and writing papers for my graduate classes until my quiet apartment becomes oppressive and stifling.

I love how my senses get assaulted at coffeehouses, the gentle whirring sound of hot milk turned into fluffy foam. The rich smell of expresso and tea. The sweet smell from all syrups they use. The murmur of multiple conversations that surround me but do not contain me. The click-clack of a laptop keyboard as a harmony to the soft metallic ring of my knitting needles coming together. The softness of the yarn around my plain, fat short fingers. The quiet slurp of the black coffee I ration, the only cup of coffee I choose to savor each day.

Knit, purl, ssk, yo, knit purl. Each row written in a special language, a code only shared by those of us in the community of knitters. It feels comforting to be a part of a community, millions or at least thousands of people who are knitting just like me at exactly the same moment somewhere. I smirk to myself as I start thinking of the controversies that consume our conversation, English v. Continental; to gauge or not to gauge, that apparently is the question. Stitch after stitch, row after row. An seemingly endless cycle of stitches that have been knitted millions of times by millions of people but is also somehow uniquely mine. I choose the size of the stitches, the yarn I use, if it is one or multiple colors, if I change the pattern halfway through.

Then some stranger, generally a woman, that has been watching me comes along and kindly inquires about what I'm making and for who. When I tell them I'm knitting to yarn bomb on June 11th, National Yarn Bomb Day, they usually laugh and remark that they always wanted to learn how to knit. I tell them I would be happy to teach them, but generally they end up declining when I tell them that knitting is something that takes patience and time. Those are two things that most people seem to not have enough of. They leave shortly after that, having somewhere they must be or a social media app they must check.

I always hesitate and say a small Buddhist prayer before I start the last row, the cast-off row. For me, it is both a relief and a sadness. It feels good to finish a project, to put my needles aside. I grab my scissors and make a quick cut to separate the project from my yarn ball. I have something in my hands that no longer needs my needles or me. It is now on its own, cast aside, now part of something larger.

While I may intend my yarn bombing to be a form of gentle protest, a small reminder to not take life so seriously, that there is beauty in all things, that some laws are meant to be broken, that doesn't mean that is how it will impact the people that encounter it.

I like to go to the places I yarn bomb just to see what becomes of them. Sometimes my yarn bombs have snippets cut away, have been ripped or torn, desecrated or vandalized. Sometimes people wish that the yarn bombing will be taken elsewhere because littering lowers their property values. Sometimes though, some stranger will observe me looking at my yarn bomb and approach. I’ll ask them what they think and they’ll tell me how much they enjoyed it or how it made them laugh. These people often wonder aloud about the person who installed the yarn bomb. It makes me laugh at what people come up with, some people think the ‘yarn-bomber’, must be cool, weird or some combination of the two.

I never let anyone know that they are looking and talking to the person they are wondering about because it is not important who I am. What’s important is that we can share an experience that takes us outside of the mundaneness of our lives and makes us feel something.