Archive for May 15th, 2014

Play Me

May 15th, 2014 by Franklin Habit

Writer, illustrator, and knitter Franklin Habit joins us for his monthly column featuring humor and insights into a yarncrafter’s life.

It has been my pleasure and privilege over the past several years to be interviewed by a few knitting magazines in America and abroad. The experience is always a little jarring, as for the first three-quarters of my life even those who knew me well were less than interested in my life and opinions. In some ways, it’s easier. When nobody cares to ask you about your creative process, you don’t have to worry about admitting that it mostly involves watching funny dog videos on YouTube and taking naps.

But interviewers, even the clever ones, always ask at least a few common questions that quickly become familiar and are easily answered. What’s it like to be a man who knits?* Who taught you knit? What’s your ideal yarn? What’s on your needles right now? You learn quickly that you’d better ready for those.

Once in a while, though, even a softball question will throw you a curve. For me, that question was, “What music do you listen to while you work?”

My answer was that if the work requires concentration–designing a lace motif, say, as opposed to knitting merrily along a sample–I work in silence. No music, no television, no funny dog videos. Silence.

The writer wasn’t terribly pleased with that response. It upset her data. She told me that every other designer she’d spoken to had obligingly offered the name of a recording artist, or at least a musical genre. Would I please do likewise? Or would I prefer she picked something for me?

So I told her to say I was physically unable to knit a single stitch in the morning until I had listened to the whole of Erich Korngold’s opera Die Tote Stadt while sitting in a bubble bath. She cut me out of the article.

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