SEW WHAT? Habit proves that knitting isn’t just for the ladies.
During a recent phone chat with knitter, blogger and author Franklin Habit, his Lakeview apartment sounded surprisingly quiet. After reading his popular knitting blog, the Panopticon, we half-expected to hear Dolores Van Hoofen causing a ruckus in the background; granted, Dolores is Habit’s imaginary sheep. “Dolores gets fan mail from people who have never picked up a piece of yarn in their life,” Habit says of his creation, who wears cat eyeglasses, has her own cabaret act and is running for president under the fictitious Fibertarian Party. “It’s gratifying and also scary. Wherever I go, people will seriously ask me, ‘Is Dolores here?’_”
Although Dolores doesn’t make an appearance in Habit’s debut book of humorous cartoons and essays about knitting, It Itches: A Stash of Knitting Cartoons (Interweave Press, $12.95), Habit already has fielded requests from fans and friends to make her the subject of his next book. It Itches, a collection of new material, is an extension of his popular blog, in which the 37-year-old Buddhist writes about things like knitting the kind of heirloom shawls your grandmother was never ambitious enough to attempt and chronicles his travels around North America while photographing knitters for his 1,000 Knitters Project. A happily partnered Pennsylvania native who moved to Chicago after college, Habit works as a freelance writer, illustrator and photographer. It Itches came about when Habit’s friend, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, the best-selling author of her own knitting-humor books (yes, there are others), encouraged her agent to contact him.
Habit’s obsession with knitting began when, as a college student at Harvard in 1992, he asked a friend to knit him a scarf. She offered to teach him to do it himself instead. “That was a very slippery slope,” he recalls. Knitting’s combination of creative and practical appealed to Habit right away. “It’s so broad and deep you could knit for 40 or 50 years and never run out of new things to try.”
In 2005, Habit started the Panopticon to keep track of his knitting projects online. “I had something to say and I had things to draw [about knitting],” so he published them on his blog and now in It Itches.
The 1,000 Knitters Project, for which Habit photographed knitters as they took turns making a scarf (and which he hopes to publish), grew out of an earlier effort. “I was trying to photograph 1,000 gay men in Chicago,” he explains. “It took me a year to get seven gay men to sit still for the camera.” Habit thought he’d try the other community he belonged to. Within two days of posting the project online, he had 400 volunteers. While meeting and shooting his 1,000 knitters, who range in age from four to 90, Habit realized the community’s diversity. “It was like a snapshot of America,” he says. “Tons of nationalities, every race, every age group.”
He’s also developed a knitting fan base. Recently, while out with gay friends of friends, Habit was recognized on the street by a bunch of knitters who approached him seeking photographs and autographs. “These A-list gays were looking at me like, ‘What the hell was that?’_” he says.
For Habit, knitting’s resurgence signals a reaction against consumer culture. “It used to be unfashionable to have to make your own clothes,” he says. “Now it’s the only chance you might have to make something and put your individual stamp on the physical world.”
Although he’s noticed recently that women are less surprised to see a man knitting, nonknitters still sometimes condescendingly mistake him for a beginner. “I’ve been sitting on the El knitting [something elaborate] and I’ll get, ‘Oh, that’s so cute! I think it’s just wonderful that you’re learning to knit.’_” Habit’s complicated projects get a better reception at Stitch ’n Bitch, a nationwide network of knitting and conversation gatherings he finds inspiring. “Knitting limbers the brain, and all those limber brains combined produce a startling amount of creativity,” he says. “If the U.N. had any sense, it would require all delegates to knit during sessions. We could eliminate famine, war and economic injustice in about a week and a half.”
It Itches is available in bookstores and at Amazon.com.