Consider Knitting
journal.stuffwithstuff.com
journal.stuffwithstuff.com
Regardless, I think it’s important for those of us who work using computers to have hobbies where you get away from the screens and use your hands in a tactile way – ideally to make something. Cooking, baking and bread-making are things that almost anyone can do. We all have to eat and it’s great to be able to share what you’ve made with others (I find the best hobbies also have some degree of social interaction).
When I cycled and mountain-biked, I used to do all my own bike maintenance and built my own wheels; I got a lot of satisfaction from building a perfectly balanced wheel. I also did a wood-work course and would have liked to have kept it up but I live in a small house without the space for a work-bench and tools.
More recently, during Covid, I started to learn guitar. Even though it doesn’t come naturally and progress happens at a very slow pace, I get a lot of enjoyment from it. My goal is to get good enough that I feel confident jamming/playing with other friends who are amateur musicians.
Definitely IMO code is a real physical thing that produces tangible results. (I personally think that code operationally is a physical thing, down to basics like logic gates and stuff. We abstract far away from that with high level languages but even making a pixel change colors is inherently, to me, altering physical reality)
But the experience of writing code and making music with your body is such a different one. You will feel and think about the code in a more imaginary and thoughtful way (you could write all your code in a notebook or a text editor and you would just be writing or typing on a keyboard) whereas the music (I play a wind instrument) is a tactile experience in the sense that it will physically be something you hear and you can actually feel the vibrations in your body; I might be wrong but I think that is what hearing is. And there is a real bio-feedback thing going on because you use your body to physically make it happen and you get immediate or very near immediate feedback (auditory, etc. You may even hear or see feedback from other musicians or even listeners). It’s just a viscerally different experience.
There’s nothing fake about seeing metrics on a dashboard or tests going from red to green or money or bits of data flowing around, at all. But it is experientially much different from the feeling of playing an instrument.
That’s my take anyway.
> The point about being disconnected with tactile sensation is very poignant. I've experimented with crafts before, but my go-to hobby has always been music - stringed instruments like the guitar. There's something very rewarding about the instant feedback you get when you fret down a string, and how much nuance you can get out of the smallest movements of your hands.
Currently, I’m trying to learn how to improve my dynamic range: being able to play softer and louder and/or accent a particular beat while keep a steady rhythm. I found it hard not to strike the strings more quickly to make them sound louder and I still find it challenging to play evenly with consistent loudness and tone.
I’ve found the more I play, the more attuned I become to the subtleties of the sound being produced, e.g., I’ve learned that pressing down on a string too much results in the pitch being sharper than what it should be. I’ve been experimenting with different thicknesses of plectrums and if not using a plectrum, noticing how the tone is different depending on whether the string is struck with the nail or the fleshy part of the finger. That’s all on an acoustic guitar; so far, I’ve purposely avoided the rabbit-hole of how electric guitar tone can be modified by amplifier and effects.
Programming – for me – doesn’t really have the same nuances and challenges. Even though I don’t produce anything tangible, I guess the main benefit for me is that learning and playing the guitar exercises completely different parts of my brain than those I use as a system administrator or programmer. I’m completely focussed on what I’m doing when I’m learning and practising and there’s a real buzz from nailing something that I first thought was impossible.
As a side-effect, it has also improved my appreciation for different styles of music and my understanding of how music is made (e.g., I can tell the difference between music in 4:4 and 6:8 time signatures) and what other instruments are doing in a piece of music, e.g., drummers often play the snare on beats 2 and 4 in many genres of popular music.
When cycling off-road, wheel rims would regularly go out of shape so I purchased spoke spanners to correct the side-to-side wobble by adjusting the spoke tension. This was important as back in the 90s as almost all non-professional mountain bikes used some form of rim brake: cantilever, and later, V-brakes. I would fix the wheels by removing the tyre and tube and mounting the wheel in the forks (front wheel) or wheel stays (rear wheel) so I could see where the wobbles were.
I eventually realised that the rims also needed to be trued radially, i.e., the rim forms a perfect circle and is consistently equidistant from the flanges of the hub. I was doing this often enough that I ended up buying a proper truing stand and I became the go-to guy for fixing wheels for friends.
Given enough abuse from mountain-biking, eventually wheels can no longer be trued by adjusting spoke tension. It seemed a shame – and environmentally wrong – to discard a wheel when it had a good-quality hub so I graduated to buying new spokes and rims to build on to the old hub (which would usually last for years) using the instructions from Sheldon Brown (as linked to in a sibling comment).
The process of building a wheel requires an understanding of the physical forces acting on the spokes and rim but the practice is more like an art. The more you did it, the better you got at avoiding issues like residual twist. It’s a bit like tuning a stringed instrument. I would even pluck the spokes and compare the pitch to get a feel for the amount of tension the individual spoke was under. It was very satisfying to get a consistent tone.
I guess that’s what they did.
I struggle with this too, especially because knitting is so slow and I'm in the unusual but fortunate position of having my other hobby (writing a couple of books) clearly having had much more impact.
There's a part of my brain when I knit that's like, "You know if you spent this hour working on another book, it would leave a bigger mark in the world."
But I also know that part of that impulse is unhealthy. I wrote those books for a lot reasons, many of which were good. But some of that drive did come from a sense that I'm not enough just being me and I need to be making something of value for as many people as possible to consider myself worthy.
I'm trying to grow out of that mindset and accept myself just as I am. So I consider time spent knitting as sort of exposure therapy for getting used to the idea that I deserve to take time for my selfish joys.
I do. As part of that whole package, I find it exceedingly difficult to focus on more than one thing at a time. As much as I would love to sit and code a bit while watching tv or listening to an audio book, I simply cannot do it. I've tried many times and find it impossible to focus on my project while my brain is more interested in the easy attention economy of the television.
Conversely, my wife is very talented in the fiber arts. She seems to be able to sew, crochet and knit while watching tv without any effort at all, paying attention to both whatever show we have on and what she's doing. Granted, she's been at it for well over a decade so there's some learned adaptation there, but as far back as I can remember she has never had the same problem I do. She also does not suffer from anxiety and depression on the level that I do.
I've been wondering if there's a correlation for awhile now. Interesting that this popped up on HN and pulled me out of lurk mode.
If I tried doing two things at once, it'd be painful and also I wouldn't be doing either properly. I believe the "multitaskers" aren't that much better, they just learned to context-switch quickly. I'm not the least envious.
~Attributed to Confucius, but I first heard it from fortune cookies :^)
Like I’m pretty good at programming, bad at writing, and ok at following the plot of a TV show (that’s hardly a skill I’m proud of, haha). But, I can code fine with a TV on in the background (I will be decent at programming and forget the plot of the TV show/miss plot beats). Or I can slow my writing even further, to an absolute crawl, while simultaneously missing TV plot points. Multitasking!
I can listen to music while I program, but it can't be anything with lyrics because programming requires too much of my language center.
Knitting doesn't touch my language center, so I can listen to music with lyrics or an audiobook. But it's too visual for me to watch anything else while I do it.
> She seems to be able to sew, crochet and knit while watching tv without any effort at all, paying attention to both whatever show we have on and what she's doing
Those combinations don't seem at all comparable.
Multitasking is just a "personality trait".. and predominantly women are more able to multitask than men. You should simply ask around and see the correlations. Some of the happiest people I know can't multitask at all
The learning curve was higher than I expected, especially without someone to be there showing me stuff. I just tried watching some YouTube videos. I got frustrated and quit rather quickly.
I’ve heard knitting is easier, but I like the idea of crochet better.
The initial hump is steep but fairly small. It took me about four or five tries before I could make stitches. Once I got over that initial challenge, it got a lot smoother. Since then, there have been continuous incremental challenges, but all fairly small.
I haven't gotten over the hump with crochet. I'm left-handed but knit right-handed because mirroring everything is very hard. The entire knitting world presumes right-handed knitting. However, I knit Continental style which uses both hands and engages the left hand a lot, so I don't find that it feels very "wrong".
However, with crochet, I don't think I could ever hold the hook with my right hand. But also mirroring everything while trying to learn is not easy.
I just looked around and found mixed opinions. Though, I found this one which may sum up the debate.
> Crochet is harder to go from 0 to 1 but knitting is harder to go from 1 to 10.
That's the funny thing about the idea of meaningful things. It is solely determined by what you think is meaningful. Personally, just sitting and making something is an extremely meaningful activity to me.
That way, the task becomes "meaningful" and thus worthy of the additional time and focus that it demands, without becoming a pressing obligation on you to cause additional stress...
Why don't you just do it for fun or while relaxing? I don't quite understand why it wouldn't be meaningful.
Knitting and other fiber arts are the grandmother of computer programming, and I'd go so far as to say your CS education is incomplete without at least passing knowledge of fabric weaving and especially weaving machine history.
Ignorance is not your fault, unfortunately they can't teach you everything in college, and people tend to downplay the importance and history of "women's work", much to all our detriment.
https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...
Why?
I'm not even that much of a fiber artist - I can crochet, and I can weave shepherd's slings out of plant fiber/paracord/other strings. But I believe the thinking patterns help me, especially in large-but-not-complex systems thinking.
ps: And then there's playing with other people, the lock-in is one of the few near esoteric experience I experienced, but I digressed.
:)
I will caution you that cotton yarn is definitely not the easiest yarn to start with. It has very little stretch which makes it hard to keep good tension and form stitches. Not impossible, just sort of difficult.
It's very much like learning to play guitar starting with an acoustic compared to an electric. Everything is a little stiffer and requires a little more finger strength.
So if you feel like it's more difficult than you expected, it may partially be because of the yarn.
There were mistakes making the actual project, occasional extra loops that I eliminated by knitting or pearling two at once in the next row (wherever I thought it was a good spot). And I think I did a row K3, P2K2, K3 instead of K3, K2P2, K3. Some rows were off by one because of the occasional extra loop. (I should have been reading the previous row.)
It has already been repurposed as a blanket for my five year old's stuffed shark. (She now wants a glove because all I have to do is "make one for each side".)
Unlike knitting, I love its usefulness. There are so only many use cases for knitwear, but furniture, man, everyone needs furniture. And being in a home that I built by my two hands is infinite joy.
The three aspects where it falls short to knitting: - It can't be done mindlessly. It would be unsafe and you'd make costly mistakes that you can't undo by pulling on the yarn. - It's more expensive. The materials are a bit more pricy (compared to hours spent on working them), but the machines certainly are. - You are confined to space and time. Whether it's your garage or wood shop where you have machines and can make noise and dust, or it's your living room where you exclusively use hand tools – you surely can't do it in your car while waiting for the kids, or at the university, or on the public transport. Whittling small objects is the one exception.
But yes, woodworking is awesome.
I do find whittling to be an interesting middle point. Like knitting, you don't need a dedicated workshop. It doesn't take a lot of set up and tear down for a given session. You can fit the project and tools in a small space.
Of course, you're shedding wood chips the whole time, so you can't really whittle on the couch. And you sure as hell can't do it on an airplane. But you can do it when, say, camping with friends, or sitting on the back porch when it's nice out.
It is well suited for me because
- I like wood
- I like knives
- I'm into typography
- it doesn't require that much work space
I have only just started out but it feels nice indeed! A hindrance is that I am not very artistically gifted, but as long as I make it mostly for myself, I don't mind too much.
They're also the kind of places where they have lessons where you can sign up, so if you're interested in both classes and a space to work, they're a great fit.
I have this problem. I did three things. First, I joined a makerspace that had a woodshop. This seems like it should cure all your problems but it won't. There's limited storage, unpredictable tool availability, the motivational issues of driving to a new place to work, etc.
Second, I joined another makerspace out of town! Redundancy and the availability of friends in the area to work with helps. Plus, supporting makerspaces feels good and the cost is not much compared to other hobbies.
Finally, there are some very basic, not large tools that can get you through 90% of projects, including very nice looking bookshelves, desks, cabinets, etc:
* Circle saw + track guide for rip cuts
* Saw horses for adhoc tables
* Power drill (+ you'll want one for all kinds of useful things anyway)
* Nice drill bit set
* Pocket hole jig (saves you time and assembly space)
* Drill block (takes the place of a drill press in a pinch)
* Painting blankets to put stain / glue-ups on
All of the above can fit in a small area of a closet, available when motivation strikes. Far and away the biggest storage headache is wood, which you'll have to get creative about, but for restoration or even modification, you won't need much. And for smaller projects you'll probably use most of what you buy on the same day if you plan it out.
Upgrades (which a makerspace would provide anyway):
* If you have a little space (like a desktop), you can get a chop/miter saw which makes repeated precise cuts much easier
* A router + bit set (esp keyhole bit! This makes hanging this much easier)
* Shopvac for dust (+ shopvacs are super useful anyway)
That's really it. You can do almost all the projects you'd want with just those, from the living room, patio, backyard, driveway, garage, or a parking spot out front.
What I get from the makerspace is access to drill presses, router tables, and table saws. Table saws are a game changer and are the best way to level up your precision and cut accuracy, but require so much space that I could never justify it at home (and small portable table saws are not the same).
I'm definitely still learning, but the main lessons are that good wood ($), precise cuts, adding layers from trim / recessed boards, hiding screws, and tons of sanding will make anything look really, really nice.
EDIT: One last thing: You can easily practice woodworking fundamentals without space by making joints, practicing stain matching (try to get veneer plywood to match a stained board), or practicing right-angle, precise cuts.
The injury does affect my computer use, when it gets real bad I have to switch my mouse pad to the other side of my desk. I haven't knitted in years and its still there.
Also made myself a custom plushie which would have cost around $1000AUD had I commissioned someone to make it.
After doing it all, I can say, yeah the prices actually are fair if you need to actually make a living off it, but also you can just do it yourself with a $300 sewing machine and some determination.
No redundancy, no backstop. If any of the stitches gets cut, the entire piece can unravel completely.
We're so used to redundancy, but sometimes you just need to get things done, and it's ok if it's all a deck of cards.
The idiom you're looking for may be "house of cards": https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/house+of+cards
I can totally zone out creating and tweaking beats on the Drumbrute Impact. I also find it oddly comforting to have on when I'm working.
After all this, I don't know any (real) songs from start to finish. The closest I come is playing Nirvana's About a Girl.
I might have some kind of rhythm disability. If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
It's so frustrating, especially when I see how fast my kids learned to play an instrument. They make it look so easy.
> If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
Are you able to play any strumming patterns (however simple) with just the metronome? Ideally you'd practice this enough that you are able to do it consistently with almost zero thinking, and then check if it has improved your ability to play along with the record.
Another thing that has helped me when learning new strumming patterns (and just rhythm in general) was practicing just the strumming, muting the strings with my left hand instead of playing chords. First with the metronome, then along the record (all without any chords, just muted strings). Give that a try if you feel like it.
To answer your metronome question - I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync. I start to focus on how my arm feels strumming and I can feel the pick vibrating in my fingers and feel the air I'm moving with my arm and I notice the vibration in the guitar body and as my attention moves around, I lose track of the click.
Not surprised that these are in there!
> I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync
Huh, I never actually did that for more than a few minutes at the time (when just using the metronome), I can imagine it gets boring and attention wanders. I did try to do it frequently (couple of times a day, spread throughout the day), but only for two minutes or so.
Anyway, I thought you might have tried all of that already, considering you took lessons and bought courses, but still wanted to throw it out there. Good luck!
The great thing about guitars is that you can buy really well made ones, brand new, for only $100-300. That and a $10 tuner and watching free online tutorials is all you need.
As someone who both knits and plays a couple of instruments, I suspect you are underestimating the skill ceiling of knitting.
Take a look at something like this: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-queen-susan-sha...
You're talking years of work to complete it. You may be thinking, "well, sure, but it's just doing the same relatively easy thing over and over for a really long time." But that's not quite it. You're making a single physical object where it's easy to make mistakes and also easy to not realize you've made a mistake. Knitting builds on the previously knitted stitches. If you miscount something early on or forget a stitch, you can end up diverging irrevocably from the pattern. A moment's inattention early on can mean you have to undo literally months of work.
A large complex project like that shawl is like a giant oil painting. It's not just the scale and time, it's the ability to consistently avoid making mistakes which requires incredible patience and discipline.
And that's just knitting the work. Now consider the mastery required to design a project like this.
Knitting has a lower skill ceiling doesn’t mean knitting or design is easy. I know that well, my mum ran a knitting shop and still works on patterns part time. She still knits a lot of stuff for us and it takes a lot of skill and work
But it’s not Glenn Gould on piano, is it? It’s not playing Bach fugues
There is a very old, very relevant observation that when men do something we call it "art" and when women do it we call it "craft".
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to compare a performative art like playing an instrument to a constructive art like knitting because the skillsets are so different. It's like trying to decide if ice cream is better than stand up comedy.
But I do think you can reasonably compare constructive arts like painting and knitting. For those, there are two aspects: coming up with the design for what you want to make, and implementing that design. Historically, the latter was given more weight than the former. The most famous painters of the Renaissance mostly just painted pictures of normal people, but it was the execution of those paintings that made them famous. Today, thanks to the invention of reproductive technology like cameras, we mostly prize originally of thought over execution. Andy Warhol is not a particularly skilled painter. (One way to think of the modern conception of "high art" versus "low art"—think Damien Hirst versus Thomas Kinkade—is exactly the distinction between concept and execution.)
Given all that, I would the best knitting designers on the same level as the best furniture designers or portrait painters. Most knitting is deliberately not conceptual, so it's hard to compare it to explicitly conceptual art. But if you think anything can reasonably be called art when it is mostly focused on quality and difficulty of execution, then knitting is an art with a ceiling as high as any other.
And, to be clear, there are fine artists whose medium is textiles as well. For example: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-textile-art...
How you feel about those probably reflects mostly how you feel about much of modern art. But I don't see any reason it should be considered a lower rung of art than other sculpture media just because it uses fibers and not metal or glass.
I guess my point is you can get some good sounds out of the guitar very quickly, which can be very intrinsically motivating.
I've always been a computer guy... I'm bad with my hands. Could never do origami. Part of the reason I dropped out of Boy Scouts was I didn't want to learn how to make knots. I was terrible in art class, I can't draw and I honestly have trouble just visualizing things (I was not great in geometry either). It's difficult for me to be creative like that. So that's my background, lol.
I could play music (and that's a hobby I still want to pursue), but lately I've been wondering if there was a craft that was better for people like me. Like, I got these cute handmade plushies as a gift recently, and I want to do something like that.
(honestly it seems like crocheting and knitting might not be bad options, but just wondering what else is out there!)
e; one thing I've considered is making something with electronics (I know enough about circuits to be dangerous), but the thing you run into quickly is you don't really want to just give somebody a circuit board, lol. At some point, it seems like all the interesting projects move towards 3D printing which I find intimidating.
Why is everybody knitting chickens?
172 points, 122 comments (5 days ago)
>They are comfort chickens, good for cuddles for those going thru breast cancer treatment. A nice shape to hold, I understand. You might have to learn to knit..
Indeed knitting is not so much different from programming and you have the whole touch aspect that is very pleasing.
He has a voice I enjoy and I'm glad I got the chance to read this.
I seem to have an intuitive competency at it but the combination of figuring out the layout, getting the measurements down and preparing the materials (I'll usually use basic card and style the individual pieces of card to match what I need e.g. making a card of floor-boarding for the wooden floor base) gives a huge amount of repetitive work that can be done while watching something.
The obvious next step is to invest time getting into origami so I can do more complex layouts.
That's lovely.
When I moved to Portland in 2004, we went to the bank (Umpqua) to open accounts and found out that they have a knitting group at the bank every week. It was so weird and felt very Portland.
Anyway, loved the post but I do have one question: how do you make coffee?
* French press. Makes great coffee easily (but not super quickly), but the clean-up is a huge hassle and makes the total iteration time not worth it. I gave up on this quickly.
* Aeropress. Makes good coffee and the clean-up isn't too bad. Pretty quick and not too fiddly to do. I did this for a couple of years.
* Mr. Coffee drip coffee. Makes mediocre coffee very easily, pretty quickly, and with fairly easy clean-up. I did it this way for several years, but the coffee gradually got worse and worse. I tried cleaning it out with vinegar a few times but eventually ditched it.
* Pour-over. Very simple, fast clean-up. Can make good coffee but it took me many iterations to dial in the parameters and making it was always fiddly and somewhat mentally taxing. I don't particularly like the fresh and fruity flavor that pour-over leans towards, otherwise I might have stuck with this.
* Keurig. I hate the old DRM-based business model, but now they have reusable K-cups and take regular coffee. This is what I do now. The coffee is only mediocre, but it is very fast. Faster than microwaving a cup of hot water. Like wizardry. The clean-up is very simple and fast.
I think I prefer the coffee from an Aeropress more, but the convenience of the Keurig is hard to beat. Really, I just need a tolerable unit of caffeine first thing in the morning in order to be a functioning human.
I do dirty field work a fair bit. Large drone test flight campaigns in the middle of nowhere for a week at a time. I've got an Aeropress Go with the stainless filter, a hand grinder, and a small electric kettle that I keep in my suitcase. I'll usually grab a bag of locally-sourced beans. Man oh man has that little kit ever brought a lot of joy into the world. When someone seems like they're starting to burn out I'll make them a fresh ground cup of coffee and you can just see their eyes light up when they take that first sip. Such a wonderful piece of plastic made by a frisbee company :D
But absolutely don't have room in my kitchen or time in the morning for that. If I was the kind of person who had a leisurely second cup of coffee in the afternoon, I probably would. But I have exactly one caffeine unit as soon as I wake up and I'm done for the day. My brain chemistry doesn't allow me to deviate from that.
Granted, I say that as a person who lives in a cold-half-the-year climate, but my point is that, just like coders, there's plenty of shitty knitters out there.
The key with any skill is to approach it as a student, ready to improve. If this is something you wanted to try, get ready to make a few rubbish tea towels before you refine your understanding.
But, also, I've found my tastes changed some as I got into knitting. There's a sort of "see through the Matrix" effect where as I learned more about knitting, I could see things about what other people are wearing that I didn't notice before. I can often tell when someone is wearing a hand-knitted garment and every now and then even notice what yarn or pattern it is.
That makes knitted clothing and accessories more interesting to see and then more interesting for myself to wear: I'm not sending a signal to other knitters about who I am.
But if I still lived on the Gulf Coast where it's hot all the time? Yeah, probably not knitting as much.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44128576
p.s. Oh, I just realized that "munificent", who posted the top-level comment in that thread, is also the author of this article.
There are a small number of knitting techniques - knit, purl, a few increases and decreases etc. Knitting patterns give you sequences to apply these primitives and at the end you have a complex, useful item, potentially in 3D.
You're doing a few simple things repeatedly and you end up with complex behaviour. That's a CPU!
At the same time, I don't knit because it reminds me of programming. If I want to scratch the programming itch, I'll program. So I ended up not mentioning it in the article, but there's definitely an overlap.
I haven't been writing much the past couple of years for a number of reasons and I'm trying to get back into that habit. Part of that is lowering the effort required to get a post out, so I decided to not bother with adding photos even though I agree it would be better with them. Maybe I'll go back and add some if I find the time.
It kind of defeats the meditation thing though :-)
So very recently?
But I don't take my advice as well, my hobbies are reading(kindle), games etc. So both work and hobbies are in front of computer. Don't recommend it.