I have SO got to buy that t-shirt.
Shhhh.......don't tell anyone I'm knitting. I'll have to go all limp in the wrists, and start wearing rainbow sweaters with big go-go boots..
Girly man.
And in other news, that's my latest hobby to keep me sane whilst (and at the same time even) being in the Army, and moving to six different posts this year. Past (most of which I still do) hobbies include (but are not restricted to), cooking, painting glass, gardening, metal casting, black smithing, running marathons, scherinschnittte, cross-stitch, and restoring old cars.
Knitting is a little more portable than blacksmithing though. However, I found myself in a little yarn shop today, discussing various kinds of wools with a girl while I forked over 50 bucks for yarn and needles, and thought, what the hell???
Never fear, Wikipedia always saves the day. A little research all around the net shows that like all good things, men hogged knitting to themselves first. Despite the "Stitch N' Bitch" (their name, not mine) propoganda, knitting cloth quite possibly got started from the arabic practice of knitting fishing nets. It travelled to Europe give or take around the time that the English were just warming up to sing madrigals, and proceeded to take off like crazy.
Next thing you know, knitting guilds sprung up like wildfire. And like much of pre-industrial Europe, it was a man's world. (thank you James Brown, you were obviously singing about Renaissance European industrial practices) Although women were soon enough knitting in the home, as a productive industry, it was still the men who put out, and knitting as a men-need-not-apply craft only came with the advent of "modern" textile machines, starting in the late 1700s.
Okay, so after that the only big recurrence of men knitting prior to recent times came during the big WWII, when men were encouraged to pick up needles for the Cause. Okay, so I cook, I clean, I have good decorating sense and I like to garden. I'm not insecure in my masculinity. So I like aromatic candles. I bake. I cross-stitch. I menstrate once a mon........umm, nevermind on that one.
It was a manly art first. Meh. I'm gonna go watch a horror movie. And maybe Bloodsport. And work on knitting a fuzzy wittle wool bag for my yarn. Yeah.
With apologies to dharma,
Man enough to knit, strong enough to purl.
NBS.