Ep111 - Assmimilating New Knitters

How do we get the entire world knitting? It's a mission of mine and today we discuss the five pillars of knitter assimilation: marketing, self-belief, tools and materials, medium and motivation and access to decent resources.

Of course, this are the Shinybees Pentagon of Knitting Assimilation and I think these are the things we need to be considering if we do want knitters to take over the world. More specifically, if we want the entire world to knit. Think how awesome that would be.

Pillar one is marketing. No, it's not just for sleazy snake oil salesmen and here's why: knitting has an image problem. Every man and his dog this that knitting is for Nanas and pregnant ladies and the media and film do nothing to change that view. Everything people see is stereotyped like this and that is a big issue.

Knitting needs to become more relevant and desirable if we want everyone to do it.

Pillar two - self belief. Sit in public and knit and you will get an array of comments like 'oh, I could never do that' and 'I tried to learn when I was a kid and I was terrible at it' and 'It looks so hard!'. Curiosity os the first step to learning, but we also need to deal with the issue of self belief in order to get people to actually try and learn the skill, instead of telling themselves repeatedly that it is too hard.

Pillar three - materials and tools. Very often, a first foray into knitting is a cheap kit with low end acrylic (not all acrylic is created equal) and bendy plastic needles. The instructions are almost always total pants and the whole thing is set up to encourage failure.

Yes, this may be cheap failure but failure is not what is needed for assimilation (see pillar two). We need to be setting newbies up with better tools and nicer yarn, to encourage continuing, and to make the end product worth it.

Pillar four is medium and motivation aka Death to the Dr Who Scarf. How many times have you seen others to have been yourself taught to knit using the Whovian method? Let's just all knit a massive boring scarf that will take forever and hope they stick at it!

Yes scarves are easy and allow for (a lot) of repetition but they are so large they are insurmountable. We need to be bringing the Shinybees Trifecta of project awesome into this: a quick win + right level of complexity + desire for finished item = knitting dreams.

Pillar five is access to decent resources. Most of the freebie videos on YouTube are crap. They are too fast, badly lit, too far away to see what is going on or lately, have an alarming array of props in there. Learning is not about perfectly styled shots; it's about getting the information across in an accessible a way as you can. We need decent resources to point newbies towards.

You can find full links and show notes at www.shinybees.com/111