What do you do while you're knitting?

[jackandahat]

I've just read yet another person going "Ooo, you can't possibly knit during films with subtitles". And I keep getting people doing the internet version of looking at me funny when I talk about knitting while reading fanfic.

But... to me that's perfectly normal. Obviously there's some stuff where I have to look at my hands, anything like picking up stitches. But if it's something like plain knitting/ribbing or an easy pattern, I'm generally either watching a film (with subtitles, dodgy hearing) or reading fic/a blog. I don't have the one-track attention to only be knitting unless it's something incredibly complicated - in which case I can only do little bits or it drives me nuts.

What do you do? Do you knit in front of the TV? Do you read while you do it? Do you knit while only focusing on the knitting? I'm curious now.

Comments

[bedlamsbard]

I always knit and watch movies/TV/Netflix on the computer/etc. -- I'm actually a bit unsure how much I'm actually looking at the screen when I'm doing so, so if I'm watching something where I need to be looking at the screen the entire time rather than absorbing it by ear, then I'll pick up a project that I can do without looking. (On the same note, I knit in movie theatres as well, but only with projects I don't need to look at. I don't do much plain stockinette, so it's usually small lace projects where I have a constant count in my head about when to yarnover or k2tog or so on. Used to be washcloths or the odd sock pattern; I haven't been to a theatre recently, though.) But, yes, ninety percent of the time I'm knitting from a chart when watching TV/movies. Occasionally music or podcasts, depending on my mood, and very rarely I'll be knitting and not doing anything else at all. I usually only have one project going at a time, so I don't tend to switch for something less complicated unless I'm going into a situation where I know I won't be able to see what I'm knitting. (Movie theatres and airplanes being the big two, as while there's light on planes, it's harder to stick the chart somewhere you can see it. So easily memorizable patterns are good.)

I can knit and read, either on the computer or from a hard copy, but I don't do that very often because in that case, my hands are doing something else so I don't need them to be knitting.

I know I'm glad to have something to do with my hands when I'm watching movies/TV -- I have the bad habit of peeling the skin off my lips when I'm not paying attention, and before I started knitting, I used to come out of movie theatres with my lips and fingernails bloody. So, yeah, knitting is definitely preferable there!

Hmm, and since someone else mentioned car trips...this is actually a place I don't knit, because I can sleep in cars but I can't sleep in airplanes.