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

[epershand]

I taught myself to knit in high school so that I could do something with my hands while reading textbooks without fidgeting myself to pieces--before that I finger crocheted full skeins of yarn over and over again into increasingly thick chains, which took care of the fidgeting but wasn't exactly a productive use of the yarn. I don't watch a whole lot of tv, but I pretty much have to be knitting or crocheting to do so. I also knit at the computer, or more recently with an e-reader propped at a good angle on my lap. (Actually, an open laptop with a lace pattern on one half of the screen makes an awesome e-reader stand! /o\ )

But sometimes I get myself into trouble. Last night I brought my current project with me into the bathroom before I realized that I do not in fact have a sufficient quantity of hands to knit while brushing my teeth. And once I was knitting a scarf with a diagonal rib while watching a movie in the dark, and when the movie ended I learned that at some point I'd reversed the direction of the diagonal and had knit a foot of scarf on the wrong bias. I mostly don't knit in the dark now.