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

[afuna]

.I read while watching TV and sometimes when I'm reading on an ebook reader that's propped up on one of those book/poster stands. Depending on what I'm doing, I can use my elbow instead of my hands to bump the ereader to switch pages, so that I won't have to let go of my yarn.

(It makes me really wish for the ability to voice control my ereader!)

Usually I knit easy stuff: simple 4-row lacework patterns that I've already memorized, swatches of stockinette, stuff like that.

First couple of repeats of any pattern, I pretty much have to pause everything and focus on just the knitting though! At least until I've figured out the logic behind the pattern and have either memorized the pattern, or established a rhythm.

Combination knitting is very useful when knitting while looking at something else, because the knit and the purls just feel different, so I just rarely ever need to look at my hands. But I'd been watching TV while knitting long before I ever tried combination-style knitting.


When doing more complicated lacework, I set it up so that both the chart and the show are on my computer screen, with the show set to always float on top so it doesn't get hidden even when I'm clicking around my lace chart. And then I just knit away...

This works better when the lace chart has long predictable stretches so that I only need to refer back to it occasionally *g*

I used to think that it would be too hard to knit while reading subtitles, but I'm finding that it's not as hard as I think! (Assuming that the show itself isn't too dense)

I always have to pause the show when I'm picking up dropped stitches. Too much going on otherwise