some discussion here, about halfway down.
My grandmother taught me how to knit before I started school. My father taught me other stuff, like how to milk cows and ride horses.
Posted on 01/16/2004 12:45:43 PM PST by the_devils_advocate_666
What's wrong with this picture?
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. She is reading a book, he is knitting.
If you said, ''Men don't knit, women do,'' that's not the right answer. Actually, there is nothing wrong with the picture.
More men are knitting today, including many whose names you will recognize -- such as Roosevelt ''Rosey'' Grier, a former star tackle with the New York Giants pro football team and the Los Angeles Rams; actors Russell Crowe and David Arquette, and Robert Gottlieb, former editor of The New Yorker magazine.
Knitting can also be an aid to your prayer life, some women have found. A few years ago, Chris Pokorny started a knitting/crocheting/sewing ministry at her church, the Edgebrook Evangelic knits hats, scarves, mittens, baby clothes, and other warm things for the needy.
''Every once in a while I will see somebody on the street wearing a hat or scarf that I made,'' Pokorny says. ''It makes me warm all over.''
''The only rule we have,'' Pokorny adds, ''is that we must pray for the person who will receive the item we are working on.''
Not many teenagers knit but it might be good if they did. Young people need to slow down and relax more. But boys are apt to consider knitting sissified.
They ought to meet Grier, the 300-pound, 6-foot-6-inch ex-pro football player of the 1950s and '60s.
Grier was the one who played the memorable role of subduing Sirhan Sirhan on the night of Robert Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles in 1968.
In addition to his autobiography, ''Rosey: An Autobiography: The Gentle Giant'' (Honor Books, 1986), he wrote ''Rosey Grier's Needlepoint for Men'' (Walker Co, 1973). (Needlepoint is a cousin to knitting and crocheting.) Photographs of Rosey doing needlepoint appeared in the New York Times, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post and on the centerfold of Look magazine.
And nobody would call Grier a sissy. Before Grier became a born-again Christian he had a ''roving eye and a yen for beautiful women.'' That's why, he said, he got into needlepoint. ''It was a handy device for striking up conversations with girls,'' he said.
Boys and young men, take note.
For the rest of us, knitting, needlepoint and crocheting can be a way of not only improving our prayer life and our social life but eliminating the pressures and stresses of 21st-century living. Knit one, purl two.
If this is taxes with reprsentation
Give me taxes without representation
I much prefer a tax on tea!
Instead of everything else.
some discussion here, about halfway down.
My grandmother taught me how to knit before I started school. My father taught me other stuff, like how to milk cows and ride horses.
Is your assertion evidence of a mind set in concrete? I hope not. Actually, you may be right.
But then, there's this:
From His Own Lips:
From Susan: Once and for all, I am going to lay to rest the idea that Russell knits :-)
I was at the 8pm Gladiator screening in LA at Oscar time in March 2001 that Russell introduced, then had a Q&A afterward. The friend I was with was (at the time) a relatively new fan of Russell's, so I helped her come up with a question to ask (we wrote them on cards that a Dreamworks staff member collected and gave to Russell). I said that I'd seen a photo of Russell knitting and since my friend did crosstitch and knitted, for fun she could describe the picture and ask him if he did indeed knit. He happened to choose her card from the bag with this question and he remembered the photo shoot and explained that he tends to pick up anything around to use as a prop in his photos, and that was the case here. When he finished his explanation of what went on in the shoot, he leaned toward us a bit, (we were in the front row, only a few feet away from him), eyes twinkling as he said with a mischievous smile: "No, I am not a knitter. I know that surprises you..." This last with tongue in cheek for sure ;-)
So there you have it, a quote right from Russell himself.
From:
Knitting must never replace target shooting!
Burly kin dabble in dainty lace
By Electa Draper
Denver Post Four Corners Bureau
Apr. 9, 2001 - BAYFIELD - Living and working amid the windswept fields and dusty back roads of this rugged ranching community, the husky Houtz brothers measure up and then some.
"Pick it up," 6-foot-5 Randy Houtz orders, indicating a brightly colored doily on the table. "Tatting is meant to be handled." He and his brother Gary, also 6foot-5, are internationally known in tatting circles as the "Shuttle Brothers," creators of exquisite knotted-lace designs and makers of hand-carved holders of spooled tatting thread, called shuttles.
The shuttles, scrimshawed or inlaid with gems and silver, are prized by tatters from England to Japan, where they are museum pieces.
Tatting is the web-like accumulation of individual tiny knots spun and looped into intricate patterns and shapes. It is, Gary says, the only type of lace not reproducible by some clever machine. And in the beefy hands of the Houtz brothers, the delicate art form assumes surprising shapes.
The brothers tat everywhere - on the buses Gary rode to away games as a former Bayfield football coach and in the airports where they await flights to international tatting conferences or to Montana's Camp Wannatat.
"We always draw a crowd," says Randy, 48.
"People may say things about it," says 52-year-old Gary. "They don't say them to me." In fact, Gary's football players clamored for his signature small design, the GR8 Butterfly, tying them to their shoelaces as goodluck charms. The small winged creations take Gary about 10 minutes to knot up, but he spent 600 hours tatting a wedding veil for his daughter-in-law.
The brothers have tatted with everything from fine-gauge wire to 1-inch rope.
One of Randy's earliest efforts was tatting a large cornstalk. The brothers then argued with lace historian Elizabeth Kruella as to whether it was "lacework." She determined it actually was more of a fabric sculpture.
For his part, Gary has tatted a Grecian urn. But the Houtzes also create exquisite small pieces of astounding delicacy, beaded snowflakes, endless doilies, jewelry and clothing.
Big brother Gary's love of tatting began as a small boy.
"When I was little, I'd be over at my grandmother's a lot," Gary says. "Her ritual every morning was to sit at the kitchen table, listen to the radio and tat. I was always fascinated by it."
She died when he was about 8 years old, so he didn't learn to tat from her. But as he grew up to be an accountant by profession, he "always had a soft spot for crochet, macrame, embroidery, knitting." He mastered each of those and then lost interest, he says. Tatting is different. "It's the unlimited design possibilities," Gary says. "You can go anywhere and do anything you want with it. I won't live long enough to learn all there is to tatting." Gary first lured his younger brother, a U.S. Forest Service trail builder, into tatting in 1994, after Gary moved to Bayfield from Salt Lake City. The brawny Gary broke many a flimsy plastic shuttle, so Randy, a craftsman with wood, bone and antler, created a sturdy yet decorative shuttle for him.
The shuttles are now all the rage in tatting and made the Houtzes famous as the "Shuttle Brothers."
Randy then became a devoted tatter who has stolen some of his brother's thunder.
"It broke my heart," Gary says. "He's just a pup. But he's an excellent tatter."
For two brothers who had little contact for 20 years, tatting has been a strong tie. Randy vies with his adolescent daughter for phone time to chatter with Gary about tatting motifs and patterns. The two wrote a manual on the "selfclosing mock ring."
Together they teach a nighttime "Tat and Chat" adult-education class in Bayfield. "Our motto is, "If you can tie a knot, you can tat,' " Gary says. His students, out of misguided respect for the burly brothers, refer to the men's doilies as "flats." "Male participation in the class has increased by leaps and bounds," Gary says. "We now have one man in 30."
When asked why they care so much about tatting, the brothers answer in unison: "Why not?" It takes the gullible listener several minutes to realize that whenever the Shuttle Brothers sound like they're saying "Why not," which they say a lot, they're really saying, "Why knot?" It's one of those private, inside-tatting guy jokes, like, "Keep your picots up."
The boys are more circumspect, however, around their whitehaired, venerable and ladylike tatting peers. Gary's and Randy's hero is 90-plus-year-old Monica Hahn of Seattle.
"The first time I saw her work, I cried," Randy says. He exults about an altar cloth she made for a New York City cathedral. "We've had the opportunity to tat with some of the best," Gary says.
But early on there were skeptics. At the first international tatting conference the Houtzes attended, the instructor stopped the class when they walked in and asked,
"Can I help you?" "We're here to tat," they replied.
"No, really, why are you here?" she said. "She thought we were maintenance workers," Gary says.
Now, one of Gary's sons tats. As for Randy's family, his wife, Wendy, who tied the knot with him 25 years ago, steers clear of the tatting workshop.
"It keeps him out of trouble, I guess," Wendy says of the consuming hobby.
Randy, hands on his hips, says with farcical frustration: "It's hard to even get her to look at my tatting and go, "Ooh.' "
Copyright 2001 The Denver Post. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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