Stick to Your Knitting

When I was a child, I used to knit. My mother, who knitted for pretty much her entire life, taught me how, and I did some knitting for a while. I have not knitted in years, however, and this is not unusual. As Kyoko Mori, a teacher at Harvard, explains in her 2004 essay “Yarn,” knitting is now almost exclusively a feminine craft, although “[t]he knitting masters and apprentices of the medieval guilds were all men, since women were not admitted into guilds.” I started thinking about taking up knitting again last year, when some friends and I visited a yarn store in Portland, Oregon. (Mori mentions visiting a yarn store, presumably the same one, in Portland, and obtaining a pattern for a knitted hat.)

I haven’t done anything about knitting yet, but I have done some thinking about knitting as a metaphor for other activities. I was particularly struck by this sentence in Mori’s essay: “The small mistakes in a knitted garment disappear when the garment is on the body, where it belongs.” It seems to me that this lesson applies as well to a lot of other areas of human endeavor, as it does to knitting.

For example, I work for the information technology (IT) department of a large telecommunications company. We go to a lot of trouble setting standards for software development, testing newly coded software, and trying to ensure that our applications perform in real life as our customer expected. Sometimes everything goes as planned, but often there are errors, glitches, and problems with the software. What I find interesting is that it is very difficult to predict which of these shortcomings are going to cause the customer to complain, and which will be accepted as part of “business as usual.”

I think it’s useful to think of a complicated software project, involving a number of applications and databases, and taking months or years to complete, in much the way Mori characterizes a sweater. If you make a really big error – having three arms, for example, or writing a system that won’t produce an invoice at all – this will be noticed, because once it is “on the body” its deficiencies will be obvious. If, on the other hand, the system does pretty much what the customer wants, you may not get a complaint about the formatting of a certain report – the equivalent of having one sleeve slightly shorter than the other.

An old expression I picked up as a child, probably from my mother, was “Stick to your knitting.” The surface meaning is the same as “Mind your own business.” Don’t meddle in affairs that don’t concern you, in other words. A deeper meaning is to give your full attention to your own work; don’t let yourself be distracted. If each of us does her own job as well as she can, rather than doing someone else’s work badly, we’ll all be better off. And if each of us does the best he can, then the mistakes will surely disappear when the work is on the body.