No Metal Needles

This is not a manifesto against the use of metal knitting needles. I have many that I like, but when I was listening to a blog where someone was going on about being the only person on campus knitting at her school, I thought to myself, how things have changed.

When I went to college, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, each semester began the same way. Each professor would hand out his list of reading materials and his rules on how his class would be run. For my four years of undergraduate study, every lecture class had listed at the top of the sheet "NO METAL NEEDLES." What was meant was that all the students who were sitting in the lecture day after day and knitting, and let me say we were numerous, were warned against metal needles. Why? Because at least once every semester someone seated in the very top row of this large hall with at least 50 concrete steps to get there would, in the middle of the lecture, drop a needle when changing from knitting to purling. That needle would hit the floor "clang" and then slowly roll down the steps "clang, clang, clang..." until it reached the bottom. You could count on that very angry professor then picking it up and cllimbing all the way to the top not to return the offending noise maker to its owner but to take her knitting and ban her from bringing it to his class for the rest of the semester. If nothing else, this experience taught me a love for circular needles.

I do feel sorry that more knitters aren't knitting in lectures. Believe me; it got us sanely through many a very tedious class. I'd love to see the number of on campus knitters grow to the point that more professors would have to post the edict, "NO METAL NEEDLES."