Knitting: The New Arts and Crafts?

We've all heard the book titles and the catch phrases: Zen and the Art of Knitting, "knitting, the new yoga," the new meditation, the stress reliever...

This Thursday I'm giving a speech at my local Toastmasters club, my project involves visual aids... and I need your help. A bit of background first:

They don't have an overhead projector, so using images becomes difficult. I thought about talking about topics from my general exam reading: the history of bibles in the US, images revealing the cult of domesticity in the 19th century, Warner Sallman's famous "Head of Christ" and other images of Jesus. But really, they don't want to hear me give an oral rehearsal of a general exam answer. They want to be entertained. And the main thing I think of these days when I think of entertainment and visual aids is (of course!) knitting.

Knitting as a speech topic raises another knotty problem: people know what a sweater is. A scarf. A sock. If they had to think about their store-bought ones for long, I'm sure they could come up with a guess or two about how it's put together. A few of them might even find the history of knitting to be interesting, but I rather doubt that they'd really want to know that much about different types of heels, shawl construction around the world, or traditional fair isle motifs. After all, I'm the only one who pulls out knitting during meetings, and usually I'm something of a curiosity ("what's that? It's pretty.").

So how on earth am I to do a speech (in 5-7 minutes) about knitting that wasn't totally facile or boring? Last night, as I was telling Coffeeboy about the Arts and Crafts movement and how it makes me think of knitting, he suggested doing my speech on knitting as the new Arts and Crafts.

Now all you knitters are saying, what's that? Why should I care? Well, the Arts and Crafts movement was a late 19th century movement that started in Britain with elite men who wanted to escape the sense of alienation and malaise brought on by industrialized society. Buying tables and chairs at stores rather than making them themselves made these corporate leaders of an increasingly capitalist world uneasy. So they went back to the land, or at least to the workbench, so to speak, creating beautiful tables, chairs, chests, and other works of art. Think of the popularity today of artisanal bread or farmer's markets, and I think you get a flavor of what these Arts and Crafts leaders were getting at.

Every time I read about Arts and Crafts, I feel a weird chill down my spine when I think of the knitting in my backpack. Why do I knit? Like these 19th century folk, I remain tied to the capitalist order: I still buy my clothes at major stores (and I have no desire to, say, live off the land on a farm, shearing my own sheep to eventually make clothes), but man, it feels good to dance around with a new pair of homemade socks!

Here's where you come in: does any of this resonate with you as knitters? Do you think an audience of non-knitters would find it interesting I'm always interested in how the past sheds light on the present, on where the world we live in came from, so *I* think it's interesting, but I'm a geeky grad student (we gave our Halloween pumpkin glasses. Seriously.) Does my brief description of the Arts and Crafts movement make sense to folks not currently in school studying the cultural and religious history of America? What other contemporary examples can you think of that involve a similar impulse? For visual aids, I'm planning to use both handouts of Arts and Crafts images, as well as a few carefully chosen knitted items on my own body, just for kicks. Nothing risque, of course, though I might go with a hat, scarf, and socks. I think a sweater might be too warm! Thanks for any and all comments you may have!

The Striping Sleeve?
For those of you following the saga of the striping sleeve, I frogged it. Not because of the dye lot changes, though; the friendly knitters at Woolbears and those who hadn't seen this blog said they didn't notice anything when I asked for comments about possible problems. So I decided to plunge ahead and pretend it was supposed to be like that. When I was a few inches from done, I tried on the sleeve and it was just too tight. I suspect I cast on an incorrect number of stitches at the armpit because something looked off. My gauge might have been a little tight, too. So, back to the drawing board with that one!