[psttt. Strangerville Live is this Friday in SLC at 8:00 at Kiln. Get tickets here if you haven't already. We only have a handful left.]

The other day I was sitting with Skylar, knitting, having a lovely time, when he said "you know there are machines that can do that."

I think he was joking, but I'm not totally sure.

The next thing I knew I was having a complete internal meltdown.

"What the hell am I doing?"

"There are machines that can do this."

"There are machines that can do the painstaking labor I often perform through blood, sweat, and tears over the course of several months. But the machines can do it in like, what, an hour?"

Maybe they're even faster. I don't know. I don't know where these machines are. But I assume there are machines that can knit and I assume they can knit much faster than my little old grandma hands. And I assume these machines do it without "mistakes that I'm sure no one will notice but me," which is the official name of every project I complete.

And I know. I KNOW. Sometimes it's just about the journey.


I picked up knitting as a form of winter therapy. I needed something to do on dark and snowy Salt Lake City nights in January when my town gets sleepy and my neighbors hibernate.

I needed something to fill the therapy void that gardening and biking in the mountains fill in other parts of the year.

I needed something that would make me stop hating the planet and my life during a full 1/3 - 1/2 of every single year.

I needed to find projects that didn't require me to sit in front of a computer and type or read words. One that I could be proud of. One that produced a result, even.

Knitting seemed like the best possible thing. I could even be good at it if I tried hard enough. More importantly, I could do it while watching TV. Meaning, I didn't even have to sacrifice the most important relationship in my life for the cause.

So I picked up the knitting.

But machines can do this.

And look. I already knew machines could do this. But there was something about having to realize it the other day that made me wonder: is there some other task machines can't do that I would find more fulfilling? Like, it would be nice to accomplish things that I couldn't just relegate to our current technological dystopian servants.

But then again, could the machines do THIS:




Ok, yes. A machine could do that. But Duncan wouldn't have let a machine make him model it.

Tell me what you do during the winter. Any hobbies that keep you sane?

~It Just Gets Stranger