Friday 29 May 2015

Has the interest in knitting dropped?

That's the title of a thread on ravelry at present. It veered off course a little, as discussions tend to do, but started out with the premise that many small, woolly businesses are struggling at present and wondering whether that's due to a general downturn in the attraction of knitting as a hobby.

What do you think? Has the interest in knitting dropped? Or is it just the likelihood of buying from a small wool shop that's dropped? Is there such a choice of festivals and shows these days, where you can often get something other than the commercially produced yarns, that knitters save their woolly money up for those and eschew the other stuff? Are people knitting down their stash? Are they ordering online from the big boys? Or have so many small wool shops opened that there's just loads of choice and yarn money is being spread more thinly?

I'm interested to know because we've just had the very quietest week since we opened and I'm wondering why... I think it's partly due to all the above and partly due to the influence of programmes like The Great British Sewing Bee turning people onto sewing rather than knitting. Sewing's so much quicker - I wish I could do it. (Honestly, you'd never know my grandma was a tailoress!) Might be time to put away my knitting needles and crochet hooks and get my old, cheap sewing machine serviced and ready for action...

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