Knit One, Pearl Two, Snad Zero.

Somehow I missed the memo that said that knitting was the new hip thing to do. I was always under the impression that knitting was something that old ladies with billions of cats did. Or that it was an important skill for pre-90s sitcom housewives to have (knitting is important for that plot where our housewife starts knitting baby booties for her pregnant sister in Minnesota, but her husband finds them and hijinks ensues). Instead, it seems that knitting is the new subversive. I've been at restaurants where pierced and nouveau-punk-haired twentysomething women have whipped out their knitting between courses. I've been in the hipster district of Toronto and passed something like four knitting clubs within three blocks. I even saw someone knitting on "Sex and The City," so it must be hip!

I figured it might be some kind of trendy New York thing that Toronto picked up because it's trying to be New York. But then I went to Montreal over the holidays and found that there were many knitters there too, including my pregnant pal, Carrie.

Carrie had been knitting clothes for her upcoming-spawn. She showed me the fancy wool and the fancy knitting book she had bought. Then she showed me the finished product. I was duly impressed since the last time I tried to knit was in the late 80s and all I managed to make was an eight-foot-long, ugly, pink scarf (my mom still uses that scarf...it's made out of indestructable Phentex yarn). I suddenly felt like a slob. I could barely mend my own socks, let alone knit baby clothes! I felt that my homemaking skills were sorely lacking. It didn't matter that I had taught this girl how to make tapenade, or that I could single-handedly fix my kitchen faucet, I was missing the zeitgeist.

Then it got worse. It turned out that all the fancy wood furniture in the loft was made, by hand, by her live-in-boyfriend-and-father-of-her-child, Owen. Owen, who is a medical doctor, makes furniture with his friend who has a workshop. I sat there dumbfounded.

I'm used to people in Montreal insisting that even though they're software engineers, waiters or physicists, they're really jazz musicians, photographers or sushi chefs. I mean, in a way, even I'm a bit that way: I'm a computer scientist, but I'm also a writer and a broadcaster. Except that writing (the way I do it) involves a computer, a dumb story and a chunk of time. And my broadcasting gig isn't really rocket science. It isn't like I sit around and invest hours and days in my craft and run around to find that perfect piece of mahogany (reused, of course, since it's a rainforest tree) or the perfect type of wool for my projects. My projects involve almost no time and no special equipment. I don't understand how a medical doctor, who works in a hospital and is on call a lot of times, can find time and energy to make wooden furniture! And all this knitting and woodworking is crammed in with the Yoga classes, the visits to family (in town and on other continents), the food preparation (they don't eat out) and the cleaning when they aren't at work.

Standing in that loft, with the knitting book in my hand, staring at the handmade duvet that adorned the handmade bed, I felt like the biggest, fattest slob in the world. I buy my furniture at Ikea. I buy my clothes at a mall. I've tried making arts-n-crafts things, but they just look cheap and shoddy because I have the attention span of a three year old. And here's the real issue: I really don't have any desire to learn how to knit or make furniture. It isn't essential to my survival and it's something that can be delegated to someone or something that's better at it than me. I'll write the software and you make the sweater, then we'll exchange the fruits of our labour.

I understand how people may want to knit or make furniture. They obviously feel that they can make something that is of better quality than they can buy and at the same time save money that would otherwise go to evil corporations that use child labour. But I'm a realist. I know that any sweater I knit will have arms of different lengths and will probably unravel in a week. Any furniture I make will have splinters and harm my houseguests. Obviously I could practice until I get good enough at it, but that would involve time and effort that could be put into doing something else, like looking for work or cleaning my apartment or having coffee with friends. And isn't the whole point of the barter system that tasks get delegated so that everyone can have some time freed up? As for the child labour, if I stop buying their sweaters, the corporations will just pay the children less or fire them, and who really wins from that?

So for now I'm staying well away from the hip knitting scene and keep buying my sweaters from the evil corporations, looking for tags that say "Made in Canada" so that I know that their sweatshops are contributing to the local economy.