Book Review: The Urban Knitter

Chin, Lily M. The Urban Knitter. New York: Berkley Books, 2002.

If you are a knitter, you know Lily Chin. You might love her, you might loathe her (there are those who call her the Tiny Diva, and they are not among her fans), buy you will know her work, whether from Vogue Knitting, Knitter’s magazine, or even Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition.

However one feels about Chin and her work, her skill as a knitter, teacher, designer, fashion industry insider cannot be denied, even without her tireless, and what some might consider tiresome, efforts at self-promotion.

So it is surprising that in a world where knitting is the new yoga, and new knitting books flood the shelves every season, that Chin hadn’t produced a knitting book. Until The Urban Knitter.

It is perhaps not surprising that Chin has titled her book The Urban Knitter. She is known for her efforts (some more successful [knitting on the steps of Sears in a knitted evening dress], some less successful [her Letterman appearance, though that was crochet]) at challenging the stereotypes of knitting as something only grandmothers and geeks do. Chin’s aim is, as she writes, “to dispel that old and dowdy misconception of what a knitter is like” and to reach out to what she describes as a “new audience”, in order to provide them with patterns that appeal to them.

To do this, Chin contacted what she came to refer to as HYUKs: Hip, Young, Urban Knitters. I remember her first call for HYUKs via the internet -- at the time, I fit into her criteria for consideration: I was under forty and I lived within city limits. I was young. Well, young-ish. I was Urban. Whether I was hip or not, well, surely that wasn’t for me to judge.

Because hip is the one concept here that I have problems grasping. A dictionary might tell you that to be hip is to be fashionable, “all the rage”, modern, groovy…trendy.

And that’s the problem. Because the truly hip are not trendy. By the time something hip becomes trendy, the hip have moved on. If you say you are hip, well, you probably aren’t. The truly hip don’t set trends. They are hip, they move on, and the un-hip, the trendy, move in to take up the slack.

This may be my bias, but I think by treating knitting as something trendy, we do knitting a disservice. We don’t consider the community of knitters as a whole, we create artificial divisions where some of us are dowdy, some of us are grannies, but knitting in a modern context is only meaningful if someone Hip, Young, and Urban is doing it.

I would like to doubt that this was Chin’s intention, but this is the impression I am left with, at times, reading the book.

On the other hand, Chin’s intention to work with the HYUKs she eventually chose for the project, to ask them what they were interested in making and why (some wanted to be able to make things they saw in boutiques, but couldn’t afford; others wanted to learn techniques to add to their knitting tool-kit; yet others wanted to be able to combine their knitting interest with a busy lifestyle or work schedule) -- simply by giving knitters the tools and information to achieve their own personal goals, well, this is something work reading about.

Something which, one suspects, should be the goal for all knitters, not just for those who are Urban, or Hip, or Young. On the other hand, there is nothing to stop those of us who are un-HYUK from being inspired to improve our knitting skills, and The Urban Knitter at least has tried to provide a more affordable inspiration (and has suffered from that choice -- some of the book’s critics have suggested that it lacks production values, with its emphasis on text and black and white sketches, and the colour photos only sandwiched into the middle of the book ) for those who are in a stage of their lives where they might not have the disposible income to throw around on some of the prettier coffee-table type knitting books.

It is difficult, as a result, to offer some judgement on the designs -- they weren’t designed for the Average HYUK, each one rose out of the needs or desires of the particular HYUK who wanted it. I personally didn’t find anything to inspire me in the book, whether a pattern or a role model, but that might well be because in the time between the book’s conception and its appearance on the shelves, I have fallen out of HYUK-dom.

If I am honest, I don’t find any of the designs in the book particularly appealing, though there are several that I might consider making (the Beaded Evening Clutch, for example, or perhaps even a variation of the Empire-Waisted, A-Line, V-Neck dress). To the credit of Chin and her HYUKs, the designs don’t have cutesy yet meaningless names, but simply describe what they are, and what, one assumes, was asked for.

In the end, though, I still have a problem with that word “hip”, sprinkled throughout the book like so much salt. My suspicion has always been that if you have to say you are hip, then you probably aren’t. And too much hip, like too much salt, dulls the tastebuds.