No Idle Hands
I have bought a couple of knitting books this week. One of them is No Idle Hands by Anne L. Macdonald. It's about the social history of American knitting. I don't know when I will ever have time to read it from end-to-end, but just browsing through it is very delightful. It has a ton of old photographs and a poem on the very last page that I wanted to share with you.
"As incentives for knitting, pleasure has preveiled over duty; fashion has triumphed over thrift; relaxation has edged out industry; creativity has outranked knitting-by-the-book; "working with my hands" long ago nosed out "fear of the devil". The old saw of idle hands becoming the devil's playground fades to a memory, revived with a chunkle by this stanza from "Grandma Says," a 1986 poem:
When Satan moves in with his Cohorts of Sin
Say, "You'll never find me submittin'
You irk me, I find
So get thee behind
And please don't disturb me-I'm knittin'."
And that's what I am going to do this weekend - have a good one.
"As incentives for knitting, pleasure has preveiled over duty; fashion has triumphed over thrift; relaxation has edged out industry; creativity has outranked knitting-by-the-book; "working with my hands" long ago nosed out "fear of the devil". The old saw of idle hands becoming the devil's playground fades to a memory, revived with a chunkle by this stanza from "Grandma Says," a 1986 poem:
Say, "You'll never find me submittin'
You irk me, I find
So get thee behind
And please don't disturb me-I'm knittin'."
And that's what I am going to do this weekend - have a good one.
posted by Claudia | 11/10/2006 10:34:00 PM
1 Comments:
Oh, I LOVE that book. I read it back in the '70's, and have kept it on my bookshelf all these years. It is definitely worth taking the time to read through. I might just pull mine out again now.
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