Pride in the wool: the rise of knitting

Almost 10 years ago this newspaper, like so many others, declared knitting the next big thing. The craft was, it said, "the biggest thing since sliced bootlegs". Ever since this early (albeit dubious-sounding) fanfare, whenever a pretty girl/D-list celebrity picked up a set of needles, you were guaranteed to find headline after headline proclaiming knitting the new yoga, or the new black, or the new whatever.

But despite this decade-long reign over the lifestyle pages, the last 12 months have been particularly good for knitting. Peter Fitzgerald, a retail director at Google UK, says that while online searches for knitting-related terms have grown steadily since 2004, the growth this year has been really noticeable. "Our data shows that searches for knitting have increased over 150% just this year," he says. The term "knitting for beginners" has increased by 250%.

Sales of yarn in John Lewis haberdasheries are significantly higher than last year: figures for luxury Germany yarn brand Gedifra have risen by 126%, while Rowan yarn is up 57%. Worldwide, Rowan yarn sales have just about doubled. What makes knit one, purl one so very 2011?

My money – or at least a few chips – is on the fact that it's no longer something owned by the east London hipsters who knit in pubs or on the tube. Rather, it's something that normal, everyday people are willing to try their hand at. Lauren O'Farrell – founder of the UK's largest knitting club, Stitch London, and author of forthcoming book Stitch London: 20 Kooky Ways to Knit the City and More – agrees. "We changed our name from 'Stitch and Bitch London' to 'Stitch London' about 18 months ago and it's made a massive difference to the amount of people who attend," she explains. "It's taken it away from being hip and trendy and made it a regular thing. I think knitting generally seems much more accessible to everyone these days."

The mainstream media has certainly had its part to play in this. Middle-of-the-road TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp relieved knitting of a great deal of cool by featuring it on her Channel 4 craft show in 2009, and mass publishing gave the craft its stamp of approval in 2010 when Penguin books put out its first knitting book since the 1950s, Jenny Lord's Purls of Wisdom. Two craft magazines – Mollie Makes and Making – have launched in UK newsagents in the last year and, as Emma Irving of Coats Crafts explains, there's been a huge rise in coverage in glossy magazines too. "We're doing a lot more work with homes magazines," she says. "A lot of people have just realised that they can create that crafty, vintage, Cath Kidston look themselves."

Advertising (see the cute video above) has brought knitting to the masses, with everyone from Vodafone to Toyota, Nintendo and the Scottish government using the activity in 2010 and 2011 marketing campaigns.

Knitting 2.0

Clearly, the rise of the internet – of blogging, YouTube (it's much easier to learn knitting from a video than a book), Facebook, Twitter and handmade marketplaces such as Etsy – have contributed to the rise in knitting's popularity since early 2003. But it's some of this year's specifics that have acted as catalysts for the most recent surge. "Ravelry, a huge social network for knitters, has recently come out of beta mode," O'Farrell explains, "which means you can see what it's about, and what fun is being had, without having to create an account. The launch of Facebook pages has been huge for knitting too. Every knitting shop, group and organisation I know is on Facebook now."

Anj Medhurst, of web-based yarn shop Meadow Yarn, has witnessed the effect herself. "The whole blog/online craft scene is incredibly important to our sort of business at the moment," she says. "We are really able to feed off the links between blogs, community sites like Ravelry, Facebook and Twitter, and make them all part of our customer service ethic. Offers, news and sales can all be spontaneously disseminated, which adds to the community feel."

Irving makes an interesting observation about the role of the web in reviving interest among more stereotypical knitters. "What has made a huge difference is that traditional knitters, the older group, have very recently found the internet. They've opened up a door to a world of craft they didn't know about. They can look at blogs, buy different types of specialist yarn, find all sorts of patterns. It's a big re-education for them and they are doing it in their droves."

Offline, meanwhile, a shaky economy is driving people towards crafts such as knitting. Not because it's cheaper to make clothes than buy them, mind (it's not). Instead, says Juliet Bernard, editor of The Knitter magazine, it's because taking up a hobby is a cheap form of entertainment: "The obvious reason is that, with everyone having less money to go out or buy things for themselves and their home, they turn to craft."

Bernard also thinks knitting taps into a spirit of manufacture now missing from our daily lives. "With so many of us working in the service, management, digital and creative industries we don't actually 'make' anything," she says. "So whether it's knitting or making jam, the pride in being able to stand back and admire something that we have physically produced is incredibly satisfying." Professor David Gauntlett, author of Making Is Connecting, agrees: "Nowadays people feel a growing need to be creators of the things, not just consumers."

And as we spend more of our time than ever online – communicating, working, shopping and playing virtually – knitting offers something so many of us are deficient in: a connection to the here and now. "People want to connect to the real, physical world, with each other, and the world around them, and picking up something as simple as a couple of needles and a ball of yarn can help do that," says Rosy Greenlees, the executive director of Crafts Council. It has been argued that knitting improves stress levels in a similar way to mindfulness, and 2011 has arguably been the year ordinary citizens turned their attentions to the benefits of that.

Knitting up a storm

The recession, this need to create, the thirst for reality – certainly, these explain the rising interest in craft generally. But not all crafts are equal and, according to Google, while dressmaking queries stand at about 100,000 in the UK, and sewing at 600,000, knitting queries have reached over a million a month. There must be more to it.

The answer comes partly from fashion. "You just have to look at the catwalk to see that major designers like Vivienne Westwood and Christopher Kane are putting knitwear, especially crochet, back into their main collections," says Coats's Irving. "It filters down to the collections we offer, and to the high street too." Consumers are seeing more knitwear in the shops and wanting to replicate it using their newfound crafting skills.

Last year particularly, the lust for knitwear was greater than ever, fuelled by some magnificent autumn/winter 2009 and 2010 collections (think Mark Fast's infamous cobweb dresses) and the launch of the first Wool Week, an awareness campaign from the Campaign for Wool. Support from Prince Charles and high-street giants such as John Lewis, Harvey Nichols, Selfridges, Jigsaw and Hobbs ensured many column inches of coverage from the likes of this newspaper and ITV's This Morning (yes, I'm afraid that is me you can see cringing in front of Phil and Holly in the video above). The organisation claims to have reached 164.5 million people with its "wool is wonderful" message and expects to target more later this year with the autumn launch of the Love Wool campaign. The Clothes Show did its bit too: the 2010 edition played host to the new "Sknitch" zone (that's the area for sewing, knitting and needlecrafts to you and me).

We mustn't underestimate the impact some of the more unique contemporary knitting practices have had on the nation's craft habits. As royal wedding fever hit the world in April, so too did Fiona Goble's Knit Your Own Royal Wedding book, which sold a whopping 45,000 copies (surely, aside from brand royal family, the biggest winner of the whole shebang?). And graffiti knitting – or guerrilla knitting, yarnbombing or yarnstorming, depending on who you're talking to – has also seen a surge in popularity in the UK since my own guerrilla knitting group, Knit the City, started decorating London's streets with woolly delights back in 2009. Both phenomena have garnered a decent amount of coverage over the last year, so even if the Facebook or the fashion thing didn't whet your appetite for a little knitting, surely the sight of a stitched-up Prince Philip or a yarn-covered statue would prompt even the most cold-hearted anti-knitter to reconsider their stance and pick up a set of needles.