I fancy a little KIP
When I started to learn how to knit at the beginning of last year it was very quickly recommended that I join Ravelry, the large online community for knitters and crocheters. As well as the overwhelming wealth of knowledge and expertise on offer from the many fibre-loving folk on the forums were a few community ‘in-jokes’ that it took a while to become accustomed with. Among these are the popular acronyms and abbreviations that frequently pop up on the forums, which were all entirely new to me. FTLOR was not, as I had thought, anything to do with falling on the floor and rolling around laughing, but stood for ‘For The Love Of Ravelry’, whilst SABLE stands for Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy.
about to have a KIP
The one that stands out in my mind from the very beginning thought was KIP. People were organising kips – one group of people were going to meet and have a kip in the local park. Had they not been in another continent I might even have travelled to witness the phenomena of a number of people gathering together solely to have a little sleep in the local community land, but I couldn’t imagine why they’d want to have a group kip at all. Soon, though, you begin to pick up that in this instance kip does not mean a light afternoon snooze, but something far more knitterly. A ‘Knit In Public’.
Now, I found this whole idea rather alien. Not because I couldn’t imagine people knitting in public, but because I couldn’t understand why there was a specific term for it. I had not at that point considered that knitting in a public space would ever have been anything other than the norm. I would not have thought twice about knitting whilst I was on the train, or whilst sitting in a sunny park.
I KIP whilst my other half RIP (reads in public)
Being a portable activity that is rather unobtrusive to those in the vicinity, I would never have considered that it was anything other than what all people who enjoyed knitting did quite regularly, and so would not require a specific term. Whether on the sofa or waiting at a bus stop it was all just ‘knitting’ to me. It would seem as natural to me as reading a book in a cafe, scanning the paper on the train commute home , but we don’t RIP when we read in public, or LIP when, with our iPods on, we Listen in public. It still feels strange to me that people feel that there is a need to make a point of knitting in public, rather than just enjoying their knitting wherever they happen to choose to do so.
