Knitting and Well-being

Abstract

More encompassing than just the facts and figures of physical health, well-being is often used to acknowledge how we feel. The World Health Organization has defined well-being as “an ability to realize personal potential, cope with daily stresses, and contribute productively to society.” This article explores the varied ways knitting can contribute to our well-being. It brings together the authors’ individual presentations from the well-being panel at the 2012 conference “In the Loop 3: The Voices of Knitting,” now reconfigured and reordered as a coauthored paper. Opening the paper are facts and figures—the very evidence of what many of us have felt or intuited—established by Betsan Corkhill and Jill Riley in their joint contribution on the therapeutic benefits of knitting. Angela Maddock then follows, not with the stuff of scientific reason, but with its exact opposite: the symbolic contribution which knitting that is disrupted or troubled can signal in a narrative. My interest in the difficult identity of solitary knitting in literature, and the need to take stock of the current infatuation academic research holds for collaboration, now acts as the final contribution to this dialogue. The outcome is eclectic, the voices varied; but so too are the many ways to consider the contribution knitting can make to our well-being today.

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