knitting in history

Wow, what a crackup this is! Back in the good ole days knitting wasn't just a craft, a vice, or a hobby but rather a necessity. I ran across Erica Lee's knitting website that had some really neat historical knitting photos and knitting artwork.

What happened over the past sixty years that changed the need for hand knitting into a want? Industrialization, mass production, cheap, foreign labor have all combined to produce usable goods that obliterated the need to hand create a lot of products including hand knitted socks. Our desire to knit has been transformed into a hobby that we yearn to spend time on rather than a requirement that we must fit into our day. This transformation is sort of mind boggling if you sit and think about it because this change has come about in really only one generation. Technology preserves our observations and recordings of these social changes, allowing us, no doubt, the ability to look back another sixty years from now and see what other changes have occurred. I sure hope those changes are for the better.