A soundtrack for knitting

Music has always been a big part of my life. The interests section of my AOL profile (remember those?) in the late 1990s was crammed full of bands, and it was a big thing my husband and I bonded over when we first become friends in college. One of our first conversations went something like, “Have you listened to Pulp?” “Of course! Different Class was one of the greatest albums of the ’90s.” When we first started dating, he introduced me to The Get Up Kids. Later, I took him to a Decemberists concert after hearing them on WFUV, Fordham University’s amazing radio station, and he was hooked. The only thing I miss about commuting to work is flipping on WFUV each morning to hear their eclectic selection. Of course I can listen online, but a lot of my work day involves making and taking phone calls, which is hard to do with music playing in the background.

While the untimely death of David Bowie this week got me thinking about how important music is to me, I had been meaning to write this post for a while (by the way, one of my knitting friends wrote a nice piece on her recollections of Bowie during her work as a music publicist). Knitting may have surpassed certain bands for what I would call the main “interest” in my life, but there are still ways to combine knitting and music.

A while back, I created a knitting playlist on Spotify. I think it might have been prompted by a conversation started by Ridgely of Astral Bath, who had mentioned something in the Yarn Hoars group on Ravelry about a Rhinebeck playlist. (Incidentally, the Astral Bath Ravelry group has a fantastic music discussion thread.) I dug up every knitting- and yarn-related song I could think of, and also found a band called Yarn, which is actually pretty good, when I searched the music app. Here’s the playlist — it’s a work in progress, so definitely comment on this post with any suggestions. I’ve been meaning to hook up my laptop and play it over the PA system at the Rhinebeck Trunk Show, but kept getting sidetracked. Maybe — especially if I can get more than an hour of music — this will be the year.