I met Witt Pratt a few months back at a bi-weekly men’s knitting group I helped put together. He is a masterful knitter who always brings great joy to his work and an endearing humility in sharing his love of the craft. When I started thinking about this Craft issue of White Crane, I knew I wanted to interview Witt as a creator of beauty.

Dan Vera: How did you get started knitting?

Witt Pratt: I guess the first time I started knitting was in 1968, when a friend of my sister’s where we lived in Arkansas taught me a little bit and a lot of strips of simple garter stitch and that was about it till the early ‘80s. I was working on a degree in costume and clothing design and I went to a dinner party with a guy I was dating at the time. I was fascinated with the woman who was having the dinner party. She had a giant loom and big baskets of wool. I was sort of busy looking at all the kinds of fabric she was able to make.

At one point she came over and said, “if you want to learn how to do something with any of this, I’ll teach you.” So I went to the yarn shop the next day and I picked out a skein of yarn. They helped me pick out some needles and I learned how to do a knit two, purl two rib and went off. I never had another lesson with her but that’s what got it started.

It was a nice companion to working on clothing design and flat drafting patterns. Thinking in two dimensions and all of a sudden being able to think in three dimensions in terms of making the fabric.

Dan: Do you see what you do as “craft” or “art?” Or do you make that distinction?

Witt: I think that if there’s a distinction its probably a semantic one. I mean is it “beige” or is it “taupe.” Who knows? I’ve seen examples of knitting that I would probably put in both of those categories. It can be artistic, definitely.

Dan: Do you consider yourself an artist or a craftsperson? Is that a better way to frame it?

Witt: I would probably consider myself a craftsperson. But I should be clear that that’s just my personal preference. It’s not because I do anything differently then my friend who considers himself an artist who uses the same tools. I sort of come more from the “knitting for warmth” category.

Dan: So the emphasis is more on the functionality of the work?

Witt: That would probably be my primary thought. Now that doesn’t mean that it can’t be decorated. I remember reading a reviewer who was at a loss for describing a knitting book who wrote that “Knitters are either architects or decorators. You know which one you are.” And basically, if you’re an architect you’ll like this book and if you’re a decorator you won’t. I personally would like to keep the family warm and if I can make it look nice in the process and express myself artistically while I’m doing that then good for me. I’ve known people to knit giant barn-sized portraits of their grandmother in little squares of tints of brown and grays. Little pixels. You couldn’t call that anything but art. Or little knitted replicas of blue willow teacups. I would have to put that in the art category.

Dan: What do you think knitting has brought to your life and your spiritual practice?

Witt: Well, one of the things it’s brought to me is a visible tangible forum. As a child knitting I was a sissy. And as a grown up knitting, I’m still a sissy. I’m just a big one instead of a little one. There’s a legitimization that goes along with things that were thought of as “sissy” and that are probably still are in many places and by many people.

But the main way I associate it with my spirituality is my belief that God loves it when we make pretty things. And nobody makes pretty like we do. And everyone knows that. Everybody. So, there’s that.

Dan: What do you think about this sudden resurgence in knitting and specifically all of the men who are taking up knitting?

Witt: Well, more and more women are entering and dominating typically male-dominated fields and more men are entering typically women-dominated fields. I’m fully aware of the historical implications of knitting having initially been a historically male dominated craft. But none of us is knitting socks because we have to. We’re doing it because we want to and we want to make them interesting or we’re fascinated by the different ways to make heels. That’s the architecture side.

Dan: When I started knitting, I was struck by the tactile element of the work. I spend most of my days either reading or working on a computer and I found knitting to be a respite from that kind of very engaged interactive activity. There was something about taking the time to knit, this practice that has my hands at work, repetitive at times, but freeing my mind to think and meditate. There are precious few times for that in most of our lives.

Witt: But there is an enormous correlation, as many have experienced and many have expressed, between intense manual activity and mental receptiveness. Knitting can be meditative. But it’s not always. There are times when I want it to be meditative and I know exactly what to make when that’s what I want. But it can also be something to shut other things out. Such as what would happen with a pattern that was sufficiently complex and involved. That means “bright lights, no television, all the lights on, the cat off the bed, the charts all spread out.” That’s focused in an intense way.

Eastern and Western traditions have involved themselves with what sometimes has been referred to as “work meditation,” whether that’s stringing rosaries or planting mint, or making furniture of fruitcake.

Dan: But then there’s the benefit of having something constructive to do while you’re watching that horrible movie on television. When you’re watching the Poseidon Adventure for the twentieth time. Even if you’ve wasted your time, you’ve created something at the same time.

Witt: Well, you know the parts when you should look up.

Dan: Right. The infamous Shelley Winters swimming scene.

Witt: “It’s coming. Let me put my knitting down.”

Dan: I remember being amazed, at a basic level, with the engineering aspect of knitting – that you can take a line, the string basically, and create this dimensionality from it.

Witt: That’s where the fact that it’s left and right brain at the same time can come in handy. You can express yourself all you want with it but in some way at some point for most people who knit, they’re going to have a little math in there. That’s if they want things to fit. It’s also something that can be satisfying pretty much right away.

There was a saying in a children’s knitting book that encouraged these young knitters to remember that it’s only hard until it’s easy. I’ve remembered that many times because as grownups, particularly, its not every day that we ask our hands to do something different. We type, or we write or we trim hedges. Or whatever. So, there can be something about it when you’re first learning that can bring you screaming back to early childhood, probably prelingual memories that we have about accomplishment, or about frustration, or about effort involved in learning how to do something new. We may revisit them as adults learning how to knit.

Dan: We posed the question in this issue about whether craft was a hobby or salvation.

Witt: Well, I think that whether its hobby or salvation or occupation or preoccupation, it depends on how we look at it. I do believe that as difficult as it may be that it is possible for us to decide that we would rather spend our lives expressing ourselves in that way. In my case the expression is with knitting, in somebody else’s case with making really amazing cakes, or whatever. Sometime ago I decided to do that. But it took a conscious decision and it took a lot of conscious effort to bring what had been a hobby or a pastime into a more enriching and focal position in my life.

By its own being, it is creation in motion. Like so many things if we take the time to notice, when you’ve got a ball of yarn, which to many of us represents nothing short of infinite possibility, the world just opens up before you. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have found this for myself. Knitting can be practical, it can be nonsensical, it can be insanely complex or completely simple. There’s beauty in all of it if you take the time to notice it. I’m thankful to be able to notice that and just want for everyone to find something in the world that they can notice that enriches them similarly.

Witt Pratt was born on his mother’s twenty-fifth birthday during a very very hot summer in Memphis, Tennessee. There was no air-conditioning in the city except in the movie theaters. Since 1972, he has called Washington, DC his home. For many years he’s done technical work for knitting publications and taught as a Crafts Yarn Council certified teacher. He loves cooking and has a proven knack for raising well adjusted animals. His partner of the last four years recently finished his first sweater, of which Witt is very proud.

For more information about knitting, visit the website Dan helped create: menknit.net