Theophil Syslo\/Bates College<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n By the lounge entrance, club co-president Martha Reyes \u201923, a mathematics major from Los Angeles, has placed the a big welcome poster on an easel. It shows a cat wearing sunglasses leaning casually against a ball of yarn, with a galaxy and shooting stars in the background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sign makes three promises; maybe call them the “Knit 3 Together” of the club. \u201cBeginner friendly,\u201d \u201cno experience required,\u201d and \u201cmaterials provided.\u201d That\u2019s the core of the club, Reyes says. \u201cKnit Wits is open for everyone,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd for people who don’t know how to knit, we’ll teach them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reyes has been a member of Knit Wits since her first year at Bates, and has watched the club go from a small group in 2019, to being scattered by the pandemic, to a robust gathering of crafters this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We just spend time as a community talking and sharing stories. It’s a really fun time to just come, take a deep breath, disconnect, and have fun.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elle Stogel \u201925, a politics major from Santa Monica, Calif., is the club secretary, and she learned to knit in high school, when her history teacher offered to teach students how to knit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have ADD, and so my hands get super jittery. But when I knit I can just move my hands without thinking and then it gives me something to do and make while I’m just talking to people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Fiki Hunt \u201924, a rhetoric, film, and screen studies major from New York, the club gave her a chance to return to knitting, which she first learned as a young child. \u201cI stopped in high school,\u201d she says. That\u2019s a great thing about activities sponsored by Bates clubs and organizations, she says. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s something you did as a kid, or wanted to always do. Now you can do it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Julia Goldstein \u201923, a biology major from New York City, is co-president with Reyes. Three years ago, as a novice knitter, her first creation was a hat, \u201cthe ugliest thing you’ve ever seen,\u201d she laughs. \u201cUnwearable.\u201d But at the same time, where there had been just yarn, there was now a real hat. \u201cI made <\/em>a hat. That was wild to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other times, knitting isn\u2019t about the outcome but about the experience, says Reyes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cKnitting for me is an excuse to slow down, do something tactile, disconnect, and enter that state of flow, where your surroundings just disappear. It’s just me and the knitting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You can focus on chatting with friends, making your first (terrible) hat, or getting into a flow, where everything disappears except you and the knitting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":153669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[133,11012],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creativity","category-student-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153614"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153672,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153614\/revisions\/153672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2023\/05\/knit_1.53.58_PM.webp\")
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