About YZ Knitting

YZ Knitting is a blog about fiber arts, sort of. A friend of mine told me that I'm wired differently than other people, that this difference shows up in the way I approach my projects, and that I should write about it. I thought about what she said, and realized she's right. I'm having a tremendous amount of fun writing this blog, and will continue it for as long as the fun lasts.

I learned to knit when I was 10, but quickly lost interest (because I was 10). When I was 13, I learned to crochet, but quickly lost interest (because I was 13). I then rediscovered knitting in the fall of 2012, at which point things quickly spiraled out of control and I now have an apartment full of yarn, fiber, knitting needles, a spinning wheel, and a German angora rabbit named Gödel.

I'm also a geek, a nerd, a dork. I enjoy math, science, computers, and logic, in addition to the less-exactingly-defined knitting, spinning, and dyeing. I search for the dividing line between the digital and the analog, and I twist that line into a pretzel. I mix disparate concepts not because the combination makes sense, but because the combination does not make sense, and I want to see what happens.

What does the 'YZ' mean?

Imagine that the space of all possible ideas is three-dimensional. Each point in this space represents an idea. People almost always think along two-dimensional planes within this space, and the further an idea is from their plane, the less obvious it is to them.

In this model, most people are XY thinkers - their thought planes extend along the X and Y axes. I'm a YZ thinker. My thought plane occupies the same space of ideas, but the set of nearby ideas is very different. Not larger or smaller, mind you, just different. As such, people have often told me that I'm good at thinking outside the box, but this is imprecise: I just see a different box, one that apparently has very little overlap with theirs.