Sorority rush is six days of what some later consider hell: whirlwind house tours, loads of small talk and annotated life stories, preference sheets, Greek love expressed by chanting and nights of deliberation that often end as the sun comes up.

For some, dealing with this winter’s rush-induced stress meant turning to an ancient art, one whose sharp needles and long skeins of yarn are more commonly associated with blue-haired grandmothers than college-aged sorority women.

“I hadn’t been knitting for awhile, and then I decided to knit during rush,” says Speech junior Emily Sandberg, “to take out my frustration.”

Sandberg, who first learned to knit while studying abroad in Switzerland at age 15, picked up her needles again after seeing fellow Kappa Delta Erin Sparks, a McCormick sophomore, with yarn and needles during late-night preference meetings.

“She was churning out all this stuff – I was jealous of her,” Sandberg says. “We both just happened to have our stuff there.”

Although Sparks was actually crocheting – the one-needled version of knitting – her reasons for making two hats and two scarves during rush were much the same as Sandberg’s.

“It’s a great way to keep your hands busy when you’re just sitting around talking,” Sparks says. “It’s actually a good stress-reliever.”

Rush or no rush, that sentiment is echoed by an increasing number of college-aged and young professional women who are rekindling an earlier love for knitting or learning the art for the first time as a way to get rid of stress and be productive at the same time.

“Knitting releases a lot of soothing endorphins because of the repetitive motion,” says Eve Christie, the manager and designer at Caroline’s Fine Yarns in Winnetka. “Like running, it’s a very addictive hobby. It’s a very tactile art.”

Christie says her store has seen a substantial increase in the number of young knitters in the past three years. The store’s assistant manager, Meredith Leslie, Speech ’99, is one of them.

“I only started knitting a year ago,” Leslie says. “I like that I can wear what I make when I’m done and it looks fabulous.”

Part of the younger generation’s growing interest in knitting has a lot to do with this style factor, says Gwynne McClure, the owner of CloseKnit, Inc. in Evanston.

“It’s been driven by the fashion industry,” she says. “Simple patterns and big, bulky knit sweaters are back in style.”

Being able to make clothes on her own is what has kept Weinberg freshman Adeline Anobile knitting. Anobile learned to knit in fourth grade in a private school in Switzerland. Recently, she has made several hats and scarves, but her most prized creation is a rust-colored, knee-length skirt knitted with a teardrop pattern.

“At first I didn’t like knitting, but I stuck to it because I wanted to be able to make stuff on my own,” says Anobile, who plans to transfer to a fashion design school in France at the end of this quarter. “I like the fabric you create from it.”

McClure thinks knitting skipped the Baby Boomer generation – herself not included – partially because of the fashion industry’s love affair with synthetic acrylic and polyester fabrics and partially because women “went to work,” leaving what was considered a domestic activity behind.

But knitting is no longer purely domestic. Instead, it has become the activity of choice among young professionals like Brenda Janish, a Speech ’88 and Learning Sciences ’95 NU graduate who now works as a Web designer in Chicago.

Two Octobers ago, Janish founded Stitch ‘n’ Bitch Chicago, a group of women in their mid-to-late 20s and early 30s that meets to knit Tuesday nights at Caribou Coffee, 3240 North Ashland, one block north of Belmont Avenue.

“I was making a lot of baby stuff,” says Janish, who has been knitting since she spent her junior year studying abroad in Ireland. “I wanted to do it in a group.”

Janish checked out the meetings of the Windy City Chapter of the Knitting Guild of America at Lincoln Park’s Sulzer Library but formed her own group when she discovered the Knitting Guild group “was primarily older women.”

Stitch ‘n’ Bitch initially drew five to 10 members per meeting, but attendance grew to as many as 20 per week after Janish posted an announcement about it on webgrrls.com, an online gathering spot for female tech and Web professionals.

After the Chicago Tribune ran a story about Stitch ‘n’ Bitch last June, the group’s listserv gradually grew to its current size of 165 members.

“There are two camps of knitters,” Janish says. “There are people like me, who have been knitting forever and are just now coming out of the closet because it’s acceptable to do in public. And then there are young knitters, college-aged and in their 20s, who are knitting because celebrities are doing it or because they’ve seen friends pick it up.”

Actresses Julia Roberts, Uma Thurman, Cameron Diaz, Winona Ryder and Julianne Moore reportedly spend downtime on the set with needles and yarn. And, according to a February article in the Irish Independent, even tough-looking Russell Crowe knits – one of more than a few men with interest in the art.

The editor of Knitter’s Magazine, Rick Mondragon, is male. And one of the 12 instructors at the Knitting Guild of America’s National Convention, to be held March 12-17 at the Westin O’Hare in Rosemont, Ill., is Barry Klein, the owner of California-based Trendsetter Yarns, a major supplier of European yarns in the Unites States.

And while knitting has a somewhat contested past, some historians attribute the rise of knitting to men, specifically male herders who discovered around 200 A.D. that twine could be made by twisting sheep’s wool. But other historians say the first evidence of knitting is found much earlier, on the edges of cloth woven by the Nazca culture in Peru from 200 B.C. to 800 A.D.

Three small fragments of knitted fabric dating to 200 A.D. were recovered in archaeological excavations at Dura-Europos, an ancient Syrian city founded in 300 B.C. that overlooks the Euphrates River. Although Dura-Europos was destroyed in the third century A.D. by the Persians, knitting survived, showing up again as the craft of choice in socks found in Egyptian tombs dating to the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

Knitting arrived in Europe courtesy of the Arab world around the same time. During the Middle Ages, it – like most other arts and crafts at the time – came under guild control. By the 14th and 15th centuries, knitting had spread to England and Scotland. The popularity of the art carried through to the Industrial Revolution, when knitting, like almost everything else at the time, became mechanized. Machine-knitted underclothes gained ground in the 19th century, and the craft has carried on since then in varying degrees of obscurity.

McClure says she thinks knitting declined in popularity during the last century as a result of the incorporation of electricity, central heating and mass-produced clothing into daily life, shifting the craft from one of necessity to one of leisure.

But, following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the subsequent economic downturn, leisure has become necessity across the United States in the past few months.

“In the last three or four years, and certainly since Sept. 11, there’s been an increased interest in knitting,” says Lauren Sanchez of the Knitters Niche at 3206 N. Southport Ave., two doors north of Belmont Avenue. “People are nesting. People are cocooning. They want to do something creative and close to home.”

But doing “something close to home” doesn’t necessarily mean staying at home. As any knitter will attest, part of the appeal of the art is its portability.

“There was a time when I was spending a lot of time in a car, and I felt really unproductive just sitting there,” says Lisa Glennon, a McCormick senior who has been knitting for about three years. “I started to keep from going crazy in the car.”

And the portable nature of knitting helps it to thrive. After watching the woman beside her knit during a plane ride to Denver, Shelley Mota, who is organizing the fashion
show at the Guild Convention, decided to learn to knit in her early 20s.

“I’ve been knitting on trains and buses for 20 years, and nobody ever asked me about it until recently,” she says. “Now people stop and ask me about it out in public. You can feel them breathing over your shoulder.”

Mota attributes some of the public’s new interest in knitting to the recent bevy of media coverage on the subject. In addition to the Chicago Tribune article about Janish’s group last June, NBC’s “Today” show interviewed a contributing editor of a new knitting magazine on air and National Public Radio ran a piece called “Cool Knitters” in January.

But not all young knitters have taken the impetus to pick up needles and skeins from the media. Some of them, like 13-year-olds Kate Walker and Laura Thompson and 12-year-olds Zuri Baron and Jenna Pollack, just want to knit because they think it’s fun. On a break from a Saturday rehearsal at the Dance Center Evanston on Davis Street, the four girls stop in McClure’s Grove Street store to hunt down some new knitting supplies.

Walker sports a long bluish-purple scarf made by a dancer friend, and Baron asks McClure for advice about starting her first hat.

“On our breaks, we eat and knit,” says Pollock, as Thompson describes the scarf she is working on, a light blue and white number. The conversation turns quickly from scarves and knitting to dancing, and, as the girls discuss their upcoming performance, they bubble with energy.

As Weinberg senior and longtime knitter Carolyn Dicus later explains, “Knitting is a productive outlet for fidget energy.”

Dicus has been knitting since she was a “little kid” and says it interests her partly because she’s “an antsy person” who always has to be doing something.

But more often than not, it’s the “doing something” that keeps most of the driven, career-oriented young women at NU from activities like knitting. Sandberg says she often is too busy to knit while at school.

Weinberg sophomore Lilly Eichner echoes Sandberg’s words; in her life, studying organic chemistry often takes precedence over working on the orange knit hat she started a couple of months ago.

Eichner says learning to knit from her German grandmother as a little girl helped to break down language and age barriers between them. She has continued to knit because, as she says, “It’s relaxing but productive at the same time.”

It’s a feeling Sandberg, whose rush week knitting resulted in what she calls “a really long, really wide scarf,” can understand.

“It gives me something to do with my hands,” she says. “I can’t just sit … I have to be doing more than one thing.” nyou