Franklin Habit, A Long and Winding Yarn

 

92-146. Frank Habit

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and you can go to 92 reportdotcom to sign up for the newsletter for this show, where I’ll send you an email after I publish each episode with the show notes and actually the full transcript. Now today, I’m delighted to be here with Franklin habit, who many of you may have known in school as Frank. So now it goes by Franklin habit. So Franklin, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks. Will so so Franklin, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Franklin Habit  00:43

All right, well, I will be the first person to admit that after graduation, I wandered in the wilderness for a long time. I thought I knew what I wanted to do, probably 10 different times and went off and down 10 or so different blind alleys. Spent a lot of time working in higher ed administration in different ways, and ultimately fell ass backwards into what I do now, which turned out to be the thing that makes me happy.

 

Will Bachman  01:19

Wait, don’t tell us. Don’t tell all. Right, okay, before we get into that, which I want, obviously, we want to explore, sure, just at least list out for us some of the blind allies. So we have just list them out for us.

 

Franklin Habit  01:35

Oh, this is, this is going to make me sound even flightier than I probably actually am in real life. But I thought, I thought when I graduated, I was going to end up in, I was going to end up doing something in museum work, probably archival stuff. I was a fine arts major, so art history was, was my, was my, was my focus? Then realized I didn’t really want to do that. Then there was a period of time when it seemed like about 80% of the people that I knew were opera singers, and I was definitely going down the path of becoming an opera stage director. Got it, got a chance to try that out, working for a brief while with opera San Jose in California. That was such a fun experience that it took me about was about three years before I could even listen to opera again. And there was a there was a web design phase, which actually brought in an income that I could live on. So that was a nice change there. And, oh yeah, it was just all of these, these different little blind alleys. But I spent a long time in web design, online marketing, PR, which sort of typically for me, I wound up working on web design and online marketing when that was a brand new thing, because the university I worked for at the time, I was the youngest person in the marketing office, and so they said, Well, you probably know what the web is, so you’re going to build websites. And so I did that for a while and and that’s what, that’s where I was before I accidentally started doing kind of what I do now.

 

Will Bachman  03:29

Okay, and let’s, let’s get into that. All right.

 

Franklin Habit  03:32

So senior year Lowell House, one of my best friends, turned out to be a veteran knitter. She knew her way around a pair of knitting needles. I thought that was fascinating and also very picturesque. So so our classmate, Eliza Lake taught me the absolute fundamentals of how to knit, and I took to it and did it on and off and on and off and on and off over the years, and then drifted away from it, and then around the time that I was really coming to a crisis point, realizing that marketing and web design were not making me especially happy, pretty much the opposite I that was around the time that blogs became a thing, and I started a blog. I started writing about my knitting in the blog, and then, to my great surprise, the blog took off. It turned out people were very interested in what I was knitting and how I wrote about what I was knitting, and pictures that I took of what I was knitting, and pictures that I drew of what I was knitting, and it was kind of the the golden age for for breaking through as a blogger, and I wound up with a book deal that was good enough that I was able to kiss my lousy job goodbye and. The people started to ask me to write for money, for actual money. People wanted me to take pictures of knitting, to write about knitting and and to teach knitting, which is something that I agreed to do, although I had absolutely no business at the time teaching anybody else how to do anything with knitting needles and yarn. And once I gave up the day job, it just sort of turned out that I never had to go back to it. And that kept me going for a good decade or so of being constantly on. And I swear to you, this is an actual thing, the International Circuit of knitting teaching, that is, that is a thing that exists, knitting and crochet and the fiber arts. They’re a niche, but they’re a pretty big niche with their own with their own culture and their own celebrities and all of that sort of thing. And that’s, that’s what I wound up again, fell as backwards, yeah, into doing it professionally.

 

Will Bachman  06:05

I had a glancing interaction with that world. My wife got really into knitting, particularly when our first child, or son was, was was being gestating, and started knitting stuff for him, blankets and everything. And then her next few kids, she’s and we went to several knitting conferences where I was doing the the watching the kids well, attend all these classes, probably with people like yourself, Baltimore, like Hartford, these knitting conferences, where people know

 

Franklin Habit  06:47

those conferences. She may have taken classes with me. I thought at those shows.

 

Will Bachman  06:52

Yeah, all right. So, so you were, like a knitting influencer, or perhaps still are. So you’re taking pictures, you’re writing about your knitting, and, you know what, how would you characterize, what was sort of distinctive about did you have a particular style, or did you do unusual things, or different colors, or, you know, what was

 

Franklin Habit  07:16

it’s it’s really funny. I get asked this question a fair amount within the field too, like when someone wants an interview. And the fact is that most folks who do what I do have a specialty. So they focus on knitting lace, or they are color people, or they are cable people. I describe myself as I sort of by the time I came along, all the specialties were taken, so I just filled in the cracks in between, but mostly what I realized was that turn turns out that as much as I like teaching, that’s how much people liked learning from me. So I became known as a teacher who was multifaceted. I was really curious. Had a can do attitude that, honestly, that I inherited from my parents, that you know, if you want to make a thing, you find out how to make the thing, and then you make the thing yourself. So I was just sort of doing what I was raised to do in that sense. And it became kind of a generalist. And the the oddest thing that that sort of makes me stand out, is people who are interested in this kind of thing decided that I was funny, which surprised me. Also surprised my mother. You know, I remember my mother asking when I was working on my first book, which was a I did I get this is a thing that exists is a knitting humor book, okay? And, and, and my mother, I remember just looking at me and saying that that’s really, they’re going to pay you money for that, and that’s they’re going to put it in hard covers with a dust jacket. Mom, you know it’s, yeah, I don’t quite understand it either, but that’s what they said they’re going to do. So we

 

Will Bachman  09:04

got to give the book a shout out here. What’s the name?

 

Franklin Habit  09:07

So the the title of the first book was a real a real Lulu that publishers usually choose the names of books, not the authors. So the the title comes from the cartoon that was on the cover of the book, and it was called it itches, a stash of knitting cartoons, and it was still in print not too long ago. These things are harder to track nowadays than they used to be. I’m pretty sure penguin owns the book now the I think, and pretty sure I’m not still in print. I get an occasional weird royalty check out of the ether. But that was, yeah, I’ve done two books, and they were both very silly, because then the second book I was asked to do by a publisher out of New York called sixth and spring, when the same people that published folk. Knitting magazine. When coloring books broke big, they asked me to do a coloring book about knitting and crochet. So I did a knitting and crochet coloring book called I dream of yarn. Okay, yeah, you know. So we have classmates that are supreme court justices and high powered lawyers and discovering cures for things, and I’ve done two extremely silly books about knitting. So that’s my that’s my contribution to the to the world. So far

 

Will Bachman  10:26

you you’ve made your mark, Frank, and I will point out that it is available on Amazon Prime. It’s, well, hey, I’m still there. Okay, available for delivery on within two days. So you get your stash of knitting cartoons, knitting cartoons, all right, so that is, that’s so cool. What was it? I’m sorry, what was the name of

 

Franklin Habit  10:50

the second book? The second book was called, I dream of yarn. I knit and crochet. Coloring Book that one I know is out of print. That’s out of print,

 

Will Bachman  11:00

and the copies you find might have already been colored in, so it’s

 

Franklin Habit  11:04

possible, yeah, or signed, you know, all right, mother love Franklin,

 

Will Bachman  11:11

all those copies you signed for your mom. So, all right, so that is amazing. So you became unexpectedly, your blog took off. And yeah, tell us a little bit about the early days when you just started the blog. Probably you told maybe three friends and your mom or something. And what was, can you just give us almost sort of a week by week or month? But like, what happened? Did just people start posting it and sharing it?

 

Franklin Habit  11:39

And, yeah, it was the oddest. It was the oddest thing I I was I went to a department lecture where I heard the word blog for the first time it popped up. And I thought, okay, so it’s an online journal. So that’s interesting. I’ve tried journals a million times. I always abandon them or lose them, or whatever this one’s online. What the hell I need a something to something to, you know, creative to indulge in at this point. Let’s do that. I didn’t quite grasp this is how dim I was. I didn’t really understand that your blog was going to be just generally visible to anybody. Okay? I really did think that it was almost like, Well, unless you did invite because I didn’t really talk to anybody about the blog. I just started doing it for me, right? And and then the first time that I got a comment, I panicked, because I thought, Well, wait a minute. I don’t know you. Who are you? What’s going on? And it turned out that word was sort of circulating about my blog, and I started getting a little bit of traffic, and then I can tell you the was a couple months into blogging, I was knitting. I had mostly knit small things, and suddenly I decided I was, I was conceived of the desire to knit a sweater for the first time. And so I wrote about the process of working on the sweater a little project diary. And then there was the night that I decided I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was going to try the sweater on. And I was living in Chicago at the time, all alone in a, you know, not a bad building, but like modern concrete, thick walls, sort of, you know, where no one can hear you scream, which is sort of the point of this. So I got into this sweater, which was about three quarters finished, and you have, you have to sort of imagine this that I so I’m alone in my apartment in the dead of night, and I’ve got the body of the sweater over my face, and the two sleeves, which were were pretty far along my arms, were stuck in those and I was just I realized I was trapped in my sweater. And the process of getting trapped in the sweater and then getting out of the sweater without destroying the sweater. I did a blog entry where I included cartoons of myself in this situation, and people went nuts for that, like suddenly overnight, where I had been getting four or five nice comments, I was getting dozens of comments, and that was the first time that people who were professionals within fiber arts and needlework started to pay attention to what I was doing. Even though what I was doing was completely ridiculous, they were sort of into it. Nothing I was doing was that remarkable. It was just they kind of liked how I talked about it. So so it was not long after that, I started then linking up, first online and then in person. There’s a there’s a very large annual sheep and wool Festival, which, again, that’s the thing in Dutchess County, New York, and I’ve been to that. Ah, of course you have, yeah, Rhinebeck, right, yeah. Rhinebeck, yeah. Oh, it’s the place, right.

 

Will Bachman  15:06

So, I mean, if you like wool, there is wool exactly, watch them, carding it and all that kind of

 

Franklin Habit  15:13

exactly sheepdog trials, the whole thing. And a group of, a group of people who, at the time, were all much better known than I was, clubbed together to bring me out to Rhinebeck, just they wanted to meet me. And yeah, so while I was out there, I got to honestly, it was a networking opportunity. It was just like, you know, I have networking opportunities like and it was just that mine tend to involve, like, hot apple cider and like cute sheep, and, you know, they’re very colorful and, yeah. And from there, that was when it wasn’t long after that, I got my first tap from publishing company to write for one of their magazines and then to illustrate for somebody else’s magazine. And I think that was ultimately, you know that, and that’s when things really took off. And it was, it was largely because I, I I had, and I have a lot of strings to my bow. I I teach, I design, I do photography, I I can illustrate all of those little streams together, kind of lifted me up in visibility within that subculture, and it was turned out to be enough for for a living.

 

Will Bachman  16:34

That’s so cool. So you mentioned that that period of your life lasted a decade or so, yeah, keep, keep playing the tape forward. What? What happened? Did you well, then the knitting influencer or, well, I get

 

Franklin Habit  16:48

I mean, I get you. And I’m like, I just what everyone says when you say, Oh, you’re an influencer. Oh, I hate that word, influencer. I gotta just hate it. And I do, you know, I do hate it, but that’s kind of what I accidentally turned into and then the the real big switch for me happened around the time, just again, by good dumb luck, just before covid hit, I was at a I was at a place where I was traveling, pretty much every weekend, I was in a different part of the country, or sometimes overseas, going in person to events to teach and speak. Oh, so you are, like I traveled constantly. You are global,

 

Will Bachman  17:31

international circuit knitting guru, exactly,

 

Franklin Habit  17:35

because that’s the thing that exists, or I should say that it still does, but then covid hit,

 

Will Bachman  17:42

yeah, but just classes like you cannot get in. Some of these classes like my wife would be, I don’t know, it opens at 9am or something, the registration link and 901, these popular teachers are all booked. You know, solid.

 

Franklin Habit  17:58

I that used to that was sort of the position that I wound up in. Is people would, I would get complaint messages saying, you know, all you know, you’re teaching nine classes, and they all all sold out within like 20 minutes. It’s not fair, right? Well, well, gosh, I’m so sorry. I’m so popular, not something I had ever been in my whole life. So that was that was different. But just before covid hit, yeah, I was getting really tired from the travel. I mean, that’s hard on the body. It’s hard on the mind. I knew O’Hare Airport better than my living room, and someone said to me, Well, you should try. There’s this new thing, and it’s called Patreon, and you can have people who subscribe, and you do things online. And I started my Patreon, I think, two weeks before. I mean, when quarantine hit, needless to say, my whole year canceled with within 24 hours, like all of my work for a year was was just gone, right? And but my Patreon took off to the point that, through quarantine, I never really had to worry about the loss of income. I mean, I just kind of kept on trucking, but doing things remotely instead of in person, and found out that I really liked it. It allowed me to get into a lot of things that I had not been able to indulge in too much before, like making videos and doing audio pieces and stuff like that, and taking some of what had been my in person classes and making them available to people who couldn’t be in a classroom with right? That’s cool, yeah, yeah. And ultimately, the net result of that was that, you know, my biggest leap, the reason that there’s such a big gap between your time zone and mine, is that there was a point at which. I realized that I was very unhappy in Chicago, and not just very unhappy in Chicago, but I had grown up in a military family. I had lived all over the country. I had been to lot of different places in the entire world. Never felt particularly at home any place, and then by chance and kind of without even really wanting to, I had to come over to Paris because I had a gig over here, and everybody sort of rolled their eyes. Oh Paris. Oh God, like it’s so over, like no one goes to Paris anymore. I miss. God it is so I came over half hearted, exhausted, and first place in the world I ever felt at home, just completely, as they say, here it was the coup de fudre. I was love at first sight, and did a little bit of thinking and digging and realized that I could do what I was doing here instead of there and then, and nobody is more surprised by this than I am. And then, then I did it. So that’s I’ve been I’ve been in Paris as of earlier this month, four years which no one is more surprised than I am that that happened, or that that’s where I am. But, yeah, so, so now I’m kind of doing the same thing, but from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and in very picturesque you can see me on camera, and can see that here in my apartment, which this building was last heavily updated in the 1860s because it was built in The 1790s but there is not a right angle. Nothing in here is plum. You know the I’m listing starboard, because the floor rolls in that direction. And I just love it. I absolutely love it.

 

Will Bachman  21:55

Can I? Can I take a screenshot here? We could put it on the on the, yeah, sure. All right, let me take a screenshot. All right. Here we go. All right, this is such a cool apartment. You have in the background. There’s kind of a, maybe a mood board with a bunch of pictures pinned up from looks like black and white photos. You have a a mannequin with a hat on it, and there’s some frame buttons, maybe, or something framed up there you got, yeah, yeah, a nice work table with a hat in progress. I mean, it looks like, it looks like a knitting influencers, you know. And I saw your Instagram, which we should mention, and it looks like, are you also doing some kind of additional visit Paris, or I saw some things where it’s like, right?

 

Franklin Habit  22:46

Yeah, yeah. There’s, there’s a an American company called knit stars, and they do seasons of classes and documentaries about notable Needleworkers, and so I will be in season 10, which launches in November. So I was actually really that was like an out of body experience, because I had filmed classes before. There used to be a company called craftsy, and I did a couple of video classes for them, but knit stars does the class which, which we did in here, but they bring in a professional cinematographer. So there, but there’s your classes, but then there’s also your your lifestyle episode, which was just Franklin in Paris. And what’s your Paris? Franklin? Show us. Show us Paris through your eyes, which is how we ended up wandering through perilous cemetery, because it’s one of my favorite places to go, and I I’m almost certainly the first person in a season of knit stars to take them to see dead people. But you know that’s you wanted my Paris. It’s not Emily’s Paris. It’s very different. So yeah, tell us

 

Will Bachman  24:02

about your Instagram. I think you have something like 29,000 followers. What are something like that?

 

Franklin Habit  24:07

Yeah, I’m around, yeah. What do you post? I was a late comer to Instagram, and it’s, it’s a real it’s a real mix. There are people actually to get after me that I don’t post about knitting in every post, your algorithms want you to be identical, identical, identical, identical, and I’m too flighty for that. So mine is a mix of stuff I encounter in daily life in Paris, one of, one of the things I’m always posting about is animals in my neighborhood, because we have a lot of very, very like, particularly working animals in my neighborhood, like the cat at the dry cleaner and the dog at the pharmacy. I just that’s one of the things I love about my neighborhood. So I post that. But then I also, I do post a lot about the needlework that I’m doing. So as I progress. Through pieces of knitting or embroidery or whatnot. I love to post about that. It’s, it’s sort of a very abbreviated version of what my blog used to be. Just this is what interests me. Here’s what’s in front of me. I hope this will interest you as well. And, and, yeah, it’s, it’s, it really is odd though, that the people, that there are people I will get complaint messages saying, Well, you don’t post about like knitting every day, like, well, I don’t always feel like posting about my knitting every day. So if you’re following me, you know this is, this is what you’re going to get. Yeah, yeah.

 

Will Bachman  25:42

What is it do you think about Paris that makes you feel so at home?

 

Franklin Habit  25:46

There the weirdest sensation that when I got here, it was, I’ve said this to to my friends who kind of roll their eyes in a very affectionate way. When I got here, it was like someone had asked me, okay, what kind of city do you want? What should it have? How should it be laid out? What should it look like? And then they built that, and that just turned out to be Paris. I, I get bored very easily. And my my old art history days at Harvard have really never left me. I mean, I never stopped loving the field. I never stopped, honestly, I never stopped studying. And where can you find more of that at your fingertips than at Paris? I mean, I one of the first, first things that I did when I got here was I got a membership at the louver and so now I actually wrote an article about this for a website called Modern daily knitting called so you want to knit at the louver, and it’s about my favorite places to drop into the louver, and like where the good seats are in, kind of the less crowded rooms where the seat is comfortable and the light is good, but you also have pretty things around You to to look at, because that’s the kind of thing that I can do here. And yeah, there is so much that interests me, even as sort of, you know, when I lived in Chicago, I was constantly having to explain myself and what I liked and what interested me to people in Chicago. I people would ask what I did, and when I tried to explain it, I would sort of get withering, you know, like, that’s not really a job. That’s, you know, sort of walk away in Paris. I’m not even, like, I wouldn’t make the top 50 list of, like, freaky, weirdest jobs just in my neighborhood. And so I just love it, like I actually fit in here. It’s, it’s nice to finally found a place where I fit in, and there’s an IT, and I am surrounded by more stuff that interests me than I can possibly do.

 

Will Bachman  27:54

Okay, I want to hear about that. So other than actually knitting, which you can do when you’re out and about, yeah, how are you sort of filling your days when you’re not at the loop?

 

Franklin Habit  28:07

What’s kind of a lot of stuff like that. I mean, Paris is a great walking city, and I’ve always loved to walk, and it is wild to me that as much as I walk, I am still finding hidden beautiful spots and interesting spots, not even 10 minutes from my apartment. Now, after four years, I found a sort of hidden Fountain Square, like seven and a half minutes from my front door. A couple of weeks ago, this beautiful absolute like, I didn’t know it was there. It’s kind of off in its own little niche, absolutely gorgeous. I see I’m finding stuff like that. So lots of walking, lots and lots of walking over here, knock wood, at least for the moment. Tickets to performances are much more reasonable. So here I’m able to go to to the opera de Paris, the Opera Comique, to theater, even to the comedy Frances regularly without breaking the bank. And then there, there. I do spend a lot of times in museums and galleries too. It’s just there are, I can’t remember what the crazy number of museums there are in Paris is exactly, but I can’t keep up with the shows that I want to see. And that’s aside from the fact that, for example, there is a dedicated library of design that I have a reader’s card for and a researcher’s card for, called the biblioteca frnae. That where I can go and I can say, Okay, I want to look at art nouveau wallpapers. And they’ll bring out into the research room like a stack of Art Nouveau wallpaper sample books. And you know, here you. Go have fun. So that’s the kind of stuff. I know. It sounds awful. Probably anyone listening to this at this point is wanting to know where to send, you know, like support, you know, thoughts and prayers for the life that I lead.

 

Will Bachman  30:14

But okay, that’s not my take. I mean, I, am totally fascinated by this. And I think, actually, on the contrary, a lot of listeners are probably saying I would love to quit my ex job, and that is what I would love to be doing instead. So I’d love to hear a little bit about how you either maybe consciously or unconsciously, when you’re out and about in the louver in the dough and the other museums, how are you sort of picking and taking up little ideas to maybe incorporate into your textiles? If that’s a conscious thing that you’re doing, or is it?

 

Franklin Habit  30:58

Well, it’s, you know, a lot of the cliches come into play here, because they actually really do work. I’ve got notebooks, okay, and I also use my phone as a notebook. I do. I do a whole lot of it takes me, if I’m walking to get somewhere, actually, for real, like I have an appointment or I need to get to a particular shop to buy something, I always have to build in extra time, instinctively. Now, because I’m going to stop and take pictures of something, there’s going to be something that, oh, wait, I need that. Oh, and I’m going to get, you know, and it’ll be a little bit of tile over here. It’ll be a detail on a building over there, or so there’s, there’s stuff like that constantly, and I have just developed through all these years of a large part of a large part of what I do has been showing people stuff online for so long that, you know, that’s an occupational tick that I’ve developed, is I am just constantly looking like my eyes are always open, Looking for something that this is going to sound so unpoetic, but it’s still really true, like something I can use, yeah, sure, I can

 

Will Bachman  32:09

use that. So it’s not just looking at paintings and seeing some, you know, someone, someone’s clothing in that, some dress, but it could be piece of architecture, a piece of furniture in a shop, tile.

 

Franklin Habit  32:25

Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean a lot of, a lot of the colors that I am playing with. I mean that the mood board that you mentioned behind me, it’s honest to god, yeah, I’m the kind of person has the mood board, because that’s where I will put little bits and pieces that I brought home like a magpie. And when I see them together, I start to notice like, oh, okay, I’m really looking at a lot of colors like this, or a lot of textures like that, or a lot of forms like that. And so that’s all raw material. And then how can I transform that into into something else. It’s just that, instead of having Grand Designs for big paintings or things like that, that raw material for me, sometimes, sometimes it’ll end up in a pair of mittens. Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  33:16

Now you did say earlier that you’re the one who sort of filled in all the cracks where other people had specialties. I am curious, though, in terms of what gives you a great deal of satisfaction? In particular, I can imagine that there’s multiple dimensions. One might be using some really interesting color combination. Another might be designing some kind of structure that was complicated and mathematical to create. So there might be some other dimensions. What? What are the dimensions where you get particularly excited, or maybe you’re particularly proud of, you know, doing some innovations in some area to talk

 

Franklin Habit  33:57

to? Oh, sure, yeah. So one of my most popular classes, one that I taught for ages, and now I’m in the process of, kind of gradually turning it into something that my that my patrons have access to online, is a lot of folk traditions in knitting in lot of different places across the world, developed systems that were often sometimes they referred to as pre literate methods, because they are, for example, a way to knit a sock that you can communicate to someone. Sometimes, this would have been a child. How do you teach them how to knit a sock when they’re not able to take notes and they’re not able in to read or write? A sock is actually pretty complex piece of engineering, a knitted sock. And so how do you communicate the way that this is done? What I wound up doing was I had a class that I very proud of, that I taught a lot, and that students would kind of walk out of the class feeling, you know, like Dizzy in the head, and, you know, sometimes really excited, jumping up and down. And what it boils down to is, I was able to put together this class where, in the course of the class, we would look at these proportional methods, where everything in the piece of knitting would boil down to, let’s to really simplify this for for this setting, just like a key number, like the number of stitches you begin with. Everything that you do throughout the rest of making that garment is going to be a multiple of that number, or a certain fraction of that number. And then there will be certain very basic geometric shapes like squares and triangles that you will create all, all, all based on that beginning number. And in that way, we would go through the method for doing a hat, to doing a sock and to doing a mitten. And these wouldn’t just be, this is how you make each of these, but it would be you can make each of these to fit an individual human being, a particular person you can knit to fit, as we would say, using each of these methods, all of which are very easy to memorize, and the students would realize what we sort of the through line was not only how much you wouldn’t think there would be a whole lot in common between how you knit to fit your head, your hand and your foot, but it was wild how often the same structures repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and the wildest thing and then this was really proud, because this actually did bring me back to Harvard. Was I would talk about the Greek school sculptor polyclitus and his canon, which was system that he came up with for divining the perfect proportions of human body. Beginning effect, I’m oversimplifying, but effectively with like the length of the joint of the little finger, the tip the joint at the tip of the little finger, like you would start with that, and from that, you would build an entire perfect human body. And that would all and so it was. It all became this big, beautiful, like web, big, beautiful circle of everything being connected. And there was something about that that just it got the students very excited. And even though it wasn’t an invention of mine, the class was a synthesis of all of these systems that I had learned and studied from all of these different places. And so you have this ancient idea showing up in a craft that, honestly, one of the interesting things about doing what I do is, how many people think it’s stupid, like, they just think it’s really, you know, like knitting, like it’s, you know, this dumb thing that sad people do. You know this, the stereotypical knitter still is an old maid who, you know, lives alone with her cat. Thing is, I’ve met a lot of those women, and they are some of the happiest women I have ever met in my life. So, you know, here’s to them. They think it’s just kind of stupid. And the fact is, it is wildly broad and deep, and even if you stuck to just knitting, you can study it for a lifetime, and you’ll never get to the bottom. It’s, it’s, it’s all there, you know? And so you have all of this mental stimulation, and then at the end, you also have cute mittens, you know? What’s not to live

 

Will Bachman  38:55

I am. My intuition is that some of that attitude that you’re talking about is, is a bit of it is kind of very kind of a gendered perception of this, Oh, absolutely, like, absolutely, you know, a guy who has a hobby of making, like, fine furniture at home, high, very finely, you know, drawers and stuff. You know, has his own workshop. Most people would say, like, Oh, that’s cool, right? That’s like, a legit oh yeah, oh yeah. Talk to me about that. I mean, you’ve probably, obviously encountered this quite a bit, this guy,

 

Franklin Habit  39:32

oh yeah. I mean, it’s to the point that, I mean knitting is there. The the gender perceptions are and and prejudices and preconce are so strong that actually, when I do like, if I do an interview with someone in the field, I have a standard thing now where I tell them, right off the bat, I will not answer the question, what is it like to be a man who knits like I just won’t answer that question, because that was the only question I would get asked. We would never talk about anything else that, you know, like, what am I actually doing? Right? And it, you know, very much like the flip side of, you know, like any woman who, for example, like, you know, to pull an exam. My dad is a car guy, yeah, like any, any woman who shows up in one of his mechanics magazines is always like. So what’s it like to be a woman who knows what makes a car go? You know, it’s kind of the that version. But yeah, it’s considered to be, it’s considered to be a female centric activity, and because of that, and largely, solely because of that, it gets looked down on. Yeah, and it’s really funny that sometimes people will try to, I think they’re trying to make me feel better, and they’ll say, Well, you know, I mean, you know that it was Irish fishermen that invented like cabled sweaters, which, by the way, is not true, not true at all. Or, you know, a lot of male surgeons like knit to keep their fingers Nim, which is also not true, and I teach a lot. I’ve taught a lot of surgeons. I’ve taught NASA engineers. I’ve taught all kinds of people. You know? I’ve also taught school lunch ladies. The fact that it is associated with women makes people tend to look down on it. And one of the things that I’ve had to be honestly really conscious of, or that I try to be conscious of, is to not take up oxygen that I don’t deserve. You know, I have occasionally disinvited myself from panels or stepped out of spotlights or whatnot, because I was in line to get credit and attention, where there actually was a woman who would have been a better person to speak to on a given subject, but the optics were like, will it be more? More people will be interested if it’s a guy talking about it? So it’s been, yeah, that the whole question of gender and knitting is just, it’s constant, something that I always have to think about in it, it, and being a guy who knits can be good sometimes, and sometimes it can be bad, in terms of, you know, what it does for me in terms of my career,

 

Will Bachman  42:18

yeah, yeah. Like, someone who’s just kind of knitting back and forth, trying to make basically like a rectangle shape. I don’t know, I imagine that’s kind of straightforward, but seeing my wife at her level, which was, you know, she was pretty serious about it, doing these kind of complicated shapes where it’s being tapered and expanding in holes. There’s a tremendous amount of just mathematical thinking and three dimensional thinking. It’s, oh yeah, just wild to like, just tell us a couple things that people who have not really seen this world about the level of levels of complexity or decisions or options, or when you say it takes a lifetime of study, just give us a little bit of flavor around that.

 

Franklin Habit  43:10

Well, you have the same considerations that you would have when it comes to clothing, the human body through something, through sewing, for example. So if you think about how complex it is, for example, to sew a made to measure shirt or a pair of pants for someone, I mean, when you consider that most of us nowadays don’t make our own clothing, we buy clothing off the rack in standard sizes, and how few of us are able to actually buy clothes that really, truly do fit. When you are knitting, you have the option, I mean, you can follow patterns, and patterns are written for standard sizes. There’s a there’s a sizing chart that professional designers are supposed to knit to in order, so that people will have some idea of how, how how large or small things will be, what the proportions will be. But if you really want to make things that will fit you, you have to become very cognizant of your body shape and how it works and what you like. And then there are. There is a galaxy of techniques, some of them mathematical, some of them have to do with the way that you approach the structure of the fabric that are required to either make patterns of your own that will fit you, or to alter patterns so that they will fit you better. You know, if the pattern was written for in my case, I largely stuck with knitting out of self defense. I’m five feet three inches tall. Okay, nothing off the rack fits me. I wanted sweaters for the first time in my life, I wanted sweaters that would actually fit me. So I decided I was going to have to make them myself. So you have you. Just the question of covering the human body in a in a fitted garment is in and of itself. It’s, it’s, there’s an entire art form. There’s a people spend a lifetime studying tailoring. People can spend a lifetime studying knitwear, as knitwear as well, and it can lead you down a garden path to the point that one of the things that’s sort of out of the frame, that you can’t see here, that I had to, that I had shipped over with me, is my spinning wheel. Because when you get interested in yarn, you tend to then become interested in what the yarn is made of, and then you realize that suddenly you know, like 20 people who’s who are shepherds, which most people don’t know, one person who’s a shepherd. I know dozens and dozens of people who have sheep and alpaca and llama, and you start to think about, where’s the fiber coming from? How are the animals being treated? What impact does that have on the environment? And, yeah, it just, it’s rabbit holes. The whole thing is just one rabbit hole, or branch in a maze, or, you know, whatever metaphor works for you. It’s, it never ends.

 

Will Bachman  46:17

Let me ask you a question about Harvard. Are there you’ve mentioned a couple times your fine arts degree. Tell us about any classes or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way?

 

Franklin Habit  46:32

Oh, sure. Okay, so Wow boy, we were there a long time ago, weren’t we? Oh, jeepers. So the there was a wonderful professor whose specialty was Italian Renaissance architecture, James Ackerman and I took his class on the Italian Renaissance villa, and that class, it was his ability. He did not just get up and dryly deliver his lectures one by one, sort of in a series. And you started here in the syllabus, and you got to there in the syllabus, and then you were all done. He connected everything constantly. It was, it was like, you know, I imagined his office. I never got I never went to his office hours. Very stupid of me. I was too in awe of him. But I imagine that he had the sort of crime investigators bulletin board with pictures of villas and, you know, red yarn running from one to the next to the next to the next, because that was how good he was. And I absolutely love that there was John Sherman, who was focused on it was the Michelangelo expert, and his style of lecturing was very stylish for one thing, very, very beautifully expressed. And he also was wonderful at getting into the research side of things. He treated all of the students like Junior art historians. And the thing was that you were going to learn, this is how you do a micro history of a painting. This is how you do you know, this is what an art is how an archive works. This is what you need to do when you need to get at a painting. This is how you like talk your way into the and that sort of thing has helped me out, because actually, a lot of the work that I do is with textile history now, so I work with a fair number of 19th century knitting patterns, and that’s really in the 19th century, is where the written knitting pattern is pretty much born in the 19th century. So I’m going back to the beginnings of of that in a lot of my work, and that in textile history, the research that I know how to do, I largely know how to do because of him. And then finally, my my junior tutorial was with Seymour slive, the big Rembrandt guy, and I learned more in 30 minutes, one on one with Seymour’s live in his office than I think maybe a lot of art history majors learn in four years like that man was incredible, and I will never forget. Oh yeah, this, this might have been the pinnacle of my Harvard education. So we were in he had a beautiful office in the fog, and I don’t remember what brought it up, but I said something about one of Rembrandt’s religious paintings, and was trying to describe it. And he said, You know, it’s really impossible to appreciate the good stuff when you haven’t seen and you can bleep this if you have to, when you haven’t seen the crap. Although he did not, he didn’t say crap, yeah. And so he’s come with me, and he took me down into like the cellars of the fog, down in the vaults, where a lot of stuff goes after don’t let this get out. I’m sure this is a big secret, where a lot of paintings go when someone leaves Harvard a bequest of a collection, and there’s like, one really good thing, and then there’s like, 15 god awful Renaissance Madonnas. But the collection can’t be split up for some reason. So he’s like, let’s go look at some really awful Renaissance art, and we did that. And he’s like, pulling things off and, like he said, because you can’t appreciate what was great about a period unless you look at the crap. And that has stuck with me forever.

 

Will Bachman  50:38

Awesome, man. That is an awesome story, I am an all star. Oh, what a great story. I’ve thought for a long time museums should do that. They should show you like, Okay, here’s the Rembrandt, the Van Gogh, but then they should show you a bunch of, like, just mediocre stuff. Wholeheartedly agree that they should do that. They should have All right, so I could keep asking you more about I think this is so awesome. People say, Oh, what good is an art history degree? Well, you become a knitting influencer, a global knitting influencer.

 

Franklin Habit  51:06

That is the natural pipeline. Is a natural history to knitting influencers. Very Yeah, so awesome,

 

Will Bachman  51:13

Franklin, tell us again, your the best ways to follow you online. Oh, okay, Instagram here. Let’s share whatever other

 

Franklin Habit  51:21

place. Sure, absolutely. So I am on Instagram and threads at Franklin dot habit. So there is a dot there between the first and last names because somebody else, for some reason, had already taken Franklin habit. I don’t ask me why. So Franklin dot habit on Instagram and threads. I’m also on blue sky, just search my name and I’ll pop up. And if anybody’s interested in kind of the the white hot center of what I do these days, my Patreon is at patreondotcom/franklin habit, and you can see what I do there,

 

Will Bachman  51:57

and we will include those links in the show notes, Franklin, thank you for joining today. What a great conversation.

 

Franklin Habit  52:03

Hey, absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me. You.