How Knitting Became a Hobby and Why That Matters for Your Job

When knitting stopped being an economic necessity, it transformed from a survival trade into a wealthy woman’s hobby, and the same fate may befall modern creative work if AI automation isn’t managed carefully.

Summary of Lace and Labor. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:04 — Hand knitting is economically irrational—yarn costs far more than factory-made clothes, making it impossible to profit from even if you sell finished garments.
• 00:02:43 — England’s Queen Elizabeth I actively rejected the knitting machine patent in 1589 because she feared mass unemployment and potential peasant uprisings from displaced hand knitters.
• 00:03:12 — The real motivation wasn’t empathy but self-preservation: authorities worried thousands of starving, jobless knitters would spark violent rebellion.
• 00:03:56 — Between 1800 and 1811, weavers’ weekly wages in Lancashire collapsed from 25 to 14 shillings as new machinery eliminated skilled workers, leading men to form the Luddite movement to destroy machines.
• 00:04:48 — Luddites weren’t anti-technology for its own sake but specifically opposed to automation that destroyed livelihoods without regard for human welfare.
• 00:05:22 — Once machines perfected knitting and made sweaters cheap, hand knitting lost all economic value and transformed into a leisure activity for wealthy women with time to spare.
• 00:06:12 — Crochet uniquely resisted mechanization because its structure fundamentally requires a single hook working one loop at a time, making it impossible for machines to replicate.
• 00:13:52 — Historical lace makers, predominantly young girls and women, worked in brutal conditions for extremely low wages despite creating highly valued luxury goods they could never afford themselves.
• 00:32:51 — Irish immigrants spread hand crochet techniques globally including to America, Lebanon, Japan, India, and the Philippines, enabling women to emigrate and escape colonial rule during the Great Hunger.
• 00:39:33 — Workers facing automation can’t outpace technology forever, but strategic adaptation—finding what machines can’t do yet and migrating to better opportunities—provided temporary survival until displacement became inevitable.

In depth

Why the crown sided with cheap labor over efficiency

The instinct to read Elizabeth I’s refusal to patent William Lee’s knitting machine in 1589 as an act of compassion doesn’t hold up under Koma’s account. The queen worried aloud that mechanizing knitting would strip a living from the poor who depended on hand knitting to survive, but the podcast is explicit that this wasn’t tenderness toward workers so much as fear of what hungry, displaced workers might do next 00:03:09. A mass of jobless knitters was a political liability, not a moral concern — the crown wanted to avoid a peasant uprising, not protect a craft 00:03:12.

That same calculus reappears two centuries later with the Luddites, whose grievance is often flattened into blanket technophobia. The show pushes back hard on that reading: wages for Lancashire weavers were cut nearly in half between 1800 and 1811, falling from 25 to 14 shillings a week as machinery replaced skilled hands 00:03:56, and it was that collapse in livelihood — not a hatred of gears and looms — that sent men out to smash equipment under the invented banner of “Ned Ludd” 00:04:12. The point made repeatedly is that Luddism was targeted: destroy the machines that erase your wage, not machines as such 00:04:48.

What’s left unresolved is whether delaying the machine ever actually helped anyone long-term. The episode concedes that once a technology exists, it cannot be un-invented — it can only be slowed 00:03:19. Hand knitters bought themselves time by inventing techniques like Fair Isle that machines couldn’t yet replicate, but the machines eventually caught up anyway 00:03:29, and ownership of the machines then shifted power to men who alone were allowed to own property 00:03:36. The delay bought adaptation time, not a reprieve.

The one stitch machines still can’t fake — and why that’s a mixed blessing

Crochet’s survival isn’t sentimental; it’s structural. Because it’s built one loop at a time off a single hook rather than two needles working parallel rows, there’s no way to mechanize it the way knitting was mechanized 00:06:12. That structural stubbornness is presented as almost the last redoubt of hand labor in a textile economy otherwise fully automated — a rare case where the craft, not the worker, won a lasting exemption from the machine.

But the episode is careful not to romanticize that exemption. Because consumers are used to paying almost nothing for any garment regardless of who made it, real hand-crocheted goods now get undercut by fake ones — machine-knit items engineered to mimic crochet’s texture and sold at fast-fashion prices, like the ten-dollar “crochet” bandana spotted at Target 00:06:43. The tell, Koma explains, is that crochet looks identical inside and out, while knitting has an obvious “wrong side” — so a shopper can literally turn a garment inside out to check whether they’re buying real hand labor or a machine’s impression of it 00:07:08.

The unresolved tension here is uncomfortable: genuine hand crochet is by definition slow and therefore expensive, so anything crochet-like sold cheaply is almost certainly either underpaid labor or an outright knitted counterfeit 00:07:32. Machines imitating crochet are actually framed as the more ethical option precisely because they don’t rely on someone being paid a pittance for forty hours of work 00:06:50 — a strange inversion where the automation that displaced knitters becomes, in this one narrow case, less exploitative than the hand labor it’s copying.

Lace: valuable labor, worthless laborers

The lace-making thread supplies the episode’s starkest illustration of value detached from the people who create it. Bobbin lace took Koma four hours of concentrated effort to produce a barely-there sliver of pattern with only six threads, when historical lace makers worked with as many as a thousand 00:12:37 — a demonstration meant to make an abstract claim about skill viscerally concrete. That skill was acquired by children as young as five or six, often sent away by families too poor to feed them, to work in dim, damp basements for intermediaries who paid extremely low wages 00:13:58.

The resulting paradox, as textile historian Emma Cormack frames it, is that lace was prized specifically because it demanded so much invisible labor, yet the people supplying that labor could never afford to wear what they made 00:14:21. The lace draped over kings and queens in old paintings represents named monarchs and anonymous makers — Cormack’s point is that once you understand the handwork, you can’t look at the object without seeing the hands 00:14:37.

Crochet’s origin as a shortcut for lace grows directly out of this exploitation economy: it was, in essence, a faster and cheaper way to fake the look of something that had been made unbearably laborious on purpose 00:22:19. That gives crochet a permanent inferiority complex relative to “real” lace — a reputation as a knockoff — even though, as the show notes, crochet actually predates lace historically and only became widely known through its association with imitating it 00:07:59.

Productivity as piety — and the hustle hiding behind the ideology

As machines took over knitting, crochet became the default occupation for upper-class Victorian women who suddenly had domestic labor done for them by servants and nothing obvious to fill their days 00:16:35. Curator Isabella Rosner supplies the ideological glue: Victorian culture linked idleness to moral danger, treating busy hands as a proxy for piety, so a woman’s crocheting became evidence of her virtue rather than her economic necessity 00:17:06. An 1829 manners guide literally instructed young women that usefulness equaled happiness 00:17:34.

But the show insists this ideology wasn’t handed down from on high — it was manufactured from below by lower-middle-class women who ran yarn shops and wrote the instructional pattern books that made crochet possible at scale, and who profited by selling wealthy women both the moral narrative and the yarn to enact it 00:19:32. These authors performed reluctance, claiming they wrote only because devoted patrons begged them to share their skills, when in fact they needed the income 00:21:18. Even Queen Victoria participated in the performance, publishing her own knitting and crochet projects to seem relatable to her subjects 00:18:32.

Elizabeth Koma draws an explicit modern parallel to influencers like Ballerina Farm, who publicly perform traditional domesticity while privately running a business — but she also draws a distinction: the Victorian pattern-book authors were far more transparent about the economics, since “I don’t think anyone was fooled” by their thin cover story, whereas she considers today’s tradwife influencers more genuinely disingenuous 00:21:55. Either way, the pattern books’ promise that crochet could earn real money was false — the going advice was literally not to charge more than a shop’s standard price, guaranteeing hand work could never be priced to reflect its actual hours 00:22:52.

Famine, flight, and the limits of adaptation

The Irish crochet lace industry gives the episode its most morally loaded case study. During the Great Hunger of the 1840s, upper-class philanthropists like Martha Roberts taught starving communities to crochet cheap imitations of bobbin lace as a relief measure, distributing the skill through local teachers across Ireland 00:29:51. Production was organized so that a single family could divide labor by skill level — a young daughter making simple motifs, an older sister the intricate ones — before sending pieces to a dealer for assembly 00:29:27, which let the technique scale even where individual skill varied widely.

The money involved was real but exploitative: one lace maker worked furiously through the Christmas season only to learn her earnings exactly covered debts owed to the middleman, leaving nothing for the goose she’d been working toward 00:32:07. Still, the show is careful not to dismiss the scheme as pure exploitation — for people facing starvation, this was, in Molly Claire Gillette’s words, literally lifesaving money 00:32:38, and it later financed emigration, spreading Irish crochet techniques to New York, Lebanon, Japan, India, and the Philippines as immigrants and Irish nuns carried the craft with them 00:32:51.

This is where the episode arrives at its explicit thesis about automation generally: workers can’t out-evolve a machine forever, but they can practice a kind of harm reduction — finding what the technology can’t yet do, and using that window to relocate into better circumstances, exactly as Irish crochet workers used their skill to get to America and escape colonial rule 00:39:33. Koma extends this directly to her own anxiety about AI displacing podcasters and writers 00:01:21, landing on the more open-ended, less triumphant conclusion that even after a craft loses economic necessity, it can retain value as a form of control and meaning-making — pointing to her own knitting, done for no economic reason at all, as evidence that making things by hand persists precisely because so much else feels out of our control 00:40:30.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.