Male Knitters: Restlessly Creative

More men in and around Rochester are finding the joy of knitting

By John Addyman

 

Not every guy loves to fold fitted sheets.

Not every guy knows how to rebuild a carburetor.

And not every guy can knit.

But chances are, if a guy can knit, he’s had a strong, busy woman in his life to show him the way.

Darrell Birchenough, 60, is a former optometrist who is now a mindful homesteader in Holley. He knits.

“I’ve been doing it for 50 years,” he said. “I had a fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Sturtz in the Copenhagen Central School, who was really adamant about any kids who finished their work early, they needed to keep their hands busy to stay out of trouble. I was one of those kids. So, she made me knit. All the kids in my class got exposed to this. I don’t know how many of them held onto knitting. But I did. It sparked something in me and I’ve done it on and off since.

“My mother was a knitter who encouraged me and helped me. If I was knitting a pair of mittens, she would do the thumb part for me, overnight when I was asleep, then I could finish the mitten the next day.”

Ron Tyler, 63, from West Bloomfield, left a four-decade nursing career to find a new workplace where he makes industrial filtration systems.

And he knits.

“My great-grandmother was from a small town outside of Syracuse,” he said. “She taught my grandfather to knit argyle sox as a young man. My grandfather was the one who taught my mother to knit. My mother taught me. I was maybe 16. My mom would take all of us cousins, sit us in a row on the couch and she would teach us all how to crochet. Then she would teach us how to knit. I still have my great-grandmother’s knitting pins.”

David Aboyoun, 61, is a new resident to Irondequoit, having left New York City for someplace quieter, closer to friends and much less expensive. An architect, he has worked on high-end commercial and residential projects and has moved past some health issues to just recently be able to return to work.

Yep, he’s a knitter.

He started last October.

“I remember my mother knitting when I was a kid,” he said. “She knitted a lot of sweaters; unfortunately, I outgrew them and got rid of them. I’m sorry about that.”

When he and his sisters were clearing out their parents’ home in New Jersey, they found some of their mother’s knitting projects. “One of them was something I remember buying the materials for, with her, when I was 7. She had started an afghan. She had bought this book about knitting afghans and wanted to make the one on the cover. I found the unfinished pieces of that same afghan. She never finished it.

“I knitted alongside my mother when I was little. She showed me how to do it, but I never made anything completely.”

Aboyoun, with help of friends, got reconnected to knitting and is taking lessons from lifelong knitter Tina Turner, whose Tina Turner Knits store at 16 N. Goodman St. in Rochester is a haven for folks who love the skill but need some help and for those who are just learning the ropes.  She told Aboyoun, who took lessons from her, that he was moving along quickly.

He happily confirmed that, sitting in his dining room, holding up his knitting bag.

“I take it everywhere,” he said. “It’s especially handy on the subway, where it takes you an hour to get anywhere.”

Then he reaches for another bag and pulls out three separate panels of a white afghan, his mom’s project from years ago.

“I’m going to finish it,” he said, determination in his voice. “It’s super-complicated, you really have to pay attention to get this right. It’s old and it’s faded a little bit but I don’t care, it was my mom’s and I’m going to finish it.”

Based on what Birchenough and Tyler have accomplished, Aboyoun, who is clearly as creative as the other guys, will likely transition from knitting into spinning, where he’ll make his own yarn and thread and then take up weaving, where things get even more challenging and technical.

When Birchenough left his optometry practice behind, he cut timber, hung gutters, fixed houses and completely rebuilt the farmhouse where he now lives with wife, Mary, an artist in her own right.

He knitted through high school, then left it behind for 15 to 20 years. “If I needed mittens or a scarf or new hat, I’d knit,” he said. In 2001 he got interested in weaving after getting ideas from a book co-written by a Navajo. He built his own loom. He learned to spin. And all along the way he went to lengths to save money.

Instead of buying yarn from a knitting shop, he went to thrift stores and bought certain types of wool sweaters, took them home and unraveled the yarn. “I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on yarn because I really didn’t know what I was doing,” he explained. “There was lot of stumbling along in the beginning. Eventually I got to the point where I could discern which sweater had the type of yarn I wanted to use for this kind of weaving, it’s very specific. The hand-knitted sweaters from Central America have exactly that kind of yarn. From the Navajo perspective, it was the same kind of yarn they were using.”

A neighbor gifted Birchenough with some alpaca and llama hair and he tried spinning that. He made a fabric bag using hair spun from the family dog.

With so many fallow fields in his area, he harvested dogbane , or Indian hemp, and took plant fibers through an involved process to end up with another spun material to weave with.

“If I’m creating the yarns to make a hat or a blanket, there’s a lot of work that has to happen before I start weaving. That’s what I’m doing with the spinning wheel, another way of challenging myself by spinning my own yarn,” he said.

Mary Birchenough said her husband is a Renaissance man. “He was born in the wrong era. He’s interested in everything.”

The mantle also fits Tyler.

“I had been away from knitting for a time,” Tyler said, “then a couple of years after my wife, Patti, and I got married, she was crocheting baby blankets and she was getting anxious about getting them all done. I told her, ‘I can help you.’

“She said, ‘There’s no way you can do that.’ I said, ‘Give me a hook and yarn.’ So I started crocheting and she asked, ‘How did you know how to do that?”

“My wife started working in a yarn shop, then they asked me to work there. In the meantime, my wife re-taught me how to knit because I couldn’t remember how to do it. I learned how to spin wool into yarn and then using my own yarn for knitting about 20 years ago and got my own spinning wheel. Now I have a collection of 23 modern and antique wheels. I also spin flax, where you get linen from. I also learned to weave and I have my own loom at home. So, it’s a progression of how all of this evolved.”

Tyler was talking from a room at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Pittsford, overseeing a meeting of the Genesee Valley Hand-Spinners Guild.

Aboyoun is just getting started, so he hasn’t progressed to spinning or weaving yet. He and Tyler both urged anyone, especially males, who want to knit to find someone to teach you the ropes. Tina Turner offers classes, but all the fiber-crafting guilds in the area will also get you in touch with someone to get you started. It’s easier with a friend, and knitters seem to make friends quickly.

Being a knitter (or spinner or weaver) has undeniable benefits.

“It’s very focusing, relaxing, and it can be very social, especially when I’m sitting around a table with other people who are knitting,” said Irondequoit resident David Aboyoun, 61. “I’ve been listening to books on tape or music and knitting. It’s nice to do it in the morning when I’m having coffee.”

“Knitting is very meditative,” said former optometrist Darrell Birchenough, 60, who lives in Holley. “It’s methodical. It’s repetitive. Same with weaving, even though I think weaving takes more focus but that could be because I’m trying to do really fancy patterns. With knitting, it’s usually straightforward; I don’t do really fancy things with knitting. Most of the time what I try to do is functional and sturdy.”

Ron Tyler, 63, of West Bloomfield, agrees with the other guys, but he also notes the still-there stigma of a male doing what some would say is a female activity.

“There’s a double obstacle,” he said. ‘I was sitting in the yarn shop, working and this 94-year-old woman came in, looks at me and demands, ‘What are YOU doing in here?’ I work here, I told her. I eventually re-taught her to knit. The obstacle is to feel comfortable to go into a shop and learn. That takes courage because of all the stigmas that are in the US today, which are slowly going away. There are a lot of married men out there who are doing handcrafts at home but their wives are buying their stuff for them because they’re too afraid to go in stores and buy things themselves. They’ll sit at home and crochet all kinds of stuff for their family, they’ll knit sweaters and blankets but won’t go into a shop and buy supplies for themselves,” Tyler said. “That’s one of the things my parents taught us, to have the courage to do what we enjoy. You can learn from a family member, from the lady next door or be taught by someone from a previous generation like I was taught.”

And once you know what you’re doing, knitting and weaving and spinning are constructive, spirit-calming, creative and satisfying.

 

Interested in Taking a Crack at Knitting?

You can start looking into it deeper on the Facebook pages and websites of these local fabric craft hotspots:

• American Sewing Guild of Rochester

• Genesee County Lace Guild

• Genesee Valley Quilt Club

• Genesee Valley Hand-Spinners Guild

• Perinton Quilt Guild

• Rochester Knitting Guild

• Rochester Modern Quilt Guild

• Weavers’ Guild of Rochester

• Craftsmen’s Guild

• Rochester Folk Art Guild