“It’s not the most normal thing to say, ‘I’m going to quit my job, and knit for a living,’” says Christina Fagan, with a laugh. After all, many people dream of quitting their jobs, but very people do it. But Fagan, who lives in Boston, figured she was 25, she’d been knitting since she was a kid, and what had started as a little side business was becoming all-consuming. So in May, Fagan left her job doing sales for the Internet advertising company Criteo, and started knitting till her fingers got sore.
If that sounds like a rash decision, it wasn’t completely. She’d been blogging under the name, Sh*t That I Knit, for some time, and had $25,000 socked away that would last through summer. And last October, she started selling her hand-knit hats at a local market with her mom. Sales were brisk, and as she posted on Instagram, she built up a following among a community of knitting obsessives. Her Instagram is filled with beautiful photos of herself and other young women wearing pom-pom hats and hand-knitted sweaters, and hanging out.
These aren’t your grandmother’s hats, but the hipster variety, made of hand-dyed Peruvian wool and topped with real fur pom-poms that retail for $199. With granny chic in this year, she hit a nerve. “Things started going out of control,” Fagan says. “I couldn’t keep up with demand. I was getting nervous about getting carpal tunnel, knitting the same hat over and over again.”
So, back on Instagram, Fagan posted for knitters who might want to join her part-time. Some 200 people applied, and she hired 30 of them – all 20- and 30-something women (plus one man) – paying them by the piece. “They’re these girls, and their grandmothers taught them to knit, and they watch Netflix and knit,” she says. “I feel like it’s fallen in my lap, in a good way, because knitting is making a comeback.”
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