In the spring of 2016, Jayna Zweiman, an artist, persuaded her friend Krista Suh to buy a Groupon for crocheting lessons at a yarn store in Los Angeles called the Little Knittery. Yarn shops, like bike or record stores, can be alienating to newcomers; patrons and employees sometimes act like members of an exclusive club who share the language of obscure wool blends. But Kat Coyle, who has owned the Little Knittery for nine years, has worked hard to make it an inviting place, outfitting it with worn Persian rugs, a giant pink sofa, and several comfortable chairs. Every Friday there were “knit nights,” open to all. After a few lessons, Zweiman and Suh became regulars. The crowd ranged in age from adolescent to geriatric, and sitting around knitting or crocheting gave Zweiman an “opportunity to really listen,” she told me.
On November 10th that year, two days after Donald Trump was elected President, Zweiman called Suh and told her that she wanted to go to the Little Knittery to find comfort. Zweiman was particularly interested in the concerns of older women at the store, and when she learned about the Women’s March she knew that she wanted to participate. She had a background in socially minded design projects, and she and Suh considered knitting a special hat to commemorate the march. Coyle agreed to help write a pattern that would be visually striking but accessible to knitters of all levels. Looking around the store, they selected a fuchsia-colored yarn produced by a Uruguayan fibre company called Malabrigo. The easiest type of hat to knit is a flat rectangle, folded and sewn together, which produces two floppy corners that resemble cat ears. Coyle knit three prototypes, and within a few days the group had named it the Pussyhat, a reference to Trump’s hot-mike moment with Billy Bush. “Krista had this vision of massive amounts of people wearing the same style, the same hat,” Coyle said.
She went on, “I just said, ‘Let me take a picture of this, and I’ll put it on Ravelry.’ ” Ravelry, which is often called “the Facebook of knitting,” has nine million registered accounts—about a million of which are active every month—an exhaustive database of patterns and yarns, and hyperactive message boards. “Telling a knitter to check out Ravelry is like telling someone who just got a computer, ‘Hey, you should check out Google,’ ” Edith Zimmerman, an avid knitter and the creator of a popular e-mail newsletter called Drawing Links, said. When new knitters come into the shop, Coyle typically says, “Get on Ravelry. Just get on. It’s going to blow your mind.” She added, “It goes all over the world. And that’s what happened” with the hat. “It went all over the world.”
After Coyle posted the Pussyhat pattern to the site, the women worked with more than a hundred and seventy-five yarn stores around the world, which served as dropoff and pickup points for knitters and hat recipients. “The country sold out of pink yarn,” Coyle said. (Four years later, Malabrigo’s fuchsia yarn is often on back order.) Some people went to the Little Knittery thinking that they could buy Pussyhats. “And we said, ‘We don’t make them for sale,’ ” Coyle told me. “ ‘You have to knit your own or get somebody to knit it for you.’ ”
By January 21, 2017, the day of the Women’s March, Zweiman claims, hundreds of thousands of hats had been knitted, creating a visual symbol of a moment in political history. “We created a sea of pink pixels,” she said. Prototypes of the Pussyhat later appeared in several exhibitions at major art museums. Sandra Markus, the chair of the fashion department at the Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), has published research on Ravelry’s Pussyhat Project group, which has about forty-five hundred members, some of whom still assemble on a regular basis to discuss knitting and politics. She remembers the discussions around the Pussyhat at her local yarn store on the Upper West Side, where women gathered to knit. “To be able to really combine the political with the craft,” Markus said, “I think it was the first time it was ever done in such a significant, visually impactful way.”
“I know how much knitters like a project,” Coyle told me. “I also knew, from my own community, they were really anxious and depressed. And what’s knitting good for? Soothing the nerves.”
Not everyone on Ravelry was soothed, though. “Embarrassing and degrading,” a user named Glassbonnie wrote, of the Pussyhat. GirlsandDogs called it an “incredibly ugly hat with a vulgar name.” Others argued that the energy dedicated to the Pussyhat could be channelled into providing for the homeless, a comment that produced more digital sniping. “Unless all of your knitting is for charity, please don’t try to lecture people on what they want to make for themselves for their own reasons and on their own time,” Merrymcg14 wrote.
During Trump’s term, hat patterns sparked political discourse. As he geared up for reëlection, his supporters began publishing patterns for hats with slogans like “Make America Great Again” and “Build the Wall.” These hats eventually led to a ban of all Trump discussion on Ravelry.
“Ravelry is just a microcosm,” Kim Denise, one of the site’s volunteer moderators, told me. “Knitters are just the same as society.” Denise joined the site in 2009, and even then she noticed a “growing radicalization among Obama haters” on Ravelry. “Trump brought that to a head.” Jessica Marshall Forbes, one of the site’s two founders, remembers the early days of Ravelry well. “You know, we just wanted to make a nice Web site about yarn,” she told me. “I look back on it now, like, ‘Oh, it wasn’t so bad.’ Because look what we’re dealing with now.”
Launched in 2007 by Jessica Marshall Forbes and Cassidy Forbes, a young married couple, Ravelry was intended to serve the needs of skilled crocheters and knitters like Coyle, who was among the several hundred people invited to test out the site during its beta phase. Cassidy and Jessica had met as undergraduates at the University of New Hampshire. Five years after graduation, Jessica was working for Brandeis University’s study-abroad program; she took up knitting as a way to pass her thirty-minute commute. As Jessica became increasingly proficient, Cassidy noticed her frustration in finding knitting patterns. At the time, there were many popular blogs focussed on knitting—Yarn Harlot, the Knitter’s Review—but finding patterns and information about techniques could take hours of research. Cassidy, a computer programmer, didn’t know how to knit, but she could build an online database. The couple began to talk about what a knitting Web site might look like, and they sent out feelers on Jessica’s blog, frecklegirl: “The idea is to create an encyclopedia of cool patterns (and yarn too??) to mix in blogging and other social aspects. I think it would be nice if knitters had a place where they could share their completed creations, get help for works in progress, and get ideas for future projects.”
One commenter wrote, “You’d better contact a patent attorney asap! Seriously.”
The couple made a New Year’s resolution to launch the site, which they tentatively called Entangled, before a knitter friend suggested Ravelry. After the beta testers, who were sworn to secrecy, contributed various ideas for improvement, Jessica went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, one of the country’s largest events for yarn lovers, and began spreading the word.
When she got back to her hotel that night, Jessica said, she opened her computer to find “thousands of people on the waiting list to get in.” She called Cassidy. “What should we do?” she asked. “Should we take the waiting list down?” It was, as Jessica said, “an innocent time” in the social Internet—Twitter was barely a year old—but she was already getting a taste of how easily users could be ruffled. Some people on the waiting list accused the site of being “just a popularity contest. You have to know somebody to get in.”
Cassidy soon quit her day job. With no funding and no experience in business, she and Jessica began selling T-shirts featuring yarn jokes like “Where my stitches at?” or “I swatched,” a reference to the small pieces of fabric that more fastidious knitters create before starting a project. They turned their small apartment into a fulfillment center and sold about thirty-two hundred shirts. “Instead of getting money from outside investors, we were really started by the community itself,” Jessica said. By the end of the year, Ravelry had fifty-seven thousand users.
Ravelry became the largest crochet- and knitting-pattern database in the world, and it enabled designers to sell their patterns without going through an established publication. The site currently lists more than a million patterns, for traditional hats, sweaters, scarves, cowls, and mittens, and for objects that would be hard to find in a store or a knitting magazine: Sasquatch-mask balaclavas, garter belts for Barbies, dog sweaters adapted from runway looks, ChapStick holders in the shape of a penis. (Cassidy has never knit or crocheted seriously. She once made an octopus but never finished the eighth leg, and the object is referred to in the Forbes home as “the septopus.”) Users can also meticulously log their projects, from pattern to yards of yarn required and tiny modifications added to a pattern, photographing each step of the process. Upon completing a project, a user gives the work Ravelry’s most satisfying designation, an “FO,” or Finished Object.
One of my favorite patterns is for a sweater with an ambitiously detailed map of the globe, knit using a technique called intarsia. The sweater appeared in a special collector’s edition of Vogue Knitting in 1991. One Ravelry user noted that it took her twenty-five years to finish the garment. “I was very glad that the Eastern Bloc countries hadn’t yet separated when this pattern was created,” a Raveler wrote in her log, because it would have been so time-consuming.
“Finding people you had things in common with online was still a new thing,” Jessica said. On the site’s lively message boards, groups include Fountain Pen Lovers, Christians with Depression, Modest Girls-9-18, and the Completely Pointless and Arbitrary Group. During the 2008 election, social activity on the forums intensified. Ravelry had just one full-time employee in addition to Cassidy and Jessica, and they continued to address members’ concerns individually, giving users the sense that Ravelry was a community of acquaintances, rather than a rapidly growing social-media network and commercial platform. “We were kind of innocent and naïve, thinking that people will behave well, but this is not the case, even on a Web site about yarn,” Jessica told me.
A hard-right group called McCain Ravelry was formed by estranged users of a more center-right group called Conservative Knitters. After John McCain lost his Presidential bid to Barack Obama, the group’s name was changed to the Bunker—which was meant to signify a place of safety, although some interpreted it as a reference to Nazi bunkers. In early 2009, after a series of inappropriate comments were posted, the Bunker was shut down. One member likened the burgundy scarf worn by Obama at his Inauguration to a noose. Later that year, one of the group’s users wrote a five-thousand-word account of the saga on her blog, Teapot Tantrums, which was titled “Badge of Honor—Too Conservative for Ravelry?” In the post, she invited the offending Bunkermate to clarify the scarf-as-noose comment: “The reference, which was obviously lost on some people, was that we were sick enough over his election to hang ourselves.” At the bottom of the post, the woman behind Teapot Tantrums linked to eleven other blogs, where aggrieved knitters complained about censorship and lamented the “inappropriate” patterns published on Ravelry, adding, “Parents, take heed and protect your underage fiber enthusiasts from what they will see on this site.”
Some anti-Ravelry posts written on other blogs began to challenge the real Ravelry in Google-search results. “It was bad,” Cassidy told me. “I remember crying in bed at night and being, like, ‘What have we done? We’ve created a monster, and we can’t get out of it.’ ”
“It is surprisingly difficult to say what knitting is,” Richard Rutt writes, in “A History of Hand Knitting,” from 1987. The craft, with its simplicity, feels ancient, but its foundational elements—knit-and-purl stitches, in alternating patterns, which make for a smoother garment and provide a palette for decorative stitching—are relatively modern. The earliest known garment to feature purl stitches is a pair of crimson silk stockings owned by Eleanor of Toledo, a Spanish noblewoman, in 1562.
Even in its earliest periods, hand knitting had a sociopolitical bent, as the proletariat toiled to make luxury garments for European royalty. In a clever reversal, Madame Defarge, the villainous tricoteuse of “A Tale of Two Cities,” encodes her stitches with the names of aristocrats who were next to be guillotined during the French Revolution. Although Defarge may be fictional, knitting was a way for Frenchwomen to harness social and economic power during the Revolution, most often by making “bonnets de la Liberté”—Liberty caps—which were worn by nearly everyone in Paris.
Across the Atlantic, knitting was already part of the formative nation: in 1664, Massachusetts had passed a law requiring all children to learn to spin and weave. At knitting bees, women stitched stockings and other garments, sometimes turning the events into frenzied competitions. During the American Revolution, knitting came to represent a form of resistance to Britain, which manufactured a majority of the American colonies’ knitted goods. In the early days of his Presidency, George Washington was so distressed that his slaves might not be knitting to their full potential at Mount Vernon—where his wife had her own personal knitter, a physically handicapped enslaved man named Peter—that he wrote in panic to his estate manager: “Doll at the Ferry must be taught to Knit, and made to do a sufficient day’s work of it, otherwise (if suffered to be idle) many more will walk in her steps. Lame Peter, if nobody else will, must teach her, and she must be brought to the house for that purpose.”
Knitting was also a tool in the war against society’s great fear: idleness. Anyone wielding a pair of needles takes on an air of industry, and one newspaper writer during the Revolutionary War extolled the “Knot of Misses busy at their Needles . . . [where they] exclude Idleness from their solitary Moments.” In “Little Women,” the March sisters knit and sewed while their father served as a chaplain in the Civil War. Jo saw the craft as a prison: “For I’m dying to go and fight with Papa, and I can only stay at home and knit, like a poky old woman!” As the war drew to a close, the abolitionist Sojourner Truth taught freed slaves how to knit as a means of supporting themselves.
During the First World War, demand for socks for soldiers skyrocketed on account of “trench foot,” a fungus that attacked wet feet. Homebound British women began to knit furiously, using an array of colors in their socks. Fearing that an army with unmatched socks would look unprepared and chaotic, the British government distributed a pattern for socks, knit in dark-gray and green wool. The government asked women to use the Kitchener stitch—named for Britain’s Secretary of State for War, Herbert Kitchener—a technique designed to produce seams that would not chafe. Printing other patterns was banned, because spies had been caught encoding information into the stitches of knitted garments.
After the war, the rapid growth of the textile industry made knitting a hobby. It could be used to achieve personal or political goals, or to explore new forms of self-expression. During the sixties and seventies, hippies filled the shops of Haight-Ashbury with garments knitted or crocheted by those who objected to mass production and consumption. Within the feminist movement, some saw knitting as a symbol of domestic oppression, others as an act of resistance against a misogynist capitalism. (Today, ninety-eight per cent of Ravelry users are women.)
Eventually, knitting came to seem value-neutral, a kind of personal palliative. In a culture suddenly compelled by the desire to slow down, knitting draws people away from the hamster wheel of technology and productivity. There is even a “slow knitting” movement—as if knitting by hand were not already agonizingly slow enough—whose proponents advocate selecting fibre more carefully and giving extra consideration to project choices.
It is hard to quantify how many people have picked up the craft since the coronavirus pandemic began, but in 2020 Ravelry had its biggest year of pattern sales. Last September, Michelle Obama told Rachael Ray, “Hold on, girl. Over the course of this quarantine, I have knitted a blanket, five scarves, three halter tops, a couple of hats for Barack, and I just finished my first pair of mittens for Malia. . . . I’m a knitter.” She also revealed that she’d become part of a “knitting community” online, under a pseudonym. Last July, after craft enthusiasts on TikTok began constructing versions of a fifteen-hundred-and-sixty-dollar patchwork J. W. Anderson sweater worn by Harry Styles, Anderson released a free pattern for the sweater.
Every knitter I spoke to in recent months told me a similar story: they learned the basic stitches in childhood from a female relative and promptly forgot the skill, only to resume in earnest decades later. Often, people pick up knitting during a life change—a divorce, a new commute, a breakup, a pregnancy. The actress Judy Greer says that it helped her quit smoking. (She became a regular at the Little Knittery.) Edith Zimmerman, the newsletter writer, learned to knit during a period of intense boredom and isolation after she moved from New York to Cape Cod, and continued to rely on it when she quit drinking. “Not having something to hold every night, my hands felt like they were empty,” she told me.
Zimmerman is partly responsible for my experience with Ravelry. I, too, learned the basic stitches as a child from my mother, who wowed our relatives with gifts of matching sweaters at Christmas. But I didn’t think about knitting again until the fall of 2019, when, out of some panicked desire to find a way to occupy myself away from a screen, I ordered a giant pair of wooden needles and a few balls of comically chunky white yarn. Many hours of YouTube tutorials later, the yarn became a blanket that weighed at least ten pounds and was filled with unsightly holes and loose ends. I gave it to some friends, whose dog took a liking to it.
A couple of months later, I quit my day job to write full time, and a couple of months after that the pandemic struck. With the extra free time and an obligation to stay home, I spent many hours a day learning new techniques and browsing online for rare wool blends. Knitting allowed me the illusion that at least something was progressing. It also recalibrated my aesthetic world view. I found that the most fun things to knit were the sorts of garments I would never have dreamed of buying from a store. I couldn’t walk outside without noticing an interesting cable on someone’s sweater or trying to guess the fibre in a scarf.
I had always been skeptical of the kind of breathless sentimentality that tends to accompany self-described “makers,” but I quickly came to see knitting as the rarest form of pleasure: a practical magic that embodies many good things while introducing nothing bad. “Its main tenets are enjoyment and satisfaction, accompanied by thrift, inventiveness, an appearance of industry, and, above all, resourcefulness,” Elizabeth Zimmermann (no relation to Edith), the host of a groundbreaking PBS series called “Knitting Workshop,” wrote. Zimmermann was an arbiter of all of the aforementioned qualities, developing mathematical formulas to help knitters perfectly size their garments, regardless of needle or yarn size.
After I started knitting, I frequently noticed mentions of the craft in Edith Zimmerman’s newsletter. When I contacted her, she asked if I had a Ravelry account. I did, but I had never used it seriously. Like many novice knitters, I found the site overwhelming, its design outdated and difficult to navigate. On Zimmerman’s recommendation, I began to explore the site, and a new world opened up to me. Ravelry does not use algorithms to serve any of its patterns, yarns, or users, and there is no automatically refreshed feed. Proactive curiosity is required to get anywhere, which ultimately makes the site a soothing browsing experience. It is the only social-media platform that makes me feel both calmer and smarter.
It seemed inconceivable that a community like Ravelry could be divisive. Knitting was a way to escape the dynamics that caused people to fight incessantly online, and its adherents are uniquely bound by the ethics inherent in the craft. I can think of no other activity that punishes cheating or impatience so brutally, as evidenced by my thousands of yards of tangled knots or hours spent tearing out projects after I’d taken shortcuts. “A good knitter always has the courage to undo her work and fix a big mistake,” the economist Loretta Napoleoni writes, in “The Power of Knitting,” from 2020.
Cassidy was initially reluctant to be interviewed. “I can’t remember the last time we answered a press request because we don’t really want to be part of non-knitters/crocheters’ writing about the craft, it’s usually cringe,” she wrote. But, since I had an active profile on the site, she agreed. For fourteen years, Cassidy and Jessica have tried to protect Ravelry from outside forces. Today, the site has five employees, including its founders, all of whom work remotely. (Jessica has gone part time in recent years, in order to raise the couple’s two children.) Although pattern sales on the site grew to more than twenty-eight million dollars last year (two per cent of which was collected by Ravelry), the founders refuse to call it an e-commerce platform, instead describing it as an online community for fibre enthusiasts. Rather than use an ad service, like Google, that would serve targeted ads based on demographic data, Ravelry selects ads exclusively for fibre-related products and events. The founders have no public-relations or marketing firm, and customer support is still provided by employees. Cassidy has written nearly thirty thousand public-forum posts on Ravelry, most of them in response to users’ concerns. In addition, six hyperactive Ravelry users serve as volunteer moderators, making sure that nothing on the main boards infringes on community guidelines.
Cassidy and Jessica have received a number of inquiries from outside investors hoping to partner with the site. “I’ve literally deleted any message from an outsider industry,” Cassidy told me. “I don’t even know how many of those we’ve not responded to.” Early on, they met with a publisher, because Jessica was a fan of some of the people who worked there. “We weren’t interested at all in selling,” Cassidy said. “We were just trying to form relationships.” Cassidy recalled the publisher’s C.E.O. telling them, “If you’re going to be like this . . . then we’ll just build our own Ravelry. And you’re only two people.” But no knitting Web site has overtaken Ravelry.
More recently, though, potential threats to Ravelry have come from its own users. In 2019, a decade after the Bunker group was dissolved, Donald Trump announced his reëlection campaign. “As the country got more highly polarized, the dialogue on Ravelry got more polarized, and patterns got more polarized,” Sandra Markus, the chair of the fashion department at F.I.T., said. Markus is a longtime Ravelry user, whose research on Ravelry is one of the few academic analyses of social-media activism which focus on middle-aged and older women. “Both groups claimed the flag as their own. A lot of groups knitted patriotic shawls,” she said. “And it was really one way for older women to have their voices heard.”
A user called Deplorable Knitter published a hat pattern whose stitching read “Build the Wall.” The pattern became a flash point on the site. “When she first started coming out with patterns, conversations became vitriolic,” Markus said. The site had long forbidden any patterns that included Confederate flags, and maga-related content was taking on a similar flavor. Some left-leaning Ravelry users said that they felt unsafe on the site. “I don’t want to be a place where people are radicalizing,” Jessica told me. “Our community users came to us and said, ‘This kind of rhetoric is actually hate speech.’ We have to believe that.”
Even before the complaints, Cassidy and Jessica were mulling over how to address the onslaught of Trump-related content that they found offensive. Soon, Cassidy said, “it became clear that there wasn’t going to be any allowing some Trump stuff and not allowing other stuff. It wasn’t going to be possible.” She drew up an outline of the things the site would need to do before initiating a ban on Trump content—improvements to reporting and flagging systems, as well as language to express the new guidelines. At around the same time, Cassidy came out to her family as a transgender woman. “I was going through some stuff,” she told me, and she could be impulsive when dealing with issues on the site. Spats between conservative and leftist users were spilling over onto Instagram, where Ravelers blasted their concerns to a larger online community. “People were accusing us of all sorts of things, saying, ‘You have to do better than this,’ ” Cassidy said. On the morning of June 23, 2019, frustrated by the drama, she announced that Ravelry would be banning all Trump-related content, including casual Trump-related chatter on the forums. In a post on the site, the Ravelry staff explained the new guidelines. “You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, just don’t talk about it here,” the post read. “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.”
Ravelry’s ban appeared in the Times and was mentioned on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Cassidy hoped that other sites would follow Ravelry’s example. “I really thought we might have done something that mattered,” she said. “But nobody followed our lead, even in the yarn community.” Eighteen months passed before the assault on the Capitol, when major social-media sites began de-platforming Trump.
On the day of the ban, Kim Denise, one of the volunteer moderators, told me, “I was, like, I’m so psyched. I’m so proud to be part of Ravelry.” Then the ban happened. “And it was, like, Oh, my God. I wish we’d thought this through.” Right-wing trolls began signing up for Ravelry accounts and spamming threads with anti-Ravelry or pro-Trump sentiment. Denise described it as “hordes of screaming people lining up to sling feces at us. . . . It was terrible.” Users scurried to help moderators by flagging posts for deletion. They recruited a retired moderator to help deal with trolls. Within a couple of months, most of the activity generated by the Trump ban had subsided. Conservative users banded together, in a movement hashtagged #RavelryExodus, deleting their accounts and shifting to other platforms to sell patterns. (Deplorable Knitter prefers #ByeRavelry.)
One afternoon in January, I received a call from Deplorable Knitter, whom people often call Deplorable for short. She used a blocked phone number, and refused to tell me her real name or where she lived, except that it was in upstate New York, “far from the city.” It struck me as a serious amount of precaution for a discussion about knitting. Deplorable told me that she is a thirty-seven-year-old homemaker with two young children, and that she and her mother had just finished knitting and mailing out a batch of thirty-six “Stop the Steal” hats to their customers. She talked about her first knitting pattern, which she wrote in 2018. A friend had wanted to make a hat that said “Walk Away,” a reference to the social-media campaign that encouraged liberals to abandon the Democratic Party. Deplorable had never tried stranded colorwork, a centuries-old technique popularized in the Shetland Islands which uses multiple strands of yarn to produce lettering. “My first hat, it looked fine in my pictures,” she said. “It wasn’t the best thing. But on the inside,” where the excess colored strands are held, “it was scary.”
These days, Deplorable is a stranded-colorwork expert. She joined Ravelry several years ago under a different name, and every Saturday morning she would eagerly browse patterns. When she published the pattern for her WalkAway hat, she created a new account for the Deplorable Knitter persona. “I knew that a lot of fibre people lean left, but I looked at it, like, I wanted to just be a voice on the other side. They’ve got all the ‘F Trump’ patterns, so I just figured I’d make one that was positive.” The WalkAway pattern had some success on the site, so she continued to produce more patterns for hats with pro-right slogans. In January, 2019, she made the “Build the Wall” pattern, which had been categorized as hate speech on Ravelry even before the widespread Trump ban. It was removed. Six months later, she released a pattern for a hat that read “God Is Love,” which was also removed. She told me, “I had made it with rainbow yarn. And they said I was being homophobic.”
Jessica admitted that Ravelry has struggled to pinpoint exactly what constitutes inappropriate content. “Some of this stuff is so nuanced,” she said. “Think about what tweet got Trump banned. It was not about attending the Inauguration.” She went on, “We went through some pretty crazy rabbit holes: ‘O.K., this is an eagle, but it isn’t really the Nazi eagle. Or is it?’ It’s just, like, ugh.”
One morning in June, 2019, Deplorable discovered that she’d been permanently banned from Ravelry, after receiving repeated notices of violation of site guidelines. “I was being painted as a horrible person, and I couldn’t do anything to disprove it,” she said. “I felt terrible. It felt horrible.” When Ravelry formally announced its Trump ban, Deplorable experienced the relief of solidarity with her fellow-knitters who’d been called out: “It’s not just me, it’s all of us. Everybody who likes the President is horrible.”
Deplorable started a Web site, as well as a podcast, hosted on YouTube, called Politically Incorrect Knitters, along with another knitter named Anne Pinkava. Deplorable began selling patterns and ready-made hats on Etsy, where one of her “Stop the Steal” hats was also banned. I asked her if, given the outcome of the election and Trump’s failure to overturn the results, she would continue to produce pro-Trump patterns. “It’s going to depend on what is going on in the news,” she said.
Deplorable spoke about Ravelry as if it were an ex-boyfriend for whom she still had a soft spot. “You know, Pinterest and Google searches or whatever is my new go-to,” she said. “It’s not as fun. I mean, anyone who’s been on Ravelry knows that you get on there, and you search, and you can find eight hundred thousand things and fall in a rabbit hole. You know, I miss that.” She added, “But I don’t need it. It’s O.K. You work it out.”
Last summer, Ravelry announced that, for the first time, it would radically redesign the site. The company had hired Livia Nelson, a product designer, to change what Cassidy had made thirteen years before. The revamping featured a new logo, color scheme, and font. Nelson wrote, “To everyone who is as excited as we are about Ravelry’s future possibilities, thank you—it makes the thousands of hours we’ve spent on the new look over the last 14 months worth it!”
It was mid-June, about three months into the pandemic and three weeks after the killing of George Floyd. The redesign, meant to lift the spirits of its users and improve the low-vision and mobile-user experience, was not well received by all. Some longtime users reported that the site was now triggering seizures and migraines. One suggested that the redesign had induced gender dysphoria. Nearly four hundred pattern designers signed an open letter asking Ravelry to fix the site’s format. The Epilepsy Foundation of America issued a standard warning about Ravelry on its social-media profiles. “Members of our epilepsy community have expressed concerns about some of the content on the knitting and crocheting community Ravelry,” the caution read.
There was some confusion about the elements of the new site that were making people sick. Dave Gibson, the president of a Web-site-development company called Propeller Media Works, which specializes in digital-accessibility issues, told me that most Web sites are doing “terribly” with accessibility. But Ravelry “doesn’t seem unusually bad to me,” he said. “There are these basic things, like missing alt tags,” he went on, referring to text that accompanies images that enable blind users to read a Web site. When I spoke to Katie Mazza, a user for more than a decade, she told me that she’d experienced migraines, and that several of her closest friends, all of whom she’d met on Ravelry, had similar complaints. “My friend sent me a screenshot of Ravelry and, before I could even read what it was, I felt pain in my eyes,” she told me. “It’s weird. That’s the only way to describe it.”
In early February, I called Cassidy to ask her about the problems, discussion of which had taken on a frenzied tone that week. “Honestly, we’ve been struggling with it, and it’s been really, really hard,” she said. “We had to take them seriously, even though the claims seemed outlandish.” Within a few days of the launch, Ravelry made it possible for users to toggle back to the old version of the Web site. But some people were still complaining. “If there was something to fix, we would fix it,” Cassidy told me. “I shouldn’t even really get into this, because it’s very upsetting.”
Cassidy has noticed a growing dynamic. “The knitting community has a big issue with people being very concerned that, if they don’t support a callout, they’ll be called out themselves,” she told me. “Not joining it seems scary to people.” Cassidy found herself in defensive conversation with Ravelers on the forums, by e-mail, and on other social-media platforms. Jessica, who is known on the site as Mama Rav, tends to be more accommodating, and on July 30th she wrote a post addressing users’ concerns. She apologized for the stress that the redesign had caused, and said that Cassidy would be taking a step back. “It will take a period of adjustment, but in the future Cassidy’s role will be focused on technical work,” she wrote. “She no longer has access to the customer service emails and her Ravelry mail is disabled.”
Jessica was within earshot of Cassidy’s phone conversation with me, which was growing more emotional. “Jessica is here, and she wants me to put it on speaker,” Cassidy told me. “You know, we haven’t commented on any of this, so I think I probably got carried away talking to you.”
Jessica interjected, “So the really hard thing is that migraines and seizures are caused by so many different things.” A Ravelry user who is a neurologist told her that stress is usually a key factor. “And, especially in this time of extreme uncertainty, we made some mistakes, putting out a redesign in the midst of a pandemic, when people were already on edge,” Jessica continued. “And, because people are so passionate about Ravelry, I think that intensity switched over, you know what I mean? That level of intensity of love and passion for the site, and feeling like they were a part of it, they felt betrayed. Which I totally get.”
Cassidy returned to the conversation a bit calmer. I pointed out to the founders that most users probably weren’t even aware that this controversy was taking place. They were downloading their knitting patterns and logging their projects with the same enthusiasm they always had. I also said that I couldn’t think of a single social Web site that wasn’t experiencing some kind of turmoil magnified by the events of the past year. Cassidy laughed. “Even talking about it now, it feels silly,” she said. “This is a much bigger thing than what’s happening with us.” ♦
An earlier version of this story misspelled Elizabeth Zimmermann’s name.
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