Knitting and Therapy

I'm not too sure how many of you who read my ruminations know much about my other knitting life, or just my other work life to be honest. In conjunction with owning Fyberspates I am a psychology researcher, I currently work on a project about attitudes, looking at prejudice, its mega interesting, but this is coming to an end pretty soon, and I needed to decide what comes next in my life academically, do I let it go, or use the skills I have developed.

When I first started my blog, I really wanted to run a project on the therapeutic benefits of knitting, but in terms of actualizing my ideas, I wasn't too sure exactly how to do it, and also didn't have the experience or confidence. Then I had the great good fortune to meet Betsan, who owns Stitchlinks, and is working to promote knitting, stitching and their therapeutic benefits. We've been talking about running a research project for ages and ages, and I started one last summer, which is taking ages because I need knitters, and unfortunately I need them to come into the lab, but also I needed a huge amount of funding, and we weren't quite there with people being accepting that it is something worthwhile researching. Well, it seems as if the time has finally come and things are starting to move. We are going to apply for a grant to research the project properly, probably over a couple of years, we now have in place access to pools of participants, which makes it possible. I am soooooo excited, its my dream to do something like this along side Fyberspates, so I'm also going to blog about the process of applying for funding and actualizing the research, because I know that if we can run this research, its gonna make such a huge impact on peoples lives, and I know so many of you knit and stitch to keep yourself sane, while the world goes on around us.

I'm not sure what else to say really, apart from the fact that I'm jsut very very excited.

I'm interested in hearing your views on knitting and its therapuetic benefits, if you would like to be part of the discussion, please join the fyberspates yahoo group, the link is on the left.

Yippee!!!!!!!!!!

x