"I wish I could knit. It's hard."
I'm going to borrow from Whole30 and say that knitting is NOT hard. Advanced calculus? Hard. Kicking heroin addiction? Hard. Disciplining 37 high school sophomores? Hard. Knitting is NOT hard. It takes time and practice though.
"I don't have the time or patience to knit."
If you have the time or the patience to sit around waiting for your doctor's appointment or to watch tv, then you can knit. I actually have a hard time sitting around and NOT knitting. Like right NOW. If I weren't typing this blog post right now, I'd be knitting, since my students are watching a movie right now.
"You should make me something!"
And here are some things that YOU should do: You should pay me! You should learn how to ask nicely! You should assuming that my time and labor are freely given!
"If I pay you to make something, how much would it cost?"
I do get people who ask me nicely to make things, and I'm much more likely to respond nicely in those cases. But I do feel it's my responsibility to then tell them, "Even if you paid me minimum wage, plus the cost of materials, it'll still cost a lot..."
"You should totally make a bunch of those and sell them!"
I appreciate the compliment, but I just don't have time. Also, I don't like when my hobbies start to feel like work, which it totally will if I have to make a bunch of the exact same thing over and over.
"Why would you spend all that time knitting that when you could just buy it?"
Because handknit merino-and-cashmere lace socks are TOTALLY the same as a bag of tube socks from Walmart, right? As I've said previously, most of the things I want to make are not things that can be found in stores. And sometimes it's not even about the object at all - it's about the act of making something with my two hands, of creating and crafting.
"Is that for your daughter?" or "Is that for a baby?"
I don't find these questions offensive, but I find it curious that people assume that knitting is only done for babies and small children. Or the assumption that if a woman is knitting, she must be pregnant? At any rate, I rarely knit for littl'uns anymore because what I've learned since becoming a mother is that they grow much faster than I can knit.
"My mom/grandma knits. Isn't knitting for old people?"
Sigh.*DEATH STARE*
The worst offense, to me, is when people touch my knitting without asking me first. ESPECIALLY STRANGERS. Like, I understand that it looks pretty and soft, and people feel compelled to touch pretty and soft things, but for the love of god, if you're handling my knitting (my hours and hours of hard work) WITHOUT MY PERMISSION and you mess something up, I WILL CUT YOUR FACE.
To end on a positive note, though, I appreciate any and all compliments, and the greatest compliment of all is when someone asks if I could teach THEM how to do it (and then they actually make the effort to learn how to do it!)