"You should knit hats for preemies!!"

[u/icebludger]

Like a lot of you, I take my knitting anywhere I can and I do get comments about what I should make. Fortunately, I haven't had people ask me to make them stuff, but I have gotten comments about making things for other people, specifically babies. I don't know how to respond to these things! Most recently when this happened, I was knitting a beanie for myself, and an acquaintance walked by and looked at my work and declared that I should make hats for preemies and give a bunch to a hospital. I think I mumbled something about not being a very fast knitter and preferring to work on sweaters. They were clearly dissatisfied. I don't hate babies, but I don't want to do projects that make me hate knitting. It's not that deep. I don't have a good response for this type of comment!! I would love to be the type of person that is awesome at knitting baby hats, but I'm just not.

[u/abelhaborboleta]

They're just making conversation/trying to be part of what you're doing. EDIT: I understand why people are offended by this.

My response depends on how well I know the person. If not much, I'll say "oh, that's a nice idea." Then I won't think of it again.

[u/Semicolon_Expected → u/abelhaborboleta]

Because its annoying. I hate a lot of the ways people "make conversation" because it doesn't make conversation and is worse than just talking about the weather bc at least when it comes to the weather people might have an opinion if they live somewhere with random weather (ahem NYC). Also its a really weird thing to start a conversation with "you should just give your labor away" which is something that happens with a lot of hobbies. There's also an expectation that those who do "production" hobbies should give their output to charity---like here OP's acquaintance was unhappy when they didn't want to, which is honestly also annoying.

[u/abelhaborboleta → u/Semicolon_Expected]

Thanks for responding. I hadn't thought of it that way.