Judy Fawcett is 78 years old. She’s a small woman, probably 100 pounds sopping wet—yet in her spare time, she walks marathons in Mongolia and gets chased by hippos in Botswana. And she knits.
For the past 20 years, Fawcett has been running expedition-style knitting trips with her collaborator Lucy Neatby (a former sailor and British Merchant Marine) to Antarctica, the Galápagos, Newfoundland, and beyond. Their group participants are primarily women, and while they skew 55 and older, their ages span seven decades. (Her eldest participant? 93.) They go to hard places, and they knit. I picture them herding elephants with their knitting needles, and while it’s not quite like that, the truth isn’t so different.
Fawcett is one of the pioneers of “adventure knitting.” She and Neatby, she says, came up with the term, wanting to combine their fierce love of travel with a softer, slower pastime. For their first trip—a paddling adventure on the shores of Nova Scotia in 2005—they got 25 people to sign up. Since then, both wait lists and couples have become common. “The husbands got jealous,” Fawcett says. “Now they just ask to come along!”
Each trip weaves the fast with the slow in different ways. Sometimes, guests literally knit during activities like wildlife-watching—Fawcett shows me a photo of her knitting among penguins. Other times, it means hikes between skill workshops and specialized experiences, like private tours to meet the lace-makers for the Moulin Rouge.
But Fawcett isn’t the only one capitalizing on this unlikely mash-up. Adventure Canada’s expedition cruises include fiber arts programs in Scotland and Newfoundland, where participants craft aboard ships and with local artisans. In Iceland, Hélène Magnússon runs knitting tours centered on her country’s rich textile and wool heritage. Boutique cruise operators Craft Cruises and Maratime Knitting Cruises also run a few adventures a year, offering itineraries that connect travelers with local textile makers, shops, and traditions, whether that’s rug-hooking in Newfoundland, embroidery in the Outer Hebrides, or weaving in Greenland.
As it turns out, the Venn diagram of “people who demand a sense of adventure” and “people who want to knit” is almost one complete circle.
The connection between knitting and adventure
“The mental state that knitting produces is close to what a lot of people are actually chasing when they book an expedition,” says Antje Springmann, shepherdess and cofounder of Adventure Canada’s fiber arts program. “When you knit, you go to a different part of your brain.” The activity creates focused attention, presence in a specific place, and quiet in the mind.
Women are particularly drawn to joining (and leading!) the combo activity of mindful practice with hard excursions, but more men are joining too.
Photo by ABlandin/Shutterstock
What’s more, yarn bought in a specific place holds memory with unusual fidelity, she continues. It’s a souvenir that doesn’t gather dust on a shelf but gets worked, stitch by stitch, into something you’ll cherish and use. Knitters talk about this almost mystically: Buy musk ox fiber (the priciest and softest yarn in the world) in the Canadian Arctic, possum-blend wool in New Zealand, or a locally dyed skein in the Faroe Islands, and future projects carry that geography. “You knit your travels into whatever you’re creating,” Springmann says. “It’s a way of capturing a place.”
In Newfoundland, that means learning about the stranded colorwork mittens that fishermen wore while hauling nets—mittens that would grow denser and more water-resistant with use in the wet cold, as the lanolin in unprocessed wool did its quiet, ancient work. The crafts aren’t ornamental, she notes. They’re solutions. In time, the art becomes tradition, with historic patterns and techniques that visitors can learn and take with them.
How women are expanding adventure travel
This is all part of a broader trend: Adventure travel built around and by women is surging. Major operators including Natural Habitat Adventures, Intrepid, and Backroads have launched women-only expeditions in recent years, from hiking in Croatia to following polar bears through Arctic Canada, capitalizing on this emerging market.
Research from National Geographic–Lindblad Expeditions found that 66 percent of women reported interest in adventure travel. And according to the Adventure Travel Trade Association, 75 percent of travelers who engage in adventure, culture, and nature-themed travel experiences are women ages 20–70. (The average age of a female adventure traveler? 47 years old.)
Adventure knitting sits squarely in that current. It attracts women who want depth—not just scenery, a lounge chair, and a cold glass of bubbly (although those moments certainly have their place on expedition travel, too). These women want to come home with a skill, a story, and a sense of place. Bringing back something beautiful and handmade is icing on the cake.
Where to cast on and go adventure knitting yourself
Adventure-knitting hot spots track predictably with the world’s great textile traditions. Scotland, Iceland, Atlantic Canada, and Greenland all have deep fiber heritage and the kind of landscape (moody, wild, built for wool) that makes the whole enterprise feel less like a hobby trip and more like a pilgrimage. However, destinations aren’t all northern: Think working with merino wool in Australia, alpaca yarn in South America, or cashmere in the Himalayas.
The common thread (forgive me) is intentionality. These aren’t trips where knitting is a rainy-day backup activity. The needles come out on Zodiacs. They come out on decks with icebergs in the background. The work and the place are inseparable—or woven together, you might say.
So the next time you’re on a group adventure, take note of who’s with you, and don’t jump to any conclusions. “That granny over there?” jokes Springmann. “She’s actually a mountaineer.”
