"Knitting keeps my mind sharp and my fingers nimble": Knitters' information seeking and sharing during the COVID lockdown

This paper reports the initial results of an ongoing study about the information seeking and sharing patterns of knitters during the first year of the COVID pandemic. Knitting is a creative and inexpensive hobby that possesses all the six qualities of serious leisure, which are: perseverance and commitment, the potentiality to turn into a career, significant personal effort based on specific knowledge, durable personal and social benefits, unique ethos within a social world and developing new identities associated with the chosen activity (Stebbins, 1982). Almost forty years of research shows engagement in serious leisure activities (e.g. hobbies, amateurism, and volunteering) brings a range of physical, mental, and emotional benefits for the leisure pursuers. These benefits range from pure pleasure and a sense of fulfilment to self-actualisation and a sense of belonging (Heo et al., 2013; Riley, 2013; Kim et al., 2014; Corkhill et. al, 2014; Liu and Yu, 2015; Mansourian, 2021). However, serious leisure always happens in a context and several contextual elements can potentially boost or hinder leisure engagement. For example, during the COVID lockdown, group activities like outdoor hobbies faced various limitations. Nonetheless, indoor hobbies such as gardening and cooking increased in one way or another as people had more free time at home (Ling, 2020; Young, 2020). On the other hand, engagement in any hobbies or amateur activity, especially for beginners, requires access to some forms of information to learn the required knowledge and skills. Therefore, serious leisure is usually an information-rich context and the participants need to actively seek, search, organise, share and produce information about their hobbies or voluntary activities.