Beryl Tsang was 37 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Six months after her mastectomy she was invited to a party and found herself in the need of a breast prosthesis. But she found the available options “too heavy, squishy or ugly,” she wrote on the site Knitty.com.
“I thought okay, I needed a breast prosthetic I’ll just knit myself one so that is what I did. I just went into my knitting, and I found this confetti colored cashmere yarn, and I made myself a tit,” Beryl Tsang tells me.
After the party, she kept knitting tits and eventually she published the pattern online so other people could make them for themselves.
Since then, the concept and recipes of knitted knockers – as they are commonly called – have spread across the internet. Today, it is the most popular kind of project in the 'medical knitting' subcategory on the community knitting website Ravelry.
Ravelry allows knitters to register when they have completed a project using a particular recipe. An analysis of the medical knitting subcategory shows that knitted knockers make up more than 82 percent of all completed projects in that subcategory. At the time of writing, 4,744 finished knockers are registered at Ravelry.
Knitted Knockers is the most Popular Medical Knitting Recipe
Popularity of each category of recipes. The size of the bubble shows the number of completed Ravelry
projects using a recipe in each category.
4,744 completed projects
have used a knocker recipe
Other
158
Menstrual
products
196
Heating or
cooling bags
261
Knockers
4,744
Injury
252
Cannular or
IV protection
58
Source: Ravelry
Knitted Knockers is the most Popular
Medical Knitting Recipe
Popularity of each category of recipes. The size of
the bubble shows the number of completed Ravelry
projects using a recipe in each category.
Heating or
cooling bags
261
Menstrual
products
196
Injury
252
Other
158
Cannular or
IV protection
58
Knockers
4,744
Source: Ravelry
Knitted Knockers is the most Popular Medical
Knitting Recipe
Popularity of each category of recipes. The size of the bubble shows the
number of completed Ravelry projects using a recipe in each category.
Other
158
Menstrual
products
196
Heating or
cooling bags
261
Knockers
4,744
Injury
252
Cannular or
IV protection
58
Source: Ravelry
And why knitted knockers you may ask. For Beryl Tsang knitting herself a new breast allowed her back some agency and control over her body.
“When you have breast cancer, you can feel very dehumanized,” Beryl Tsang says.
“It is me and him [her surgeon], his whole medical class, who are now all looking at the cancer on my breast, right? And then all of a sudden that breast is gone. And then it was like ‘oh everybody let's go look at the scar’. It's like taking back ownership of your body.”
“So agency is important,” she says.
Knitted knockers have many positive qualities for women that have just undergone a mastectomy. For some, they are a temporary solution because they can be worn shorter after surgery. The softer nature of the knockers makes them less of an irritation to the scar.
And compared to conventional breast prostheses, knitted knockers offer a cheap alternative. An analysis of the recommended yarn of the knocker recipes at Ravelry shows, that it would cost between $4 and $18 plus production time to knit a knocker. Conventional breast prostheses would cost many times more, according to breastcancer.org.
Knitted Knockers is a cheaper alternative to conventional breast Prostheses
Price span of knitted knockers, non−silicone prostheses and silicone prosteses.
Yarn for a knitted knocker
costs between $4 and $18
Knocker
Non−silicone
Silicone
$0
$100
$200
$300
$400
$500
Source: Ravelry and breastcancer.org
Knockers is a cheaper alternative to
conventional breast Prostheses
Price span of knitted knockers, non−silicone
prostheses and silicone prosteses.
Knocker
Non−silicone
Silicone
$0$100$200$300$400$500
Data: Ravelry and breastcancer.org
Knitted Knockers is a cheeper alternative to
conventional breast Prostheses
Price span of knitted knockers, non−silicone prostheses and silicone
prosteses.
Knocker
Non−silicone
Silicone
$0$100$200$300$400$500
Data: Ravelry and breastcancer.org
For Beryl Tsang, knitting has provided a sense of community and safety for her and her fellow breast cancer survivors.
“Knitting is also a way of bringing the community together. When I was going to breast cancer groups, that was how we made friends with my people in my breast cancer group,” she says.
“I would sit there, and I would knit myself a tit and then I go get them a tit. And when they had breast reconstruction done, they still have a tit that they'd like to squeeze when they got anxious,” Beryl Tsang adds.
Since she published the original tit bits recipe, the community around the knitted knockers has grown globally.
The site knittedknockers.org facilitates connecting volunteer knitters and breast cancer survivors to “offer free Knitted Knockers to any woman who wants them”. According to their website, there are 5,182 knitted knockers groups worldwide and by January 2023, more than 522,000 knitted knockers had been provided.
The popularity and demand for Knitted Knockers is not surprising. Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women in America. In 2019, 264,121 women were diagnosed with breast cancer.
For American Women, Breast Cancer is the most common type of cancer
Age-adjusted cancer rates per 100,000 American women in 2021.
Female Breast Cancer
129.7
Lung Cancer
48.1
Colon and Rectum Cancer
31.8
Uterine Cancer
27.7
Thyroid Cancer
19.1
Breast Cancer is 2.7 times as
common as lung cancer
Melanoma Skin Cancer
18.2
Non−Hodgkin Lymphoma
15.0
Kidney Cancer
11.8
Pancreas Cancer
11.6
Leukemias
10.3
Source: CDC Cancer Statistics
For American Women, Breast Cancer is
the most common type of cancer
Age-adjusted cancer rates per 100,000
American women in 2021.
Female Breast
Cancer
129.7
Lung Cancer
48.1
Colon and
Rectum Cancer
31.8
Breast Cancer is 2.7
times as common
as lung cancer
Uterine Cancer
27.7
19.1
Thyroid Cancer
Melanoma
Skin Cancer
18.2
Non−Hodgkin
Lymphoma
15.0
Kidney Cancer
11.8
Pancreas
Cancer
11.6
10.3
Leukemias
Source: Ravelry
For American Women, Breast Cancer is the most
common type of cancer
Age-adjusted cancer rates per 100,000 American women in 2021.
Female Breast
Cancer
129.7
Lung Cancer
48.1
Colon and Rectum
Cancer
31.8
Uterine Cancer
27.7
Breast Cancer is 2.7
times as common
as lung cancer
Thyroid Cancer
19.1
Melanoma Skin
Cancer
18.2
Non−Hodgkin
Lymphoma
15.0
Kidney Cancer
11.8
Pancreas Cancer
11.6
Leukemias
10.3
Source: CDC Cancer Statistics
Globally, breast cancer is also the most commonly occurring cancer in women and the most common cancer overall. In 2020, more than 2.2 million new cases of breast cancer were diagnosed, according to the World Cancer Research Fund.
Breast cancer contributed to 25.8 percent of the total number of new cancer cases among women diagnosed that year.
It is thus unlikely, that the need for knitted knockers and other artificial breasts will disappear any time soon. On the contrary, women will continue to invent new and innovative ways to overcome and handle illness.
Part of the data used in this article was obtained by scraping Ravelry.com. You can find the code and all the data used on Github.
The top image was generated by DALL·E 2 using the prompt “high quality knitted background in pink and orange and purple”.