We deliver worldwide
Olga Fahim: “Sarcasm is My Way of Dealing with the World”
Olga Fahim might just be the funniest person on Knitstagram who doesn’t really consider herself that humorous: according to her, she is “just a normal person, occasionally funny on the internet”.
“I'm still surprised that you wanted to do this interview. Don’t you guys have other people to ask?”
But for anyone who has come across Olga’s videos on social media — where she is known as Gotham Knits — it is clear that there is something special about her. In a world where knitting and other fibre crafts are not generally seen as particularly funny, Olga has been a pioneer in creating comical content about them.
She has the ability to make these small, snarky, spot-on remarks about us knitters and the way we interact with the world, and turn them into videos that generate tens of thousands of views (and laughs). Such as the one where she lists things she has used as stitch markers lately (including a Lego, a paper clip and a tea infuser), or when she posted on 30th December how she has decided to give up buying yarn for the rest of the year (“Think about all the money I’ll save!”).
Olga, 40, lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, two kids (aged 13 and 12) and a cat. Her main profession is creating social media content for herself as well as for other brands and companies, while occasionally designing a shawl pattern here and there.
Her dark sense of humour is something that used to get Olga into trouble even as a kid.
“I remember how my mom used to tell me, ‘You need to be nicer, you can’t talk like this to grown-up people.’ I’m just very sarcastic — for me, it's a way of dealing with the world,” Olga says.
GROWN-UP JOBS
When Olga meets other people who work in the knitting business, she likes to ask them what they would be doing otherwise. Most knitwear designers, for example, didn’t go to knitwear design school, so they usually have other “grown-up jobs”. The same with Olga: she studied psychology (though she hasn’t worked a day as a psychologist), used to work for a daily business newspaper in her native Ukraine, then in New York as a florist — and she thinks that she might make a great detective, too.
“When I mention to people that I have a degree in psychology, they’re like, ‘Oh, you do?’ I feel like people think that I started doing funny videos because I had nothing else to do.”
Olga grew up in Ukraine, where her mother owned a travel agency, so the family travelled a lot — by the time Olga was 20, she had visited about 25 different countries. It was no surprise, then, that after college she wanted to live abroad and ended up staying with a family friend in upstate New York. When she got a job offer at a flower shop, she took it.
“Then I signed up for the gym, and the first time I went there, I met my husband, who was a boxing trainer. We clicked right away and got married like three weeks after we met. That was 17 or 18 years ago, and I just never went back.”
FROM BABIES TO GOTHAM
Knitting started to play a bigger part in Olga’s life when she had her two children very close together. She had been used to having a job, and now she felt like she wasn’t doing anything for herself — she was just a mother, a wife, a chef and a driver.
“And that was very hard because I didn't know who I was, except for those roles.”
Olga had a friend who enjoyed sewing, and she advised Olga to try to remember what she used to do to bring her joy. Olga had learned many fibre crafts as a child and loved them — in Ukraine, they were part of the school curriculum, and both of her grandmothers were also crafty. So she went online, looked at all the yarn choices (quite different from her childhood, when the options were “sheep yarn and another sheep yarn”), and put everything she liked in the cart.
“It came out to about $75, which at that time was a lot of money out of our family budget. And I remember telling my husband, ‘Trust me, it’s either one and done, and I’ll never mention this again, or it's going to be something good.’ And I’m very grateful that he just said, ‘Do whatever you want.’ Of course, now I’m looking at that $75, and that’s like two skeins of yarn today…”
Back then, Olga had an Instagram page called What About Baby, where she posted pregnancy and baby content, but soon knitting took over. The name Gotham Knits, which she uses on Instagram and TikTok, came from the TV show Gotham, which was on at the time: she was drawn to its dark aesthetics and muted colours. The humour aspect started almost accidentally: Olga was knitting in the car while her husband was driving, and she was responsible for telling him which exit to take — but, instead, she was counting stitches.
“We laughed about it, but then I thought: ‘That’s actually a funny thing to put out on the internet because I’m sure other people do that too.’ That was one of my first viral reels: it got about 300,000 views,” Olga says. “Back then, in 2021, there weren’t many funny things about crafting online — just a lot of tutorials, patterns and designers. These days, I think everyone is doing funny content, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Not everybody needs to be funny.”
EVERYONE’S FAVOURITE HUSBAND
The ideas for Olga’s videos can come from many places: observing things in real life, seeing a video or a movie scene that could work in the knitting context, or hearing a funny phrase that lingers in her mind. But the videos people most love are always the ones where her husband is included — such as the one where he picks up Olga’s knitting from the couch, accidentally drops the stitches off the needles and sneaks away.
“He is not a big social media person, so it usually requires about a month’s work to persuade him to do a video with me and actually be happy in it — not just a grumpy person sitting next to me!”
For Olga, one of the hardest questions to answer is what she hopes people will take away from her content. It’s not something she really thinks about, she says. And there are two things she doesn’t want to discuss, neither on her page nor in this interview, and they are politics and religion. Other than that, she says she does social media because it is a personal outlet.
“I do hope that with whatever’s happening in the world right now, when people come to my page, they can have a happy moment of just enjoying the funny things about craft. But do I do it specifically with that hope in mind? No, I just do it because that’s what brings me joy. And then if it makes other people happy, that’s even better.”
Olga at times worries how her jokes might be interpreted — filtering is something she is still not very good at. That’s why she has a friend whom she describes as her “tech editor, but for the jokes”, who goes over her ideas beforehand.
“Sometimes I will send her something and be like, ‘Can I say that?’, and she'll be like ‘Nope’ or ‘You can, but it needs to be like this.’ I don't want to get into trouble.”
ENOUGH KNITTING TIME
Content creation might not be the job Olga would have chosen, but now she loves it: she enjoys the creative process of shooting and editing a video, and also the way it allows her to stay at home and spend a lot of time with her kids — and of course, to knit. As an anxious person, knitting brings her calm and regulates her.
“There are days when I knit for eight hours a day, and there are days where I knit barely 45 minutes. Those are not happy days. I would say, for my mental health and for the happiness of everybody in this house, I should have at least an hour of knitting a day. For everybody to be blissfully happy, I should have three.”
Olga has a theory about balancing work and family life: if you have a circle of responsibilities — such as work, being a parent, taking care of the house, knitting and social interactions — and you want everything to be at the same level, it can only happen if that level is zero. Otherwise, something’s going to be the priority for the day.
“So one day I am working a lot, and barely any knitting gets done, and the dinner gets ordered in. Then the next day, I stay at home, so I can cook, bake and knit. And then it’s the weekend and family time. I learned the hard way not to try to fit it all in one day. I’m trying to get better at just being in a moment.”
THE INTROVERT CRAFTERS
Occasionally, when people meet Olga in real life, they expect her to be a bubbly, happy person. This is actually not the case, she says.
“My favourite colour is black, and I don’t really like people or talking a lot. So whatever happy shiny bubbly things I have, I put them on the internet, so my gloomy dark personality just stays intact,” Olga says. “I am lucky enough that people who I work with — I think most crafters are this way, too — are introverts. We are fine just crafting side by side and not talking. But we are very happy inside.”
Finally, let’s have Olga tell one of her favourite jokes (one, she says, that not everyone gets). It goes like this:
“A guy is at a job interview, and at the end, they ask him, ‘Do you have any special talents?’ He takes out a taxidermied raccoon and says, ‘Well, one of my hobbies is taxidermy.’ And then the raccoon says, ‘And the other is ventriloquism.’”
Laughing? Then you might just share a sense of humour with knitting's funniest not-so-funny person.
TEXT: MAIJA KANGASLUOMA
PHOTOS: HANNAH SCHWEISS & JONNA HELIN
This feature was first published in Laine issue 29.
