In an effort to increase ship morale and encourage hobbies in a group of people so obsessed with their jobs they even freaked out the Admiralty; Kirk received an official com one day informing him of a mandatory knitting circle that was required to convene once a week for at least two hours. The Captain thought it was, quite possibly, one of the stupidest things they had been required to do in Starfleet (and that included the three different sets of sex pollen forms, eighteen steps to adding an extra cube of ice to replicated ice water, and the crew quarters quarterly inspections.) but since they were pretty much stuck in warp for the next three weeks and were looking down the barrel of four months full of uninteresting milk runs he figured it probably couldn't hurt. Too badly, anyway.
Nyota was all for the idea. She'd been knitting since she was six and it was the easiest way to get her Gram to stop ranting about the lost arts and how no young people are willing to take up the mantle of fine crafts anymore. She had always thought it was a bit funny, Gram was all about the arts right up until she was asked to pay seventy five credits for a hand-made necklace to support the local artist. Then suddenly it was highway robbery at its lowest. None the less, it became easier just to learn to knit and get Gram talking about something that didn't bring her blood pressure up quite so high.
Kirk took to knitting like he did almost everything else in life. To Nyota's unending frustration he turned out to be a natural. When she caught him doing tricks even she didn't know she was very nearly ready to jab him with one of her nice bamboo needles and that would just be a waste of a good needle, right there. Once he got the basics down, he started each new project with the express intent on learning a new trick. By week four he was just making shit up as he went along and when asked about it just shrugged and said "It's all just loops going through the next layer of loops, you know?" Nyota wasn't quite sure she could forgive him when he completed a little stuffed Dalek to give Spock (who accepted with the bemused air of someone who didn't get the joke but wasn't really willing to admit it).
Spock's knitting was neat, efficient, and just about as precise as you can get in a craft that's essentially just fancy knot making. Every project had a perfectly matching four inch by four inch swatch. He had managed to calculate out his yarn needs to the inch and had taken to requesting only the amount necessary to complete each project. While every single article he made was exactly as the pattern had depicted, he would never admit that he secretly envied the Captains ability to churn things out without a pattern and only a vague idea of the end result. Two months in he'd made a replica of the first plush Dalek by counting stitches in the one Kirk had made and didn't quite know what to do with it after he finished. After spending a few weeks in his sock drawer Spock finally admitted defeat and set them next to his com screen while he watched ancient Doctor Who episodes and found himself liking them despite his better judgement.
The first thing Chekov made was a knobbly, miniature sweater. When asked why he would create something so tiny he said with assurance, "It is for BJD, Suvik." and only Sulu seemed to understand what he was talking about. When pressed for an explanation by the others (Sulu wasn't exactly comfortable admitting his knowledge to the group) Chekov ran to grab what might have been the creepiest doll any of them had ever seen. It was white, had glass eyes, and an unreasonable amount of joints. It looked a bit like a very small person that was too perfect to be true, only it also had fangs and looked like it might want to lunch on you in your sleep. Nyota, completely enamored with the thing and somehow magically immune to it's creepy stare, offered to make it a dress. Chekov declined on the grounds that while some boys might be into that sort of thing, Suvik certainly wasn't. As if aware her solid ground in the conversation was slipping, Nyota asked how he knew the exceptionally feminine doll was male in a slightly dubious tone. He showed her.
Nobody quite knew what to do with themselves or what to say after that. They were eventually saved by a small sound of distress coming from Scotty, who had somehow managed to tie his right elbow to his neck and very nearly lodge an over-sized knitting needle up his nose. Bones was already methodically attempting to unravel the mess, but somehow every time Scotty moved it just kept getting worse. With the careful expertise of a world class surgeon Bones was required to cut the poor engineer out of his inadvertent prison and ruined nearly an entire skein in the process.
The doctor's own project lay untouched. He hadn't bothered to pick up the needles and spent most of each session bitching about whatever adventures he'd had to fish his commanding team out of that week. Mostly people let him talk, though Kirk would throw in a quip here or there while he stared intently at his latest masterpiece (it was a potholder with the Starfleet insignia on it. Nobody was quite sure how he made it reversible but it appeared to involve two balls of thread at once and a lot of moving them around. He was planning on giving it to Bones to see if his head would explode at the worthlessness of a potholder in space.)
Sulu kept trying to follow Kirk's footsteps and create his own projects from scratch. One of his first attempts at adventuring into the unknown territory of pattern-making had been a cozy for one of his retractable blades. When he'd proudly showed it to Chekov he was distressed to find the teenager turning bright red with suppressed mirth. He hadn't told the navigator what it was and had hoped it would be obvious what the six inch long, two inch diameter pouch would be for and OH HOLY SHIT how did he miss that one? He tried to hide it before the rest of the group caught wind but by then Chekov was laughing so loudly he'd alerted the rest of the command crew and Sulu was forced to explain that YES REALLY it's a sword cozy and I Don't KNOW, Kirk's knitting a POTHOLDER and nobody questions the value of THAT now do they? The Captain only smirked knowingly in his direction and asked if he planned to make more.
By the time the four months was up and the actually challenging missions started coming in Admiralty rescinded the requirement to meet every week but it wasn't really like anybody had noticed because Nyota was knitting the most epic afghan any of them had seen, Kirk had just started a mystery project he wouldn't tell anybody about, and Spock had created an actual pattern making tutorial that most of them wanted to try. Except Scotty and Bones of course, who had taken to leaving the yarn to those that understood it and just started bringing their drink of choice and a whole helluva lot of shit to bitch about because yeah, it was kind of nice to just sit around and relax between missions, you know?