During the French Revolution, how did the women known as tricoteuses pass the time while sitting by the guillotine?

Tricoteuse is French for a knitting woman. The term is most often used in its historical sense as a nickname for the women who sat beside the guillotine during public executions in Paris in the French Revolution, supposedly continuing to knit in between executions. Amongst the items they knitted was the famous liberty cap or Phrygian cap.

One of the earliest outbreaks of insurrection in the revolutionary era was the Women's March on Versailles on October 5, 1789. Irate over high food prices and chronic shortages, working class women from the markets of Paris spontaneously marched to the royal residence at the Palace of Versailles to protest. Numbering in the thousands, the crowd of women commanded a unique respect: their demands for bread were met and Louis XVI of France was forced to leave his luxurious palace and return, most unwillingly, to Paris to preside "from the national home".

The veterans of the march, and their numerous successors and hangers-on, gathered thereafter at the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution (now Place de la Concorde), as sullen onlookers to the daily public executions. "Thus deprived of active participation in politics, the market-women became the tricoteuses, or knitting-women, who used to take their seats at the Place de la Révolution, and watch the guillotine as they knitted."