Outlaw

Once upon a time I designed a swell little camisole.  It had everything: fun to knit, flattering on lots of shapes, inexpensive, accessible in every way.  I proposed to some delightful yarny-type people who make magazines that they should let me create it for their publication.  They promised to get back to me, as the yarny people do, and I promptly forgot all about the whole thing.  And when I say "forgot", I mean complete cognitive dismissal.  Something caught fire, or I saw something shiny, or the global economy face-planted - some small distraction pulled my focus, and on I rolled, completely abandoning thoughts of the lacy confection I had concocted in my head.  Never mind that I had immortalized the swatch by pinning it up on the cork board above my desk.  Even though the physical representation of the idea was right there in front of me, the concept was intellectually unavailable for some reason.  Like it never even happened.

Flash forward several months (or minutes - could have been either, really), and the delightful yarny-people contacted me.  Yes, they said, we would like you to create that thing you made up for us.  Yes, they said, we will publish it in our fine magazine.  Yes, they said, we even like the yarn you swatched it in, so please make the design and send it to us one fine day in July. 

Bearing the fiscal component that it does, this information cut quickly to the front of the line of notions waiting for my contemplation.  Oh yes!  I thought, the sweet little camisole!  That will be really fun, and I have the yarn right here in my stash!  I found the yarn with a minimum of hassle.  I returned to the page in my notebook where I had stored all the pertinent information about making this design, should I be invited to do so.  There it all was:  yarn, guage, needle size, sketches, even ideas for notions.  And I somehow managed to notice the swatch again, hanging patiently as it had been all along, there above my desk.  And that's when the wheels fell off my wagon.

Which book did that stitch pattern come from, anyway?  Not in my notes.  No little tag tied cunningly to the swatch for future (the future is now, by the way) reference.  I had left myself nary a breadcrumb to guide me back to the #$%U@*! stitch dictionary where I found that little lace pattern.  No memory of its origin.  Think Harder, I commanded myself.  Nothing.  No trace of the process I used to make that string turn into a little square of lace.  Total creative amnesia.

There are times, when some little quest takes me back to my books, which are so reinvigorating.  Being immersed in my life's collection of important knitting information is comforting, inspiring, and affirming.  There are times when the pages of these books that I know by heart are like short visits with dear friends.  Like hearing favorite songs I forgot how much I loved.

Yesterday afternoon was not one of those times.

Yesterday afternoon was more like scorched earth.  I stacked books.  I racked brains.  I searched in vain.  I chased my own tail.  Nothing and Nowhere contained my long lost lace pattern.  A lace pattern I forgot existed until yesterday morning, for a project whose existence I would not have remembered ten minutes before that.  Now it was the most important information in the world, and only because I knew it was there someplace, but not any of the places I could think of to look.

About three hours into my ransack of the book collection, it dawned on me that my time might be better served if I turned my attention back to the lowly little swatch.  I have knit it once already, for pity's sake.  How hard could it be to reverse-engineer the damn thing?  Do I have graph paper?  Check.  Do I have a pencil? Negative.  Can a Smally locate one for me?  Check.  Bright light, glasses on, knitting needle to point at the stitches as I count them; Check, Check, Check.

45 Minutes.  I actually timed it, and it took 45 minutes to re-draw a little chart from my existing swatch and knit a sample from it that looks enough like the original to fool its mother.  Situation Sorted.  So why did I go through the knitting library like a social disease through a bordello?  Not  sure.  I suppose we creatures of habit only know to do things in the way that we have done them before:  There was no reason to trust my ability to reverse-engineer the pattern because I hadn't done it that way last time.  I was blinded by the notion that I needed the book where that pattern originated in order to move forward.  For all I know, I changed the pattern drastically from its source when I made the swatch in the first place, making the original version unrecognizable when I did find it.  But it took me three hours to get past the failure of step 1: locate pattern, and envision step 2: re-create pattern.

Note to self:  Include information about stitch pattern origin in design notes when submitting proposals. 

Additional note to self:  Restore order to knitting library carnage.

Hole-y Sleeves, Batman! and Other Things,Too

The beautiful thing (one of many beautiful things) about lace is that it requires us as knitters to pay attention to negative space.  The finished product is nothing but a lot of holes, framed by yarn.  It also looks (and measures!) nothing like the finished product while you are making it, so there is the element of surprise, too.  Case in point:

Ah, the enchanted forest of pins.  No, it doesn't really require this many for one little sleeve.  I just don't know when to stop.
 

Here's the sleeve, in all it's non-puffy glory.  It was supposed to be a short, gathered sleeve, until it redesigned itself as a longer, slimmer one.  I will confess that I historically have disliked to wear 3/4 length sleeves.  You know:  Neither long, nor short; neither fish, nor foul.  Pick a side already!   But I am pretty much enchanted by these sleeves, and I can't wait to try them out.  Who knows; maybe I just haven't met the right 3/4 sleeve yet.  Today should be cardigan finishing day, and then its only a matter of time until you can make one too!

News You Can Use:  This pattern will be the next thing I publish, and you should have it in time for summer knitting (and wearing!).  Stay Tuned, because it rocks out loud.

And speaking of Rocking Out Loud, I would like to thank especially my friend and supporter, Marilyn King of BlackWater Abbey Yarns for including me in her gorgeous newsletter this month.  Many new visitors have stopped by the blog:  To all of you, welcome, and thank you for your readership!  We have gobs o'fun here, (well I know I do), blathering on about whatever's on my mind and on my needles.  Clever reader Susan, of NY wrote to ask if there is a Faery Ring knitalong in the works, which I can't believe I never thought of myself.  Whaddya think?  If you are interested in such, drop me a line, and let's see if we can't organize a little something.

To my local pals, I want to remind you that I'm teaching at the TKGA Knit and Crochet show next week, here in Portland, and there are still a few spots available in my Mad Hatters class.  Please come and join us if you're able!

And finally, a Cunning Plan is hatching between me and the Smallies:  

We are learning about plying, and wondering why plying Kates only hold 3 bobbins, usually.  We have decided to perform an Experiment in Invention this weekend, in honor of Mother's Day:  We are going to construct our very own "Kate-Inator", conceived as a 6-bobbin Kate!  Check back to view the ensuing carnage/hilarity.

Same thing we do every day, kids:  Try to take over the world, one fiber at a time...
 

How the Mitten Saved the Sleeve

Let me begin by stating an empirical truth:  I like short, puffy sleeves.  I like designing them, knitting them, wearing them, and seeing them on other people.  To my mind, there is nothing more feminine or demure than a gathered sleeve cap, and paired with a lacy pattern and a short length for summer, they're knitting gold, baby. 

So there was no doubt in my mind about the way the sleeves for the Sommelier Cardigan needed to play out:  Short, Puffy, Sweet.  Naturally, since the design element was so clear in my mind, and no alternative ideas were even creeping up on it, what formed on my needles was nowhere near what I had planned.

To begin with, even though I measured precisely and calculated carefully, the math that I started with was (not surprisingly) Very Much Wrong.  I think there can be degrees of wrong in knitting: Kinda wrong, a little wrong, mostly wrong, you get the idea.  This sleeve was an extreme case from the word go.  Not that I let that bother me, you understand, equipped as I am with a powerful sense of denial.  I knit blithely on for seventeen rows of lace, never admitting that I had jacked up the whole plan the minute I stopped casting on and started knitting.  No Siree, nothing wrong here.  Nothing to worry about.

Until there was.  I began the armhole shaping after the lace border and immediately began to sense a disturbance in the Force. "It'll block larger", I lied to myself.  "There is no reason at all why I can't just stretch it."  Except, of course for the poor miserable knitters who would arrive at my door with pitchforks and torches, crying "THERE SHE IS!  GET HER!" once the pattern is published. 

That's the sucky thing about designing - you totally cannot fake anything, because you have basically promised your knitting brethren that you can be trusted to provide them with a pattern that will not drive them to the nuthatch.  At least, that's how I feel about it:  If you are brave enough to spend your precious knitting allowance on a project I dreamed up, then the least I owe you is my level best effort to make a pattern that can be followed to a successful conclusion.  This presumed oath of accuracy puts a lot of pressure on a designer: when I screw up my knitting, it's not just my personal goalpost that moves, it's yours, too. 

It was ultimately my allegiance to my fellow knitters which prevailed.  I admitted to myself that the sleeve was Bad Wrong, and had to be frogged.  My frustration was such that I actually put down my knitting (okay, I may have thrown it a little).  I reached without thinking for the nearest comfort, which is of course, more knitting.  In this case it was a sweet little mitten that I have been stealing moments of knitting time for.  Campbell's Mitten, with its lofty, fluffy Blue-Faced Leicester wool in shades of his favorite colors.  Thoughts of the process of making it so far danced in my mind:  Campbell hugging the fiber; me spinning the yarn; Lindsay measuring for me around his little hand.  The bliss of casting on with your own handspun is something I wish for every knitter.  There is just nothing like it.  I began to relax into the rhythm of kl, p1, kl.

And that's when the mitten saved the sleeve.  The relaxation triggered by the comforting action of knitting a mitten cuff brought clarity with it:  I don't have to knit the sleeve I thought I wanted.  I can keep knitting the sleeve that I have, and follow it to it's natural conclusion.  Even though I was trying for a gathered short sleeve, what I made was a svelte long one.  Better still, I could make it an elegant bracelet length.  Bracelet sleeves are delightful, classic, feminine, and even easy to block (unlike their short, puffy relatives).  Yes!  I could press on with the sleeve, exactly as it was, and create something even better than what I imagined.  There was nothing at all wrong with that little sleeve - the problem was the designer.

Thank you, dear little mitten.  You were there when I needed you most, and even if you get lost one day, as is often the case with mittens, you have already served a purpose even higher than keeping Cam's hand warm:  You saved my sleeve, my sanity, and most important, the composure of future knitters.  We who are about to knit salute you.