If You Give a Mouse a Cookie...

Ever have one of those days where you walk into a room for one thing, notice something that needs doing, do that, notice something else, do that, and two hours later go back into the same room for the first thing?  No, neither do I.

Not only do I do that all the time, but it mirrors my design process.  I'll look at a design, maybe on a person in front of me in line in the bank.  Either I'll admire it and try to learn from it, or I'll dislike it, and start correcting it in my head.

If I "need" to redesign it, I start with a gauge swatch.  The swatch will lead me to think about the best use for the resulting fabric.  The original design may be an overcoat, but the fabric I made wants to be a Saturday Sweater.  I'll get into designing a Saturday Sweater, and then decide that the pattern repeat that I want needs a slightly smaller gauge.  After achieving the smaller gauge, I'll realize that part of this pattern would make fantastic socks.  While searching through sock yarn to find the ideal fiber for the socks in my head, I realize that I'd love to use this cashmere blend sock yarn as a run-along with a silk/tencel blend to make a texture-y hat.  I grab the two yarns, and make a new gauge swatch.  I discover that this is a very soft and strong combination, and I'd love to try it as mittens.  I start drawing mitten after mitten. 

6 mitten patterns later, I decide this is a silly idea, and that what I really want to do is design an overcoat.  What would it look like? .....

Knitting vs. Designing

Slowly but surely I am awakening from my knitting hiatus.  Coffee has been involved. Design is still fighting for supremacy, but some knitting is finally getting done.  I've added an inch to the No H8 Mittens, and a few inches to the Guinan Hat.  The mittens are in Cascade Ultra Pima (white) and Cascade Pure Alpaca (burgundy), and so soft!  The hat is in Cascade 220 (turquoise) and Aslan Trends Bariloche (grey) and really warm.  I've decided to finish the hat in spite of occasional hives because it's easy, cute, and has been adopted by one of the children.  I started to frog it, and was asked to stop when a teen daughter realized she could never "borrow" it if it didn't exist!  And still lurking in the workbasket are the two-color brioche scarf, yummy socks, and the promised Girlfriend Gloves.  At least I don't have to start anything for an upcoming class right now!   I love that there are no deadlines.  Unless you want the mittens, hat, scarf, and gloves available this winter.

The rival of my knitting queue, my design process, often involves me knitting up a swatch of a small part of a design to check the look of a motif.  These side projects are a major impediment to getting UFOs into the FOs column.  I still can't choose one over the other as the priority, though, as I only want to design in spurts.  Trying to design when I'm not inspired is as futile as gift wrapping Jello. I need to get it down on paper while it's fresh, or it's gone forever.

I fuss over each design project a little every day like a doting mother.  There are some William Morris inspired mittens, Nursery Rhymes blanket squares, and a whole set of Arts and Crafts/Mission Style pillows, blankets, and towels.  The hand bone mittens are coming along, though ridiculously slowly.  I'll get there.  I think I have design ADHD.  Is there a cure for that?  Does it come in coffee flavor?

Musings on Bones

For two months I've been trying to design a mitten (shocking! I know) with a pattern of the skeleton of the human hand.  If you think that's morbid, stop reading now.  You won't understand. I think bones and most other body parts are really beautiful.  With few exceptions they are spare, efficient, and strong.  I wanted to explore celebrating it with our most complex bone structure, the human hand.

For me, the trick to a mitten is that it has to be functional as well as interesting to look at.  If I were to design this mitten in sock weight yarns, I could probably do it.  The pixelization at worsted and DK is just too large for the bones to look like anything but a cartoon.  But living in Buffalo, I've got to say, I don't think I've ever met a sock yarn up to the challenge of keeping me warm, dry, and shoveling on a ten degree day. 

Is there a significant call for sock weight mittens elsewhere?  Should I keep going down in yarn weight?  No human bones are straight.  Every surface and every length is curved to one degree or another.  The only way to exhibit convincing curves is to spread them out over a LOT of stitches, and the idea was the bones on the mitten would correlate directly to the bones of the hand below.  Let me know what you think.  I just might keep trying.

November Knit Along

I started writing patterns for a monthly dishcloth/blanket square knit along two Karma-Knitting-Shop newsletters back, and have been really surprised and pleased with the results. September was a Dragonfly, and October was a Happy Skull. My goal is to make something cheerful, seasonal, and secular for each month.

I finished the chart for the November Knit Along yesterday. (It's a "slice of pie" square!) I still have to knit a sample to confirm the pattern. Modern technology has made the whole process pretty easy, as I just print out scaled knitting graph paper and transfer my design to the "pixels". (http://www.tata-tatao.to/knit/matrix/e-index.html) But since knit stiches are not really neat rectangles, the knitted result doesn't always live up to the sketch. If the sample is good, step three will be typing it up, as our group seems to prefer written patterns to charts.

In the Karma department, I awoke coughing and sneezing today. When I came downstairs I discovered that my dog has learned a new game. He pulls the Kleenex out of the box one at a time! Once he has made a little pile of them, he chews them until they're pulpy, and then repeats. Interesting that he chose to learn this trick just when I really NEED those Kleenexes...