What a Life!

This morning while I was heating the water for my chai, Steve started laughing at me and said I was pacing the kitchen with an odd smile on my face. Goodness gracious! Am I not allowed to smile? He wanted to know what I was thinking about and I told him “knitting.” I deserve to smile about something, don’t I?

I have a handful of blogs that I love to read every day, and most of them belong to knitwear designers who talk about their designs and so forth. I must confess, since I’ve started doing my own designing, I’ve become quite a snob about various designs knitters come up with. Basically, most knitters out there, it seems, want basic (aka boring) patterns that spell out exactly how to do a garment so they just have to follow the stitch by stitch directions. That makes for a lot of boring designs. My favorite designers are the ones who come up with innovative designs for things that normal people would still wear (as in, not Vogue).

I’ve done technical editing on a number of patterns for a published designer, so it’s not that I don’t understand what goes into designing a pattern to sell and trying to avoid a raft of questions from knitters who need things spelled out stitch by stitch. I don’t particularly like knitting from patterns designed for those types of knitters because I am more interested in the idea behind what you’re being told to do stitch by stitch. I actually prefer knitting from European patterns because they spell things out less and only tell you what you really need to know.

I’ve considered writing patterns for my own designs, but it’s the though of the spelling out stitch by stitch kind of writing that makes my eyes glaze over and my hands pick up another item to knit rather than going to the keyboard to write out what I did. But I decided sometime between yesterday and this morning that if I self-published my patterns (as some of my favorite designers do), I could write them any way I want…and maybe people would be so inspired by how I wrote my patterns that the whole knitting pattern industry here in the U.S. would change to do things as I do. Well, maybe not quite.

I mean, if people are looking for patterns that will allow them mindless knitting, explaining a stitch pattern according to how it appears as you knit it rather than stitch by stitch is actually a lot more “mindless” than having to follow a pattern stitch by stitch. And I can’t be the only one who prefers patterns that are written for people who actually understand what they’re doing before they see the final result. So why not write my own patterns in a style that I prefer? If I want to publish any of them, I can edit them for the publication in which they will appear.

Once I reached that conclusion, the ideas started rolling for how I would write patterns for designs I have already done. And it was that flood of ideas that put the odd smile on my face and made me pace the kitchen to burn off the energy the ideas were creating. So go ahead and laugh at me! At least I am having fun!