Road Trip!!

As almost every knitter knows, road trips are a great time to get a ton of knitting done and also possibly aggravate any carpal tunnel or tendonitis you might have.  Or perhaps set off that motion sickness you are prone to.  Luckily I don't have motion sickness and I have managed to be careful about avoiding carpal tunnel and their ilk.  So I should have been able to get a ton of knitting done on our 13 hour, each direction, marathon road trip.  Nope!  I actually got nothing done.  It wasn't because I didn't want to, or I didn't have the time, rather I was sitting in the back keeping my little boy happy.  And being crammed between a large carseat and the door doesn't make for comfortable or ergonomic knitting (when is knitting ergonomic anyways!).  And it wasn't for lack of trying, I have tried in the past to knit while crammed in and alas the carseat is just at the wrong height for me to knit at all.  Sigh.

I was also hopeful that I could get some knitting done when I reached our destination but again I barely managed to start a shawl I have been designing and working on for a while.  I figured out that since I am not up on my British accents, it was really hard to knit and watch Downton Abbey, yes I am only just now finally getting around to watching it.  This is the drawback to not having cable, but the savings are totally worth the lack of cable right now.  While I did manage to get most of the numbers figured out, I really need to just sit down and knit the whole thing to determine if the numbers will work out to the right size.  So now we are finally back home and I don't have to worry about the house proofing or the stairs.  I do have to slowly wean the little guy off the non-stop attention he got so he can once again play on his own some more and I can get stuff done without him hanging on or wanting to be held (my poor arm).

Hopefully everyone got more knitting done then I did.

Designing is Fun

I haven't been designing patterns for that long, really I consider myself a newbie in the design department even if I consider myself a fairly advanced knitter (at least when it comes to lace).  I started a few months ago trying to design a crescent shaped shawl with the fan and feather along the bottom edge.  Yes, I know, I think everyone has a pattern out for something like this.  I just couldn't figure out how to get the center point fan to not pucker the surrounding shawl.  So I put it down for a while hoping inspiration would come to me as I worked on something else.

Well, inspiration did come to me.  Unfortunately it didn't resolve the puckering issue.  Instead it came in the form of another idea for a shawl.  A better form for the crescent and a nice apple leaf detail along the bottom (check out the Apple Leaf pattern on Ravelry).  So I sketched out the idea, whipped up a sample and it looked great along the edge, but turned out way too long.   This was a scarf not a shawl!  So back to the drawing board and not only did I resolve the scarf versus shawl issue but along came another idea.

Cables! I haven't really done cables before.  I have done mock cables and while they are easy and look nice I wasn't a huge fan of them.  So what on earth possessed me to design a shawl with not one cable but two cables, one along the neck edge and one in the border detail.  Well, cables really are not that hard and the shawl knit up pretty quickly.  Mostly I think this was because I had learned from the first two shawls.  Plan more in advance.  I just posted the Cabled Lace pattern on Ravelry and already people have it in their queues with over 20+ likes on it.  Check it out and give it a like if you think it is nice.

It doesn't stop there either.  Suddenly I had not one, not two, but three more ideas pop into my head for more shawls and even a little shrug/bolero.  I sketched them all out so I wouldn't forget and even started test knitting them.  The shrug is really cute and works well in bulky, and fingering.  I am working on making it both a long sleeve and short sleeve.  I will have to play around with adding more details to it so people have options while knitting it.

I didn't realize that design work could beget more ideas.  It is like I have opened up a door and everything is rushing to push itself inside.

Frogging; Knitting Therapy

The worst enemy to a knitter is themselves.  I am harshly critical of my own work, yet I am oblivious to mistakes made by other knitters.  Not only am I not looking for them but I really don't care if they made a mistake(s) as long as the whole piece looks nice.  So why do my mistakes bother me so much?

They bother me because not only do I know they are there, and exactly where they are, but also because it ruins the piece for me.  It will always be flawed to me.  This has pushed me to figure out how to correct mistakes several rows down so I can fix them as soon as I find them.  But I will no longer hesitate to just frog a piece and start fresh.  I remember when I picked up knitting again after more then ten years away and could barely remember how to cast off.  Imagine my frustration at knitting a sweater in the round for the first time and getting a twist in it; not once, not twice, but three times in a row.  And of course you never discover this after just one or two rows.  Frogging was a huge thing after struggling to get everything to work.  But I always felt so much better afterwards because I was once again moving forward with the project.  I also didn't have this large mistake hanging over my head and weighing me down.

Frogging has become a form of therapy for a project that just isn't going right.  I pull out the needles and just pull on that working thread.  I can frog something quite quickly sending hours or even days worth of work back onto the ball.  And while there is some initial pain, the relief of moving forward even if I am going backwards is a much better reward.  If I really think about it, I always know that frogging is the best solution for a major problem, whether I am starting over completely or just frogging back to a better point, my brain always knows it is the right thing to do.  My heart sometimes tries to rebel but I just can't justify stopping a project because I don't like how it is going or because of a mistake.  I don't need a WIP with an error hanging over my head.

Design work has really upped the ante on my frogging rate.  So many times, a pattern that seems good on paper doesn't make it past more then a few rows before I have to frog it back and rework the pattern to account for shape, or stitches I didn't count.  I am now quite zen about frogging, maybe a little too zen.  What's your take on frogging?