Mastery
January 18, 2009 at 7:20 pm | In Fiber Art, Lace, Past – Present – Future | 2 CommentsWhile cleaning up my crafts area, I came across a piece in progress that I’ve last shown in this post, over a year ago. So I started fiddling with it again, and made some more progress:
As I got back into the project, I realized that achieving any kind of consistency with the lace stitches would take a lot of practice, and that is not very likely to happen when I can forget something in the corner for a year at times while being busy with other things. The problem is that I’m interested in way too many things to have the time and patience to achieve mastery in any one of them. I’m more interested in trying out things and understanding the basics of something than I am in knowing everything about one thing. No, that’s not quite right, I’d happily learn all about one thing if that wouldn’t steal time from other interesting pursuits.
With the amount of knowledge available today and multiplying every day, it’s become impossible to get even an overview of what’s out there to know, much less aquiring detailed knowledge in several fields at once. Most of us have had to become specialists in a narrow field out of necessity, since the body of knowledge even in a small field can be vast. The internet is playing its own role in making lots of knowledge available to everybody at the other end of a search. So, being naturally curious about a lot of things, fibery or not, I get drawn in all directions and never put in the time to go really far into one topic.
But why should I want to? While it might be nice to be a specialist in whatever area, I think having just basic knowledge of many different fields has its own benefits. One of the goals of this blog is to help keeping as many old needlecrafts as possible alive and well. And alive for me doesn’t mean 5 people on the planet know perfectly how to do it, but as many people as possible have tried it with a simple project and know the basics. If then a few people fall in love with a craft and want to go deeper, so much the better. So I think I’ll go on providing tutorials and patterns for small projects in whatever craft takes my fancy next, and stop worrying about achieving mastery in any of them.
Versatility Mittens—Finished!
January 11, 2009 at 9:23 pm | In Knitting | Leave a CommentI seem to be exclusively knitting lately, I think the communities at Ravelry and at my local knitting group keep me motivated. So I finished my Versatility Mittens this week, and here they are:
This was my first try at designing something with a pattern, and the result is pretty and definitely wearable! It took a few tries and a bit of tinkering to figure out how to best finish the cable pattern at the top of the mitten, but I worked something out. For the left mitten, I mirrored the cable to make the mittens symmetrical by changing all C5F to C5B and vice versa. I also increased one stitch on the back after the ribbing to have an odd number of stitches at the back, so I could really center the pattern.
For anybody who wants to play, here’s the chart for the tip decreases with the end of the pattern:
The back of the mitten is 24 stitches wide, the decreases for the tip start on a row with a double cable crossing. The chart is for the right mitten, for the left one switch the cable crossings around.
If I were to make those again, there’s a few things I would change that I didn’t anticipate before starting to knit, but in hindsight should have.
Because of the cable on the back the back of the mitten is narrower than the front side. This doesn’t really matter until you work the tip, when the decreases show up mostly on the back when they should be at the front and back symmetrically. They also seem to crowd the end of the pattern in. There’s a couple of things I could try to fix this:
- Using the two-circs method to knit the front of the mittens with a smaller needle than the back. This would also lead to a denser fabric at the front where most of the wear and tear will take place.
- increase a couple more stitches at the back when beginning the pattern. I’d still have the problem how to lose them when working the tip, though.
This was a fun and fast little project, but if I really want to design my own patterns, I’ve got a lot to learn yet.
Versatility Mittens
January 3, 2009 at 8:11 pm | In Knitting | 1 CommentWhile my Versatility scarf still isn’t finished, I decided I needed a matching pair of mittens. Since I’m making the scarf with the yarn doubled up, I can easily use a single strand of the same yarn for the mittens. I’m using a basic pattern for mittens as found in my go-to knitting book. The fun started when I tried to place the center cable from Versatility on the back of the mitten. To make sure the ribbing is continuous with the pattern, Im using a 2 knit/1 purl ribbing. After some miscalculations (there are only 4 braids, but 5 purl stitches in that braid, I somehow got 5 braids stuck in memory) I worked things out. As of today, the first mitten is finished and the second one already cast on!
Here’s the started scarf again for comparison:
I really like how this is coming out, this is going to be a very nice set when finished!
Something I really start to appreciate while making the first steps to designing my own knits, is the care for the little details that goes into a good pattern and takes quite a lot of fiddling to get right. Kudos to all the designers that take that kind of care and provide us with so many gorgeous patterns.
The designer of Versatility has her own blog at LeTonBeau’s Weblog and the folks at Knitty, where this pattern was published, put together a great magazine with lots of great patterns. You could say I’m developing a bit of an addiction, since Waves of Grain came from the same edition of Knitty as Versatility.
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