[Some years ago, I started another craft blog, which quickly died a death. Today on Twitter, the incomparable Kate (of Rebel Raising and I Blame the Mother, among other valiant and inspiring endeavours) suggested that I repost this entry, which I'm delighted to do. It's from spring 2008 - hence the amazingly grainy [...]]]>

[Some years ago, I started another craft blog, which quickly died a death. Today on Twitter, the incomparable Kate (of Rebel Raising and I Blame the Mother, among other valiant and inspiring endeavours) suggested that I repost this entry, which I'm delighted to do. It's from spring 2008 - hence the amazingly grainy photos, taken with my last camera but one - and rereading it reminds me how pleased I was with the baby tanktop I made from this wool. I must write up the pattern.]

Believe it or not, although I’ve been knitting on and off for maybe 27 years, I’ve just finished my very first project knitted from a skein – specifically, a skein of delicious Shepherd Worsted from Lorna’s Laces, in the “Watercolor” colourway. I wound the wool ten days ago, while watching the second half of Casino Royale (see under: four-month-old baby with unpredictable evening sleep pattern; films that can if necessary be watched in eighteen-minute segments preferred).

Winding the wool took me back. I did it my grandmother’s way (she knitted constantly, and was my steady source of random ends of yarn for many years – though she, and I, always called it “wool”). She showed me her winding method when I was around eleven, and I went through a phase of winding my own balls from the ends she gave me – and sometimes even from new-bought balls. They were so much nicer, with their pineappley tufts and firm thumb-holes, and so satisfying to make.

So, as James Bond suited up to face Le Chiffre across the poker table, I hung the skein around my knees, found an end, and made a figure-8 around a thumb and two fingers, winding until I had a comfortable handful. Then I laid the handful against my thumb and started winding around both, each turn slightly crossing the turn below.

As the stakes rose, the body count mounted and the question of whom to trust became steadily more open, I wound and wound, rotating the ball on my thumb, feeling it grow larger and more coherent, enjoying the softness and smoothness of the wool, the regularity of the ball’s surface, and the rhythm of my progress around the skein on my knees, around, and around again.

Finally, just when it looked as though Bond had really fallen for the accountant, I came to the end of my skein, and watched the last few set-piece sequences with my hands still in my lap. Only when the credits started to roll did I pull my thumb out from its neat little burrow and admire my finished ball.

This last photo and the one at the top of the post were taken the following day, in the light. (I’m stuck with my camera phone at the moment – looking into sorting something better out soon.) To start knitting, you pull on the loopy bit at the top to retrieve your original handful of figure-8, leaving you knitting from the centre of the ball, just like my grandmother and me. No dancing, tumbling, tangling rigmarole when you want to get more yarn as you knit. So convenient!

This past little while, I’ve been thinking a lot about myself as a child, doing my crafts (that’s me there on the left, in 1984). It all seemed so much simpler then, as I rummaged through my great-aunt’s bags of remnants or my grandmother’s yarn ends to find what I wanted. I didn’t [...]]]>

This past little while, I’ve been thinking a lot about myself as a child, doing my crafts (that’s me there on the left, in 1984). It all seemed so much simpler then, as I rummaged through my great-aunt’s bags of remnants or my grandmother’s yarn ends to find what I wanted. I didn’t always know where I was going, but I was having such a good time getting there that I didn’t care.

My nine-year-old self would have been very pleased, I think, if she’d known how passionate I’d still be about these crafts at thirty-four. But it feels as though my approach is quite different now. I’ve been wondering what advice she’d give me – what have I forgotten in the intervening quarter-century?

Here are, oh, let’s make it nine things she might say … or at least, she might if she spoke in the idiom of a thirty-four-year-old, twenty-first-century mother of two – I am not writing this post in a cutesy, faux-naive style; you can’t make me:

1. Experiment. Take an idea and run with it – try things out. Do a little sampler piece or dive straight into a full-scale project: it doesn’t matter. Don’t be afraid that it’ll all go wrong. If it does go wrong, you can probably fix it anyway, or turn it into something else.

2. Use what you have. You possess an almighty stash, after all, some of which has been around since before you and I were born. I don’t mean “don’t buy any more yarn or fabric or threads until you’ve used all this up” (my god – you actually have money for supplies!) but maybe just … think about it first. For any given project, you probably already have something that can be used.

3. The right tool may make things easier, but the wrong tool can often do the trick. This is related to “use what you have”, but it’s more about inhibitions. That mental tic that says, “But I don’t have any coilless safety pins – I can’t possibly think about making a quilt!”? That’s not helpful. Improvise. You’ll be fine.

4. Produce lots. Creative success implies creative failure. (See? My nine-year-old self definitely wouldn’t have put it that way.) I mean to say, don’t be afraid of having wasted time and resources if a project doesn’t work out how you’d planned. The experience is always valuable. And don’t worry about making too much. Make what you feel like making. That way, you’ll get better at what you love, and you’ll have more beautiful things to give people. Win.

5. No need to shake the universe with every project. Simple is good too. Traditional designs survive because they have some quality that endures. The well made objects that you use every day will bring you at least as much pleasure in the long term as the bedizened creations that see action only rarely.

6. Capture ideas. You seem to have got out of the habit of sketching designs, copying down patterns that strike you, tracing and doodling and planning. You even carry a camera these days – use it! You don’t need to do something with every one of these ideas, but catching them as they whoosh by you can only be a good thing, surely?

7. Go with what you find beautiful. Don’t worry about fashions and trends and what people will think. If you make things that cause your pulse to quicken and a wide grin to settle on your face whenever you catch sight of them, all kinds of good will ensue. Aim to have as much beauty in your life as will fit – I mean real beauty, the stuff that makes you feel alive and aligned.

8. There’s no moral obligation to finish a project. I think you still have one or two projects kicking around that I abandoned in the early 1980s. You know what? That’s fine. Keep them if you want, or get rid of them, or repurpose them, but whatever you do, don’t feel a shred of guilt. The obligation to finish what you’ve started is a real creativity-killer. Don’t yield to it.

9. This stuff is important. What handcrafting means for you – all that complex edifice of memories and skills and emotions – has genuine value in your life. Don’t downplay it. Give it the space it needs, and allow it to nourish and sustain you.

It’s about maximising joy. You know that’s your number 1 priority, right? Right.

I’m on a serious design jag at the moment – finishing Down in the Woods and starting the purple thing in the past week. I’ve been knitting my own designs for (good lord) twenty years now, and I was asking myself this evening, have I learned anything useful? One or two things. Here [...]]]>

I’m on a serious design jag at the moment – finishing Down in the Woods and starting the purple thing in the past week. I’ve been knitting my own designs for (good lord) twenty years now, and I was asking myself this evening, have I learned anything useful? One or two things. Here – have a handful.

1. Swatch, swatch, swatch

Swatch. You may (like me) be a bit adolescent about swatching for other people’s designs (oh, Muuuuum, do I haaaaave to?), but trust me, swatching is your friend. Swatch for gauge, certainly, but also:

• Try out stitch and colour ideas.
• Check whether the transitions you’re planning will work in practice.
• Decide how you’ll cast on and off.
• See what sort of fabric your chosen needles produce – you may want to shift up or down a size.

2. Try out textured stitches in cotton

If you’re wanting to use a complex stitch, try knitting up a swatch in cotton with your various options. Dig out your favourite stitch library, if you have one (I love the Harmony Guides – details at the end of the post), and knit an inch or two of anything that takes your fancy. It’s a fun way to spend an afternoon. You may end up using only one of the stitches you try out, but the exercise is useful for a couple of reasons.

• Cotton has no loft to it, so you can really see the structure of the stitches and get a feel for how they might work in your garment.
• Different stitch patterns yield different widths over the same number of stitches – forewarned is forearmed.

3. Borrow dimensions from an existing garment

No need to reinvent the wheel spindle whorl. Base your dimensions on a similar knitted garment whose fit you like. Knitted fabric is very forgiving, fit-wise, so you don’t need to be 100% precise – go with what fits your stitch count and overall design.

4. Use techniques that suit you

The legendary Elizabeth Zimmerman declared straight out in Knitting without Tearsthat the main reason she knitted so much in the round was that she hated purl. Hear this: you don’t get extra points for slogging through techniques that give you no joy.

So if holding teeny needles makes your hands ache, use bigger ones. Or if you hate seaming, don’t do seams. (Aside: Actually, if you hate seaming, get hold of The Knitter’s Book of Finishing Techniques. It changed my knitting life.)

On the other hand, if you do a mean tubular cast-on, adore beading, go all squishy at the thought of crocheted edgings, well, knock yourself out.

5. Count twice, knit once

Not as crucial as the sewing rule “measure twice, cut once”, since you can always rip out your knitting (unless the yarn’s really hairy, in which case you’re doomed). But if you’re anything like as impatient as I am, you’ll want to do the actual work as few times as possible – ideally once.

So take your gauge. Take your dimensions. Take your calculator. Sit with them in Zen-like communion (you know that means “do the sums”, yeah?), and then write down your magic numbers. (Incidentally, if you’re designing for an adult woman, this free sizing spreadsheet from Josi Hannon Madera looks pretty amazing, though I should note that I haven’t used it.) Work out row lengths, increases and decreases. Trust the numbers. Then take a deep breath, and start knitting.

6. Keep track like a fiend

Write everything down. Even if you’re not planning to make a fair copy of your pattern, you’ll at least need to know how many rows you knitted on the back before beginning the armhole shaping, or where your sleeve increases are. Also, for all but the simplest patterns, you’ll more than likely come to a point where the stitches on your needle don’t look like you thought they would, and you’ll have to tweak things. Keep a note of what you do – you’ll be glad of it.

Doing these things won’t turn you into Kim Hargreaves or Ysolda or Di Gilpin, of course, but they should help your designs to come out the way you’d planned.

Links to Amazon.co.uk
The Harmony Guides: Knit & Purl Stitches: 250 Stitches to Knit
The Harmony Guides: Cable & Aran Stitches: 250 Stitches to Knit
The Harmony Guides: Lace & Eyelet Stitches: 250 Stitches to Knit
Knitting without Tears(Elizabeth Zimmerman)
The Knitter’s Book of Finishing Techniques(Nancie M. Wiseman)

Links to Amazon.com
The Harmony Guides: Knit & Purl: 250 Stitches to Knit
The Harmony Guides: Cables & Arans: 250 Stitches to Knit
The Harmony Guides: Lace & Eyelets: 250 Stitches to Knit
Knitting Without Tears(Elizabeth Zimmerman)
The Knitter’s Book of Finishing Techniques