The Year of Design

Hello folks! I might be blogging a smidgeon more this year than last (hahaha, I wrote one blogpost last year, not a hard goal to reach), because I have some stuff I want to share with the people, and blogging will work better for this than Facebook.

As any of you who know me knows, I'm an avid knitter. A few years ago I put on my Christmas list a book called "Design it, Knit it". Ellie bought it for me, happy, I think, that I was planning on taking my knitting to the next level. Little did she know, I wanted the book because it had a pattern in it that I really wanted to make.

Months later she mentioned her expectations, and I think that's what encouraged me to design my first vest (which I gave to her). It had some aspects that I real liked, but was a little too short. It has been relegated to my "will fix this eventually" pile to be undone and redesigned... eventually. A few years later I designed another vest. Hated it, ended up giving it to Goodwill. Then I designed another vest (seeing a pattern here?), again, for Ellie, and finally had a moderate success on my hands. I was now ready for the next step: sleeves. You might think that sleeves are an odd thing to get caught up on, but the shaping at the top takes careful balance to fit correctly into the armholes (which are bad enough).

Summer 2017 I designed my first sleeved sweater. Half-way through sewing the sleeves into the armholes, I turned back, undid the sleeves for about 9 inches, and redid the shaping. That sweater turned out a moderate success (I still own it, have worn it several times, and have received a few compliments on it). Sadly, it didn't fit the picture in my head, which is something I'm still working on.

So onto this year. At the very end of December I started sketching out my next project: an ankle length cardigan sweater, in a fading, monochromatic color scheme. Plans changed a lot as it went, but I really enjoyed the process, and wanted to keep doing it. I decided to stretch myself, and set a goal of designing and knitting at least one project a month. I hope to post pictures and descriptions of each project. I have not written the patterns for any of them (so far) and probably won't unless any other knitters request them. I hate writing patterns, it takes away from the time I could be knitting!