People knit for a lot of reasons. For creative expression. To make something useful or beautiful. And sometimes, to exert control over their life and environment.

I bend reality with my yarn.

I make time flow more swiftly.

I change wasted time into productive time.

While I hold my needles, I transform a hospital room into a sanctuary, not a beeping hell dimension.

I’ve never been so grateful to have an intricate lace project on the needles as I was two weeks ago.

I  understand now why so many lapsed knitters find themselves taking it up again when they are in the hospital . Sure, it helps beat the boredom, but it’s more than that. Knitting transforms a knitter’s experience of “place.” It changes your sense of locus of control from external to internal. One minute, you feel out-of-place, unmoored,  and anxious. Then you pick up your needles and, in just a few minutes, the rhythm and familiarity have calmed and soothed you. You have control again. Just a small bubble of control, but it’s yours.

Knitting doesn’t really change reality, it changes me.

At a recent knit night my friends and I were swapping knit-gossip about our favorite designers, including one designer who (according to hearsay) had been both knitting and designing for five years.

Now, I assume this designer spent at least a few minutes picking up the basics before launching her wildly successful pattern business. But still…

How do you jump from learning how to knit and follow other people’s visions to the level of understanding that allows you to realize your own visions? Not everyone is a knitting-Mozart, learning to knit and purl one day; the next, channeling the voice of God into their cables.

They say it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become world class in any field. I’m not convinced one has to be world class in order to be good enough to be a designer. Still, it seems as if some level of mastery must be attained before you can properly understand what you’re doing…before you can extrapolate from what what you know and have experienced, to something you’ve never even seen.

When are your visions just “twiddling” or adding mods? And when are they something more? At what point does it become clear that your own vision and creativity are the driving force behind what you are creating? When are you no longer aping other fiber artists, but truly doing your own thing?

And at what point do you decide that your fibery, artistic vision is worthy to be formally documented and shared with others? There are very few gate keepers when it comes to knitting patterns these days. It only takes a few clicks of a mouse to publish a pattern on Ravelry. You don’t need to prove your pattern is original, well-written or even tested before releasing it into the wild. If you release it for free then people won’t even hold you accountable for its quality.

I don’t believe in publishing junk. So that option’s out.

Publishing a pattern requires a lot of self-confidence. If you’re not a knitting Mozart with celestial voices to guide you, it takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there.  I’d like to do it someday, but I think I’ll be content to be a hardworking knitting Wagner. Wagner famously spent 26 years writing The Ring of the Nibelung. I hope it doesn’t take me that long.

 

 

 

 

Ok folks, I’m dipping my toes ever so slightly into knitwear design. Just for fun, at this point. I’ve created simple designs for myself before, but nothing complicated or, really, written down.

I’ve just completed a rough draft of instructions and a chart for a pair of colorwork mittens. For the charts, I used the spreadsheet software that comes with Libreoffice (a free MS Excel clone for Mac).

Having done this, I’m left with the earnest desire to see if there’s a better solution out there.

What do you like to use? Have you found knitting design software that has truly made your life easier? Do you have different software you use for different purposes?