This whole ‘pattern’ thing that’s so pervasive in knitting and crochet…I don’t really get it. I like to live dangerously. Or stupidly. It wavers.
There are so many great patterns out there, written by talented designers who plough hours into doing the mental gymnastics, so we knitters/crocheters can just sit down and relax and create. Pick your pattern, roll around in your stash and select the yarn, maybe knit a gauge swatch and off you go.
Or not, if you’re me.
Because I am apparently pathologically incapable of Just Following The Bloody Pattern. Instead, I tweak and fiddle at best, and make the thing up from scratch at the more extreme end. The latter is especially true for garments.
Now, I should point out that this is not merely a symptom of my giant ego, utter hubris egging me on to make ‘improvements’ to the carefully designed pattern. No, sometimes there is actually a method to this madness (and it really does lead to madness, or at least creative swearing, on occasion). See, I am an odd shape. I am essentially a human cut-and-shut. No part of my anatomy is in proportion to any other part, no matter what metric or schema is used. This means that no off-the-rack clothes, or pattern for said clothes, will ever fit me in anything other than a very…approximate…way. And that’s the beauty of learning to knit, right? You can make stuff exactly how you want it! Rainbows and crystals emit joyously from the needles, as the knitter creates perfectly fitting garments, all with a benign smile, because knitting is also therapeutic and relaxing, right?
Er, not in my house.
My approach to knitting is less fluffy-bunnies and zen-like composure, and more Wall Street trading floor with added stimulants.
Sometimes it all starts out so normally, too. Let’s take the Green Cabled Cardigan (GCC) that I knit for my beloved spouse (henceforth know as Mr RustyRenault) last year. Now, it should also be noted here that I do not, as a rule, knit for other people. If you’re looking for one of those Nice Knitters, you’ve come knocking at the wrong door. I make the odd exception, usually for Mr RR. He knows better than to actually ask for something – he waits, silently, until I have decided to bestow something upon him. Then he may select an item (in the knowledge that I am capricious and reserve the right to veto as I see fit) and yarn (he is very good at picking yarn, and can smell Good Yarn hiding amidst a sea of squeaky acrylic – this is partly why I deign to knit for him in the first place).
The GCC started inauspiciously enough. I had seen a pattern in a magazine, by a fairly well-known designer. Mr RR concurred that he liked this pattern (or was too intimidated to say otherwise), and so yarn was purchased, and feely squares (one in stocking stitch, one in the cable pattern) were knit, washed and blocked. Behold and glory be! My gauge sufficiently matched pattern gauge and so I cast on the appropriate size, without the need for tedious arithmetic to resize, or reswatch.
I cast on 200-and-something stitches for the bottom hem. I knitted. And knitted some more. It looked a bit small, but you never can really tell for a good few rows. I finished the (folded – so twice as much knitting as for a normal hem) hem and proceeded to the main cable pattern. It still seemed slightly…parsimonious in fit…but I put my faith in the designer and their pattern-writing skills.
After another couple of rows, doubt had reached epic proportions. Out came the tape measure and I measured. And, you guessed it – too small. By about 2.5 inches. I rechecked gauge. I rechecked the number of stitches. I rechecked everything that could possibly be rechecked.
And then I checked the pattern.
I melted a number of my favourite brain cells checking the arithmetic of stitch counts against the schematic at various key points in the pattern. It was…wrong. The number of stitches, when knit at the gauge specified, did not result in the measurement proclaimed so boldly at the top of the pattern page. I redid the math several times. I redid it with a calculator. I redid it whilst yelling it out in rage. It was still wrong.
Taking a deep breath, I plotted my next move. Other than throwing the whole lot in the fire (come on, we’ve all been there…). ‘Aha’, thought I – ‘I’ll just knit the next size up’. Chastened by the ten million stitches I had already fruitlessly knit, I cleverly decided to check the math for this enterprise. It was also…wrong. Whatever absurd size grading this pattern used meant that there were huuuumungous gaps between sizes, rendering the one size too small, and the next size up too big.
Now, what a sensible knitter would probably have done at this point, bearing in mind that this pattern had quite an unusual shoulder construction that was quite key to the look, would have been to give it up as a bad job and find something else to knit.
I am not a sensible knitter, as you have possibly gathered by now. No. I saw this as the pattern thumbing its nose at me, and I was not about to back down at this juncture. No, I would reverse-engineer this cardigan, retaining all the unique features, but the correct goddamn size. Did I mention that I had knit precisely two sweaters before this, one of which was Flax, the easiest sweater pattern known to knitter-kind?
So, casting aside all notions of this fabled ‘relaxing knitting’ thing I hear people talk about, I set about engineering this cardigan…
To be continued…
This year my journey from hand painted merino loveliness to sheepy goodness seemed to be complete. Through EYF and the podcast lounge I entered the world of podcasts and blogs and learnt about colourwork that requires a much toothier sticky yarn. So once again Ysolda enabled with Rauma yarn and Shetland yarns.
