Pattern? We don’t need no stinking patterns!
Somehow, someway, I’ve developed an allergy to knitting patterns.
Not to knitting itself, mind you. Knitting is still a fun and relaxing way to pass the time (and get a new pair of warm socks). However, I’m now on a sort of anti-pattern kick. Having memorized the basic patterns for things like socks, gloves, and scarves, I pretty much just cast on and improvise things instead of following any pattern. With scarves, this is no big deal. Size isn’t a real concern. Just pick a stitch pattern, and a yarn, and you’re ready to go.
But now things are getting a bit out of hand. Take the Jaywalkers, for example. You’d be hard pressed to find a clearer, more straightforwardly-written pattern than Grumperina’s. It looks like this. My working copy of the pattern, however, looks a little different:
Um….yeah. Kinda minimalist. At best. More to the point, though, is this “we don’t need no stinking patterns” attitude that has since resulted in this little bit of madness:
This here piece of enigmatic knitting is my first experiment with entrelac. Fun, but at the same time I now totally understand why some folks learn to knit backwards rather than keep turning and turning and turning and turning and turning the work around. A more *normal* knitter might have gone with a simple but small project to learn this stuff, and just followed the pattern. Me? Nah. I just figured, “I know what I’ll do–entrelac mitts!” Small project that doesn’t require a lot of time or effort to find out if I like Entrelac. So then I carefully researched the Entrelac stitch, then checked out existing patterns for fingerless gloves, made a gauge swatch and measured it a couple times, tested things out with both the Clover needles and the Addis, and…hah. No.
Just messing with you. I found an Entrelac tutorial, and just cast that puppy on.
Vaguely sorting through the mental hopper for my memorized fingerless mitt pattern, I realized I would have to knit the fronts and the backs of the gloves separately. Since I’m used to doing anything remotely tubelike on two circular needles, this is an easy enough adjustment. I started with a two inch cuff in my usual K2P2 ribbing, let one needle pause, while starting in on the entrelac adventures with the other. Later the two sides will will get joined up, but even now I haven’t decided whether to just leave slits for the thumbs, or do the “knit in some waste yarn and cast on a thumb trick. I’m taking a total voyage of discovery with this project.
Along the way I discovered the whole “entrelac is really poofy” phenomonon, and so the mitts are rapidly turning into a present for Joy, whose hands are much bigger than mine. There’s also the “learn to knit backwards” thing, which I haven’t done yet but suspect I will be strongly motivated to do by the time I get to the second glove.
These developments are kind of scary, actually, because in the knitting queue is a sweater. I already have one sweater in the queue–Rosebud, to be precise–that I started earlier in the year, and then lost track off for a while. Meantime, I want to start another one. Here in Rewalsar, there isn’t a lot of variation in sweater patterns. Everybody seems to use the same basic patterns for vests, cardigans, and pullovers. It’s very common to see women wandering around town knitting merrily away on a sweater sleeve, or back, or front, with nary a written pattern in sight, or even a small note for size calculations. I’ve been here long that now I want a “desi sweater” for my very own.
Thing is, except for one–count it, one!–baby sweater, I’ve never successfully knit a sweater before. Yes, I’ve found a pattern. Will I actually pay any attention to it? Stay tuned….
