Oh, my dear god it is HOT in here.
I’m in my studio right now (where there is no air conditioner…yet) and it is actually too hot to knit. Unfortunately, that means I should be working on things like sizing and schematics, but obviously, I’m procrastinating.
Had a really good photo shoot this morning, which means that the first shawl of the mystery series is due out sometime this week! And the second one hopefully next week!
This weekend is the Garden State Yarn Crawl, which, for those of you who don’t know, is like a pub crawl except with yarn stores. I’ll be working Friday Saturday and Sunday at The Blue Purl (and after that I’m going to need an industrial strength foot massage. Any offers?).
Last Wednesday I realized I wasn’t all that excited about anything I was knitting, mostly just because I’m not at very exciting parts of any of my projects. I thought maybe what I needed was to cast on for something that is NOT a design of my own. Sometimes it’s nice to just…follow a pattern. Not worry about whether it’s going to fit a human of any shape, whether I’m going to have to re-jigger the stitch count to make the lace pattern work, or what the HELL is going to happen once the armholes measure 7.5″.
So I spent the entire evening after work looking through all my Ravelry favorites, magazines, books and pattern binders. (If you’re anything like me, you laughed when you read that I was going to try to cast on for a project THE SAME NIGHT I thought of it because it takes DAYS, if not WEEKS of planning for this kind of thing. Except for the things you cast on on a whim just because you feel like it and the yarn happened to be right there and the needles were free. I don’t know about you, but those rarely end well for me…if they end at all.)
Needless to say, I didn’t come up with a project, but it did get me thinking about the whole concept of knitting from patterns again. I think people often don’t think of knitting as an art form simply because many knitters use other peoples’ patterns to create a finished garment. Now let’s think about this. I’ve never heard of a pianist being criticized for only playing the works of other composers rather than creating their own. You don’t scoff at people on the subway for reading books rather then writing their own.
Maybe I’m getting carried away. I guess in my own life, there’s a constant struggle going on: Art vs. Craft. Having grown up with an artist parent and always having been surrounded by that type (particularly in college), I’ve always considered art to be The Goal. At the same time, I was always drawn to things that were deemed “crafty” by my “arty” friends. I remember when I was in college and having a fling with counted cross stitch, one of my friends said to me, “Isn’t that sort of like paint-by-numbers?”
I still think of that as one of the most wounding things anyone has ever said to me. I’m always striving to make Art with a capital A, and now that I’m designing, I think I can legitimately say that I am (maybe not with the capital A, but art nonetheless). When the knitting bug first bit me and I was knitting from patterns, I was out of college and not quite so immersed in the art world, but I still felt that I needed to justify what I was doing because that bitchy little voice in my head was saying that this seemed an AWFUL lot like the dreaded paint-by-numbers.
My argument for knitting from patterns is this: I have learned so much from every pattern I’ve ever knit. I’ve learned how lace works, ways to incorporate shaping into various design elements, I’ve learned all kinds of finishing techniques and positively COUNTLESS other things. So even though I’m really busy with my own designs, I can’t imagine not ever knitting from a pattern ever again because I still have so much to learn from them. We all do.