New Design
Here’s what I’ve been up to for the last little while — just finished putting this newest pattern up on Ravelry and hopefully it will be available within a couple of days on Patternfish as well.
The Yarn
The yarn is a wonderful Rowan Pure Wool DK – it is soooo soft — highly recommended!
In(un)venting
I’ve been working on a couple of interesting techniques — one an edge finishing one and the other some unusual colour work — that will be shared in the coming weeks as I incorporate them into actual designs.
My current conundrum
I am contemplating submitting a design to one of the online knitting magazines — a very intimidating process. First of all, there are quite a few to choose from; and it’s a big, as in BIG, no-no to submit the same design to more than one magazine, so how to choose? Also, rejection letters abound — can I not take it personally if no one likes my design enough to publish it.
Every idea always seems like such a good one when I first think of it and as I sketch and draw and swatch (oh, yes I do!) and calculate I sometime giggle to myself I’m so pleased — everyone will love this! I just hope no one else gets it out there before I do — ’cause you know as soon as you think of an idea, at least 100 people around the world are probably having the same thought.
How it Happened:
My “brilliant” idea that I’m contemplating for the magazine submission was a landmark on the west coast that jumped out at me from a travel photo I saw on the net. It instantly yelled “knitting” at me. Then grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. What could I do?
Translating the idea to knitting is a fluid process for me — a combination of stitch dictionaries, shapes that feel good to me, yarn I have (sometimes) and sketching lots of possibilities and combinations. Hardly ever the same process twice in a row.
I usually have a pretty firm idea in my head before I actually swatch — but the current swatch is #2 already because after I did the first one, washed it, dried it, I didn’t like the texture of the fabric. It was much to soft and limp. So frog, frog, frog and started again with a smaller set of needles — swatch #2 is drying as we speak. Yarn straight from the store is very deceiving.
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