More Knitting Stuff!
I wish there were more about knitting on the web. I don't mean blogs (although some of them are really great) and I don't mean patterns. What would be really cool (and maybe exists but I haven't found it) is a place to discuss designing stuff. I sometimes think it would be cool to design something; I sometimes even try to do it. What I don't have is a sense of proportion, of what works and what doesn't. For example, my grandmother's poncho. I did not know (a) how much yarn it would take (b) how much time it would take (c) how stretchy the top would be (d) how big around it should really be on the bottom. On the other hand, it would be great if there was a place where I could post something like "Hey, wouldn't it be a great idea to..." and have someone (like me right now, but of course "experience is what you get after you need it") say "Are you nuts? It'll take three million years and four miles of yarn and you still won't be done. Oh, and it'll be huge."
On the other hand, I'm sure that professional designers are not always willing to look at these, and the rest of us... well I don't know about other people, but I'm a pattern coward. I'm willing to experiment on little things but I am not willing to spend $100 and 100 hours on knitting something that will be fit for an elephant to wear. Or a chimpanzee. I want something that at least has some use, if only as a tablecloth (which is how a wrap that I made is currently being used...). Which I'm not sure my grandmother's poncho will, although she said that she liked it. (On the other hand, what kind of grandmother wouldn't like something that her granddaughter made?)
Well, I'm going to start doing it here, just in case someone is actually reading this and feels like returning me to sanity before I go completely off the deep end. In a positive-attitude attempt to start, here is my new scarf idea:
A few months ago the yarn store was having a sale. They had a bunch of bags of yarn that they were selling at $30 each. Now the idea is, of course, that you buy this bag, it has one skein of yarn in it of a bunch of types, and then you need more of the same yarn. One bag, however, had about 9 balls of Filatura di Crosa 100% silk fingering weight yarn in two colors. (They were all tangled together in a huge snarl, which is why they hadn't been separated.) I had just been planning to start a fingering-weight shawl, so this looked perfect. The bag had a bunch of other yarn, though, most of it incredibly ugly: some chunky yellow stuff, some very thin, very dark, brownish green ribbon yarn, some beige variegated varying-thickness yarn (i hate varying thickness yarn), some other beige fluffy stuff that doesn't match any of the other yarns, and so on. None of these are yarns for which I would pay money. (The Filatura di Crosa already cost $30, so these other skeins didn't count. And there was some reasonably nice stuff, too.) So I'm thinking: make a garter stitch scarf with all of this stuff. Then make a big pot of black dye (I'm interested with learning to dye anyway, so this'll be a good start =) ) and toss it in. The dye should kill the ugly colors and BOOM: you have an interesting textured scarf. I hope. =) Is this crazy, or sane?
On the other hand, I'm sure that professional designers are not always willing to look at these, and the rest of us... well I don't know about other people, but I'm a pattern coward. I'm willing to experiment on little things but I am not willing to spend $100 and 100 hours on knitting something that will be fit for an elephant to wear. Or a chimpanzee. I want something that at least has some use, if only as a tablecloth (which is how a wrap that I made is currently being used...). Which I'm not sure my grandmother's poncho will, although she said that she liked it. (On the other hand, what kind of grandmother wouldn't like something that her granddaughter made?)
Well, I'm going to start doing it here, just in case someone is actually reading this and feels like returning me to sanity before I go completely off the deep end. In a positive-attitude attempt to start, here is my new scarf idea:
A few months ago the yarn store was having a sale. They had a bunch of bags of yarn that they were selling at $30 each. Now the idea is, of course, that you buy this bag, it has one skein of yarn in it of a bunch of types, and then you need more of the same yarn. One bag, however, had about 9 balls of Filatura di Crosa 100% silk fingering weight yarn in two colors. (They were all tangled together in a huge snarl, which is why they hadn't been separated.) I had just been planning to start a fingering-weight shawl, so this looked perfect. The bag had a bunch of other yarn, though, most of it incredibly ugly: some chunky yellow stuff, some very thin, very dark, brownish green ribbon yarn, some beige variegated varying-thickness yarn (i hate varying thickness yarn), some other beige fluffy stuff that doesn't match any of the other yarns, and so on. None of these are yarns for which I would pay money. (The Filatura di Crosa already cost $30, so these other skeins didn't count. And there was some reasonably nice stuff, too.) So I'm thinking: make a garter stitch scarf with all of this stuff. Then make a big pot of black dye (I'm interested with learning to dye anyway, so this'll be a good start =) ) and toss it in. The dye should kill the ugly colors and BOOM: you have an interesting textured scarf. I hope. =) Is this crazy, or sane?
posted by Inna at
12:57 AM
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