Needles & hooks

Fostering Creativity

I’ve been a riot of ideas lately and I’ve posted a few things that I’ve worked on. And I know it can sometimes be intimidating to see people develop all kinds of neat stuff and think that you’ll never be able to do that. But really, a fully formed pattern doesn’t usually spring out of my head and off of my needles. Usually there’s a bit of work involved. A lot of experimenting. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about the creative process.

Sometimes I set out to try to make a certain thing. That’s how my Clapotis Cap came about. I knew I wanted to make a matching hat. I wanted to make it look like a mini-Clapotis was wound around my head. But I feared if I made the sections as they are in the shawl pattern, they would be too wide. So I made them a little narrower. And I knit up a prototype. My first one was cute, but the sides were only about 3 inches long. Not nearly long enough. So I made it bigger. Later, when I was faced with making the top, I realized that with careful placing, I could make the decrease swirl look like it was growing out of the ends of some of the diagonals. So I made that happen too.

Othertimes, I just have a general idea and I play around until I find something that works. When I designed the Whirlygig Scarf, I was looking for something that showcased the yarn I needed to use, that would make an interesting scarf. I tried a number of stitch patterns that I’d knit and rip out before trying the chevron pattern I ultimately used. And I completely didn’t expect the knitted item to behave in the twisty way that it did. But I was thrilled.

Sometimes pieces of an idea strike me, but I’m not sure what I want to do with them. In those cases, I record them somewhere. Sometimes I revisit them. I’ve jotted notes in various places, but I was never a good journaler. But then, recently, I wanted to chart out an idea I had and I needed graph paper. And I wished for a graph paper notebook. Most of the time, you can find a quad-ruled notebook, but it’s a fancy Lab Notebook and expensive to boot. So, during my last trip to Staples, I was delighted to find these (a steal at 6 books for $8)

Small enough to fit into a knitting bag. Can be used to take notes, make sketches, draw charts. A pen fits neatly in the spiral. Here’s where I sketched out my ideas for the Whirlygig Hat (coming soon):

And here are a few notes I took during my Entrelac class at Stitches. A few things I noticed about the garments that were passed around. As you can see from my last few posts, I’ve been playing around with Entrelac.

Overall, the important thing is just to try things out. Buy some inexpensive light-colored yarn that you can use to play with ideas. Cast on stitches, try new stitches, rip it out of it doesn’t work. Try to think about why it didn’t work and what you can change about it. And then try again.

Comments: 0 — Posted under: Almost Random, Tech-head

Intangled in Intarsia

I didn’t get a lot of knitting done this past weekend. Instead, I spent a lot of type hacking my TiVo (this is “stuff I do with my hands”). It’s got bigger hard drives now (to record 10 days of TV, yes, days) and an ethernet card, and pretty soon, I’ll be able to transfer shows from it to my Macintosh and burn DVDs.

For the curious, here are a few pictures. The first is what the inside of a TiVo looks like. It’s really just a computer. The second is the hacking setup — I had to put the TiVo hard drive into a PC to format it and I needed my Mac laptop to read the webpages with the instructions. The last is a close-up of the “tools” I had to add to the PC to temporarily hold the hard drives (see the Cadbury Egg box near the middle and at the very bottom, under the hard drive in the lower left corner, is a GladWare container that I used as a platform - it was just the right size).

But enough about that.

In the odd moments that I did knit (watching my TiVo, hoping I didn’t break it), I worked on the Mouse Baby Blanket. I’m more than half finished as you can see in this photo:

As you might guess, there’s a lot of instarsia. For the non-knitters, “intarsia” is the practise of knitting with multiple balls of yarn to create color blocks. Everywhere I switch colors, there is another ball of yarn. Fortunately, I can start over at each new row of squares. But, with the 4 different squares and the two sections of edging, and the adornments of stripes or polka dots or mice (the grey blobs), that’s a lot of balls to keep in the air. So all I see is this:

Now, I could use some yarn bobbins instead of whole balls, but the squares are pretty big and I’m doing enough weaving at the corners and for the embellishments that I don’t want to risk having too little yarn on a bobbin. I finally had the epiphany over the weekend to stick each ball in a separate ziploc bag. This minimizes the tangling. And I’ve worked out a great system where I line up the balls I’m working and do a quick swap when I have to switch colors and twist the yarn. But the bags are slippery and they take up a lot of room next to me on the couch. And my husband eyes it all with disdain, because after all, he thinks he should get the whole couch. What I really need is a small milk crate with individual cubbies to stick each ball in. A bag won’t do, because I want something rigid that will hold the balls upright in their proper places. Maybe it’s time to run out to the liquor store (to find a box with cubbies!).

The good news is that there end up being so many tails to weave in with this project, that I pause to take the time to do it after I complete each row of squares. Otherwise, I get hopelessly tangled while I’m working. So when I finish this blanket, there will be minimal finishing work to do.

I was going to say something about the dangers of reading other knitter’s blogs, causing one to want to do yet more projects. But not tonight.

Comments: 0 — Posted under: Knitting, Tech-head