Crowns
So here's another example of what I mean by having a bunch of building blocks and putting them together different ways. These are the crowns of the two hats from yesterday's post. And hat crowns are (generally) just 'ways to decrease while maintaining some of the lines of the pattern.' So if you have a couple of different ways to decrease out of a given stitch, you can find yourself with a couple of lovely different hat crowns. The hardest part is deciding which you like best, which I, alas, am no help with. I'm hopelessly smitten with both! But [...]
Stack them up
Ok, I'm going to be Very Brave and show you some Very Not Pretty Pictures so I can excitedly explain the next weird idea... Remember when I talked about how the thing that I've come to really love in designs is letting all the bits of a piece flow nicely into one another? How that's what makes a pattern feel like it clicks in my head? Well I'm working on a way to take all those various pieces and sort of...package them all up together as building blocks so you can play with them too! So these hats are taking [...]
Tidy
Because just one version is not enough...Also because oh, oh starting things off like that is just so very very very tidy that it makes my brain happy.
You pick!
We have a decision to make! One of these is going to come out, and you get to pick which. You can vote over here (it's a public post). Ok, so, these are both little...explorations that went along with a couple of last year's hat patterns. One covers duplicate stitch and all the lovely ways you can use it to decorate things. The other covers some very spiffy variations of herringbone stitch and the ways you can play with them on all sorts of things. They both started life as special little extras for the folks Patreon. And now it's [...]
Flow
Ok, so I asked if we should talk about what changed between the first version of these (which were my very first pattern...fifteen years ago...when I did not know what I was doing) and the shiny new version that came out this week. And you said yes, so let's do that! So, the biggest thing is what I tend to think of as flow...how smoothly you transition between one section of the sock and the next. And this is a little nebulous and hand wave-y to talk about, but it's pretty easy to see. There's an instagram version of this [...]
Growth
So...I still have them. The first socks. From 15 years ago. And I have the shiny new version. Wanna see what's changed? First, a small caution, because my heart gets tender and squishy about things these days. My first inclination, any time I get better at anything, is to whisk away all evidence that I didn't always know what I know now. So showing the sock from my Very First Sock Pattern feels like showing you my teenage diary. There are lots of things that make me want to hide my face in my hands and groan in embarrassment. But [...]
Popped
Popped is back and oh, oh I have some feelings about this one! These came out fifteen years ago, and they were my very first pattern. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing—no clue how to write a pattern or take a decent picture. But somehow I talked myself into doing it anyway. And folks liked them, so I did it again. And again. And again. Now here we are, fifteen years later, and somehow those socks that I knit for my own amusement and wrote up on whim have turned into a career and a dozen books [...]
Satisfying
Ya know those things you pick up and just want to play with? Like it's somehow satisfying to manipulate them? Yeah...this is one of those. Like really really really a lot. I promise it will make (at least a little) more sense when it's done. But oh, oh it's fun to hold.
It depends
Do I block my swatches? Eh, depends on what I'm using them for! In this case, I was checking to see if I liked this stitch pattern with this yarn for a pair of socks I'm getting reknit. And since that was all I was doing, I totally could have just taken the wee crumpled bit of business (photo two) and stretched it out between my fingers and said 'yup, that works' and carried on. But that only works because it's a yarn I'm familiar with, getting turned into a thing I'm familiar with, where the sizing isn't super important. [...]
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