Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving

Unless you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, in which case Happy Thursday.  Now if you'll excuse me, family has descended upon my house, and for some reason we spent most of our day at Ikea.  Sleep is required.  XD

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Rip it, rip it...

I have done quite a lot of frogging today.  Thank heaven it was frogging crochet, because it's so much easier to do a partial frog in crochet than in knit, and if I had had to do the part before my mistake, I would have been really skeeved off.  But anyway.  Frogging, unfortunately, is an essential part of my design process.  I'm sure not everybody does this.  But for me, usually... I make a sketch.  I make a swatch or two.  Do some math.  Then I get started with the yarn.

This part rarely goes as well as the swatches and math suggest it will.  Stitch a little.  Doesn't look the way I think it ought to.  Rip rip rip.  Now things don't quite come together the way they're supposed to.  Rip rip rip.  Successful for a bit.  Then I measure things.  Things always go south when I measure things the first time.  Rip rip.  Then with any luck I'm past the gusset/yoke/insane part because I seem to always insist on one piece design.

But you know, ripping isn't always a bad thing.  Every iteration is better.  And yarn, if nothing else, is very forgiving.

Monday, November 7, 2011

My favorite thing about crochet...

...is that you can use very fine yarn, and still have a project finished this century.  Case in point: I am currently crocheting a sweater in fingering weight.  If I tried to do that in knitting, I don't think I would ever finish.  Maybe there are people out there for whom knitting is faster.  But I don't think I've ever met one.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Turns out I'm bad at November.

The idea, I think, was to plan to get something done, then do it.  But things keep coming up.  Also, I am easily distracted.  Instead of working on my sweater design, I have finished my pair of mittens, sewn a dress for myself (it doesn't fit right), made up a crap ton of invoices, begun figuring out about selling hard copies of my patterns, (gasp, pant), and, FINALLY, started a swatch for my sweater.  Sort of.  I mean, it's only two rows long, and I haven't started any of the stitch patterns I need to test.  Also, my husband's family will be staying with us for Thanksgiving, so I have to get ready for that.

So, short version: November seems to be kicking my butt, rather than the other way around.  Boo.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

November is for getting stuff done.

You'be probably heard of all the Na(something something)Mo things.  Knit a sweater, write a blog, write a novel, the whole point is to get stuff done in November.  Lots and lots of stuff.  Personally, I'm going to take a  cue from both NaKniSweMo and NaBloPoMo and work on a sweater design and talk to y'all about it here on my blog.  With any luck at all I will also get my camera and my computer back on speaking terms, and thus be able to show you lots of pictures of work-in-progress sweater.  Although it is a crochet sweater.  Cut me some slack, I'm designing the darn thing, if I had to knit it too I would never get it done this month.  Crochet = much faster.  I hope.  Did I mention it's in fingering weight?
I'm liking it so far anyway, even though it is still just yarn.