I’m well into Tri-Aran-Angle — a wonderfully-designed shawl for a cold climate, by the way. If you want to practice making pretty cables, this is definitely a great pattern to use! I’ve have learned some things about my mental block in following knitting patterns.

The convention in knitting patterns is to give line by line instructions for the creation of a garment. If you follow it line by line, and trust the designer, you’ll get a nice product.

I don’t think step by step for anything I do. I need to understand the principles of the whole, why I’m performing an action, and then not only will I be able to do what’s needed, I might be able to create variations on it. I think one of the reasons I found Knitting Without Tears such a delightful knitting instruction book was that Ms. Zimmerman spent a lot of time teaching the principles behind what she was doing along with the instructions for how to create the garments – whether it was the percentage system for constructing a sweater, or why wool acts the way it does.

This type of learning style has had its consequences in other areas of my life. Probably one of the reasons I never became much of a pianist (other than the fact I was not willing to practice enough. That was the biggie!) was that I was not taught musical theory anywhere near early enough in my studies. Not blaming my piano teacher. I’m sure to her eyes not only was I too young and not nearly interested enough in music, I was far too unskilled to handle theory before I got the process down. I am a theory-based learner, no doubt about it. As an adult, knowing that has big advantages. It means that I can pretty much learn anything I want to without being at the mercy of teaching style. Heh… I ought to thank my third grade teacher for being such a rotten teacher, actually. She might have turned me off to school and caused me to distrust teachers, but that’s when I started trying (with inconsistent success) to learn things on my own.

So, back to knitting. Instead of following knitting patterns, I’m deconstructing them to get the theory behind the techniques. I really wish Elizabeth Zimmerman’s style of pattern description were more common than the line by line convention that’s so common, but I can understand why it’s not. That much expository writing is pretty time-consuming.

Do you ever think about your learning style? What is it, and why does it work for you? (Why yes, that is of professional interest to me!)

So, having set myself the challenge of learning to knit from patterns properly, I started simply, and am going the Tri-Aran-Angle shawl.  Since it’s a shawl, getting the size wrong isn’t really a concern.  Also, I’m learning to do cables and such.

I’m actually doing the shawl for a the local hospital.  Like many places where people are in need of comfort, there is a Comfort Shawl project going on.   People who are caregivers for the elderly, or caring for very ill relatives, can get a hand-knit or hand-crocheted shawl if they want one.  There are people who find them a help in time of trial.  This one is a fairly heavy one, so it’s going to be like wrapping yourself in a security blanket.  Also, it’s appropriate for the cold winter weather.

So, what the heck?  I have yarn, the project looks like it’ll go fine, and someone can have a little something to feel better at a difficult time of life.  That works for me.

I’ve been knitting seriously for about six years. I can make basic socks, a scarf, mittens, whatever. I’ve posted pictures of some of my work, and it’s decent stuff. Wearable and attractive. Even creative. But most of the detail work in my knitting has been from stranded colorwork.

Confession. I don’t really know how to read a knitting pattern. Not well, anyway. Mostly, this is because I never knit to other people’s pattern, but use some design templates I’ve found such as Elizabeth Zimmerman’s seamless yoke sweater, or Wendy’s Generic Toe Up Socks, then added color details as it suited me. The colorwork? Mostly easy, because I learned how to do stranded colorwork from the We Call Them Pirates hat. Yes, that is a pattern, but using some really simple stitch techniques so I didn’t get bogged down in the chart. I’m confident enough with this kind of thing that a steeked Nordic sweater only presents the problem of what sort of pattern and colorwork would look cool on it.

However, I’d like to branch out. I’d like to make an Aran sweater; I’d like to add texture detail on socks. But for the most part, the charts with their symbols weren’t making sense to me.

Why? I was expecting to be able to skim them.

You can’t skim when you don’t know the language. Just sayin’.

I get this with my computer students all the time. They don’t have the vocabulary for whatever it is we’re doing, and it short circuits their brains. Abbreviations and symbols are difficult to decipher until you’re actually fluent in the language. When you’re used to things being easy and fluent, going back to it being tedious to decipher can be a bit of a difficult leap.

The simple fact is that while I can knit some classes of garments quite well, and am a structural thinker, until I’m fluent with the language, puzzling out the charts and patterns for textured knitting is going to be hard. Nothing wrong with that mind, but I’d gotten too used to knitting being easy and automatic and had forgotten that tacking on a new skill is going to require more concentration.

I’m knitting a pair of socks right now.  Pattern?  Heh.  I don’t really use one.

What I do (for you knitters out there), is a figure-8 cast-on toe-up sock knit in a stockingette with short row heels and a 2X2 rib for the cuff.  It’s the way I made the first pair of socks I ever made, and I like the basic idea.

I don’t even know if I do the short-rows “right”, mind.  But since the shape works, I don’t really care.

Hand-knit socks are funny.  If you’ve never worn them, the idea of getting socks as a gift seems a bit lame.  I get that. But I’ll tell you what, the look on a person’s face when they first try on a well-knit pair of hand-knit wool socks is funny as can be.   They look apprehensive at first, trying them on.  They don’t want to offend, but really, it’s a sock. How exciting can a sock be?  Besides, a hand-knits sock made to the specs of a specific person’s foot can look weirdly-shaped — not at all like commercial socks.

So here the person in, trying on… socks.  How silly.   They poke in the toe, and slide it over the foot gingerly.  After all, this is something hand-knit, and the maker is right there.  What if they <gasp> tear the sock that the knitter is clearly so proud of? How are they supposed to react?  Then, as the sock slides over the foot and nestles over the heel, the wearer gets this goofy look of bliss on their face, holds out the foot and wiggles the toes.  There is this dawning look of delight, rotating the foot and grinning.

You knitters know what I’m talking about.  I just wish I’d the sense to get pictures of people trying on hand-knit socks for the first time.

Dear 100% Wool,

I’m so sorry I abandoned you.  I loved you so much for your warmth in chilly, damp Northern New England. I didn’t like what a pain it was to wash you, but I’m so sorry, I didn’t know there were ways around that.

Can we try again?

All my love,

Noel

I’d been knitting with a wool/acrylic blend for the last year or two. I idly mentioned to the lady who owns my LYS¹ the reason I was choosing the yarn I did, but that I liked wool’s insulating properties a googleplex times better.  It’s just that I only own five or six sweaters, so they do need to be washed several times a winter.

My LYS guru looked at me strangely, and mentioned a method she uses to wash wool sweaters.   You fill a washing machine with warm (not hot) water and a little gentle soap.  Then you turn it off, but leave the basin full.  Add the sweaters and drop a towel in if the load needs balancing.  Walk away from it for a half hour or so.  Then turn the water to the spin cycle.  This will get the water out without agitating the sweater too much.  then you take the sweaters out, fill again and repeat without soap for the rinse.

The spin cycle does remove the water far, far better than the roll it in a towel method.  This means that if I wash a load of sweaters, I don’t have the damn things on every large flat surface for more than a day.

I’m back to knitting with wool, my preferred fiber for sweaters.  They make a better, longer-lasting sweater.  I realize that there are people who are allergic to wool, but I’m not, so that’s what I’m making for me.

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¹Local Yarn Store

I was complimented three times today on the sweater I’m wearing.  It’s the one I call my Thursday Sweater because of the red and purple joke with the Mjollnir pattern.  I was even asked where one could buy such a sweater.  I commented that I’d made it and the woman sighed, “Of course.  You can’t find a good wool sweater in a store any more.  They’re all cotton.”

That may not seem like much, depending on where you live.  But cotton is awful for cold or clammy weather — be it for socks or sweaters.   Cotton or cotton blend socks are certainly easier to care for.  But they don’t wick moisture well.  If your feet sweat, you get clammy.   I was never the world’s biggest wool fan until I started knitting up here in New England.  Wool socks are a thing of joy, let me tell you!   Wool wicks moisture, and is wonderfully warm.  In damp weather, wool doesn’t get clammy and lose its ability to insulate well.  Oh no.  It retains heat beautifully even in a drizzle, or if you step in a puddle.

Sure, wool is a pain in the butt to care for.   But warm?  Oh dear lord…

I suppose anyone who reads this blog has ascertained that I’m a pretty enthusiastic knitter.

I didn’t get into knitting until about 2005 or so.  I was going through an insane amount of stress, I had some friends who knitted and it looked cool and I like having something to do with my hands while watching a movie and things like that.  I made some scarves and a hat or two, and it was fun, but I didn’t really groove on knitting until I learned to knit in the round making toe-up socks with short row heels.  In fact, I don’t know how to make a traditional heel to this day.  My favorite socks are the ones I knit myself.  They’re warmer than the cotton jobs you buy in department stores, being wool and all.   The hand-washing, though, is a bit of a pain.

I made a sweater after I’d been knitting about six months.  A friend kindly sent me The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns after a complaint about the fact that I knew how to use a sloper in sewing, so why didn’t knitting have something like that?  I don’t much like trying to create to a specific pattern, you see.  But there are garment templates to work and create from.  I learned a lot from this book, still use it for making mittens and hat and think it’s a good book for any knitter who likes to create her own work, but needs a good canvas to start from.

That sweater I made?  It proved three things:  The Sweater Curse is real,  I hate sewing up a sweater, and I prefer knitting in the round to knitting flat when it comes to garments.  It wasn’t a very good sweater, mind.  I did my best, but I wasn’t skilled enough yet.

Some time later, I got a copy of Knitting Without Tears.  Now, I’d always wanted to be able to knit sweaters and had a feeling that if I just didn’t have to seam the darned things, I’d have something nice that I’d be content to wear or to give to someone else.  I live in Northern New England.  You’d be hard put to find a more practical application of knitting than making sweaters. It’s no wonder that some of the most gorgeous and inventive garments in the knitting tradition are local to Northern Europe.   Once I’d learned stranded knitting using a two fisted technique (yes, I can knit with my right or left hand — useful when you’re carrying two colors of yarn), you bet I was going to start knitting sweaters in the Nordic and Icelandic traditions.

It is the inherent practicality of it that I love, though.  Knitting is like banked time.  Think of how much waiting we do in our lives — waiting in line at the bank, waiting at the airport, riding in the car to get somewhere, waiting at the doctor’s office.  You’d be amazed how many of the socks I wear are knitted on airplanes or trains.  There are socks  I have that remind me of trips I’ve taken because they were created while travelling.  When you knit, that time becomes productive time.  At the end of it, you have a real sweater you can wear for years, or socks that keep your feet toasty warm.

Someone once commented that spikes in knitting come with stressful times.  I’d buy that.   I knit and sew more during stressful times than otherwise.  There are a lot of theories on why this might be so in general.  Part of it, I am sure, is the soothing nature of a repetitive physical motion (rocking a baby, anyone?).  But I think it’s more than that.  Sewing has a similar effect on me, and that’s not quite as repetitive as knitting.

Most crisis intervention therapies have routines to promote a sense of competence and mastery to the patients.  Basically, if you can’t feel in control of something or accomplished about something, you run out of cope real, real fast.  That’s a very normal human reaction.   While you can’t necessarily plot a curve from one point, I know the kick I get out of sewing my own wardrobe or knitting a garment for someone.  It’s a sense of accomplishment.   It’s a way to restore a sense of competence.  Knitting and sewing are relatively simple skills to learn.  Elizabeth Zimmerman, the Ur-geek of knitting, put it this way:

Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course, superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.

You can learn to knit a garter stitch scarf relatively quickly. And at the end of the project, you have something physical, tangible, and dare I say  useful as well.  That kind of thing can do a lot to restore a sense of competence.

If it seems goofy to say, “I can’t control the economy, but by God, I can make this sweater!” don’t be too quick to sneer.  That sense of competence can and does fuel intelligent action in other areas.  Anyone who engages in a repetitive but ultimately useful and creative thing like knitting¹ will tell you that in the process of creation, your mind relaxes.  You enter a meditative state and often that relaxation of the mind engages the creative centers that allows you to come up with the creative solutions you need in other areas of life.

It also has to do with how the brain works and how it encodes stressful experiences.

Psychological theory suggests that when we’re exposed to a horrifying situation, we take it in through two channels. One is the basic, primal sensory channel: the sights, sounds, sensations, and smells of the situation. The other is an intellectual channel: our brains trying to make sense of what’s going on, and putting it into words and a context that we can talk about.

The experimenters wondered what would happen if you specifically blocked one of these channels while the traumatic event is going on. And they found that if you were pre-occupied with a “visual-spatial task,” like typing a pattern on a computer, you didn’t encode the images and sounds of the traumatic experience as strongly. As a result, subjects who kept their hands busy had fewer flashbacks.

– http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/sci_update.cfm?DocID=209

Does make for an interesting take on the old saying, “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.”

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¹Or woodworking (ever sanded a bookcase?), or cooking, or even scrubbing a floor (see Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett for an interesting discussion of the principle). It needs to be physical, but not too mentally demanding.