Friday, July 21, 2006

wellllllllll, maybe not!

dammit. i was gonna post a pic of the baby sweater in progress (yes, it's a sweater) and here's the pattern. my other intention, was to show progress pictures every hour either until i got it done, or died and went to bed. anyway, it is one where you start on the back, cast on more for the sleeves, work over the shoulder (no shoulder seams!), then down each front (it's a cardigan), and then seam and pick up stitches for the hood, and icord for the ties. i've got the back, one sleeve, and one front done. i'm working on the second sleeve as we speak. it progresseth apace (verily, i say!).

i do have a question for y'all. i have discovered that a lot of the knitting i do is intuitive. a lady was having trouble with doing attached icord last night. now for any of you who have been here from the beginning, i had the PFH. aka the Poncho From Hell. it was made with lion brand homespun and red heart clouds (yeah, different gauges, they do work ok together though), knit top down, with a slit for a zipper. the intent was to wear this at work when the air conditioning decided that it was in meat locker mode (this was a meat packing plant in one reincarnation). any way, because this was in stocking stitch, and i didn't want it to curl, i decided applied icord was the way to go. however, this poncho ended up hanging to my knees. and yes, i think i had a half a mile of icord to apply. ouch.

anyway, back to the story. she was having trouble with a purse she was making, to felt. what i didn't realize until she sat down when i told her i knew how to do applied icord, is that she was using the applied icord to seam two pieces together. i've never done that before. so, i took it from her, turned it inside out, and figured out what becky, our knitting doctor at sit & knit, had been showing her, and proceeded to show her again. and i showed her enough that she actually got half the bag seamed!

what amazes me, is that it only took a few minutes to figure it out. my question is this:

are you an intuitive knitter, or not? do you just jump in, or do you have to have it all laid out for you?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just jump on in! In many things, costme making, knitting,even spinning. I tend to read alot about the different methods and then just get on with it the way that I feel is "right"

yarnivorous said...

Hmm, I tend to nut things out and do them too. Like knitting a sock on one circ (my current favourite way). Some things I need to see a picture of first, then I can work it out. But not lace - i am still relatively new to lace.

Michelle said...

I'm a little of both. I usually look up a technique I haven't done before in one of my books and take it from there. I say it like that because, to me, the diagrams in these books are horrible as are the directions, so I end up winging it anyway. The book seems to give me the confidence to do it. *shrug* Go figure.

puck said...

i always think i know better than the pattern (unfortunately i don't alwys actually know better) but does that make me intuitive? (or just not-so-smart) i do think i have a knack for figuring things out, especially when a pattern doesn't make sense or skips over something
i, too, tend to just jump right in to things, knitting, spinning...i finally stained the pieces of the rigid heddle loom that have been sitting on my living room floor for the last 2 months...then i'll learn to weave (hopefully)