Knit and Crochet Blog Week Day 2: Skill + 1UP

One of the main reasons I enjoy (obsess over?) knitting--the same reason I love snow skiing--is that there is always something new to try, new territory to be charted.
Comparing my repertoire from last year to this year, it doesn't look like my style of knitting has changed very much--I haven't added any big new leaps like a first pair of socks, for example (that was last year).

What I have started doing is working on projects without a pattern. I've been on a creative and/or self-destructive cycle of getting an idea for a project, looking for the appropriate pattern, and upon not finding it, deciding "Eh, it can't be that hard. I'll just write the pattern myself!" Words you should consider carefully before uttering--"How hard can it be?" Sometimes it ends well:






I hesitate to use the word design--let's just say I make stuff (stuff could be replaced with a four-letter word that also starts with s). I realized it's just a matter of an idea + simple geometry and algebra + experimenting to see what works. But there are usually a lot of steps in between that look like this:

Yarn explosion! Sometimes the dog also causes a scene like this.
which makes my production process very slooooooow. Fortunately, the process of knitting is my favorite part, so I try to think of it as getting multiple uses from the same ball of yarn. I just finished this guy for my husband:



I had the idea that I wanted it to look like there were ski tracks coming down the sides of the hat. Finding no suitable pattern, "How hard can it be?"

I've also been incredibly entertained writing up the patterns and making charts (seriously!). I discovered the Free Pattern Testers group on Ravelry, and awesome place to test new designs and/or get your designs tested. They can try out your pattern, find any errors, and tell you if your design sucks. I've got those fingerless mitts in the last image swirling around in the test pile right now. I'm tempted to try a sweater next...that'll probably only take about approximately one-thousand years for me to bang out.