Growing my knitting skills – and getting sidetracked

Today’s topic is to look back over the last year of projects & look at where I am in terms of new skills and knowledge.

I’ve got two main areas that I’ve been learning in the last year: creating knitting patterns and spinning.

I don’t have any training in writing knitting patterns. I’m an engineer who tests software and who got a Classical Studies degree for fun. After over a decade of knitting, I started having my own ideas. My first idea took ages to turn into a written pattern and the process was painful.

In the last year I’ve got a lot more comfortable with writing patterns and I published 6 in 2010. 2010 helped me clarify what I believe needs to be in a pattern. I also started developing a better process for getting there. The experience of doing a gigantic knit along (KAL) last July was an amazing wild ride. It helped me hone my troubleshooting skills. Everyone has their own interpretation of the words on a page, so it was a challenge to remotely diagnose the problems other people had with how my brain works

This year I’m working on my pattern development and looking to do more submissions for publication.

In November I finally succumbed to the desire to learn to spin. I had bought Abby Franquemont’s book a few months earlier, but it wasn’t until November that I bought a wonderful little Golding spindle. Since then I’ve spun about 5 miles of singles and I’ve gone from wonky looking stuff to yarn that looks and acts like yarn. This has sidetracked me from knitting, but it’s also brought me a lot of joy. It’ll eventually lead to knitting.

I’m pretty much self-taught from books and YouTube videos, so I’m hoping in the next year to learn from some folks who’ve been doing this for longer.