What a Life!

In the time between when I used to blog “regularly” and now, I have taken up designing with my knitting. It isn’t that I didn’t have design ideas before. I was known for feeling free to change things here and there, but I still followed the basic structure of the pattern. Now I’ve gained a nuts and bolts understanding of how to make garments that fit which means I can knit without a pattern.

Oh, I’ve made wonderful things. The joy of having a baby is that baby’s are small and you can use leftover yarn from other projects to design sweaters that knit up quick and are great experiments in design. So not only have I made wonderful things, I’ve used up a lot of leftover yarn from completed projects.

But here is the problem that has arisen – I can’t just knit anymore. I literally cannot follow a pattern. I’ve tried, but I get about halfway through and I have a better idea so I rip it all out and do it over my way. It’s fun, but it slows progress, and it’s sad when you can no longer be satisfied following a simple pattern.

Take, for instance, my current project: knitting wool pants for baby. The pattern I intended to use is one I actually helped design and slaved over for hours with the designer. It’s worked from the waist down and has great shaping techniques that make it work well over a variety of different diapers. But as I am knitting, it is so plain. And I keep thinking, What if I knit up from the cuff? How could I do the crotch differently? What designs could I add that would dress them up a little?

I’ve seen many patterns for knitted pants, and all the ones written for diapering are from the top down and the ones not intended for cloth-diapered babies are knit from the bottom up. The top-down ones are all seamless and the cuff-up ones are not. Otherwise there isn’t a big difference beyond the shaping or lack of it. I have this odd desire to try knitting a pair “the other way” just to see if I could do it. Shaping would be a much bigger challenge, but it could still be done. My mind is a whirl and I just feel compelled to try.

So I’m looking at a half-knit pair of longies and seriously thinking of ripping them out completely and starting over using a different method. Yes, another half-knit project ripped out so I can try it another way just to see if I could come up with something better. Why oh why do I do this to myself?