As I was cruising through my email this morning, an article from Knitting Daily caught my eye.   As I began to read, it hit me that this knitwear designer  (Shirley Paden) couldn’t have put to better words the sheer thrill the challenge of designing something new on the looms brings me.

Here’s a little excerpt:
“”…But what I’ve come to realize is that moments like this are the best part of the knitwear design experience. Because suddenly you are doing more than reading a chart or a series of instructions. You are interacting with your own vision, pulling it out of some sort of abstract universe and making it real, making it become what you’d hoped for all along.

The mistakes that get made when you’re designing are different than the mistakes you make when you overlook a row on a store-bought chart or when you drop a stitch. The mistakes you make when you’re working up your own creation add up to what I call ‘design wisdom.’ Somehow they really stay with you and get incorporated into your ‘knitting brain’! The next time you begin a project, those skills are at the ready.” They are waiting for you.

So, if you wonder how I design or why I keep wanting to design, you have your answer now. To watch the process of a vision unfold, take form, and live in the world-something unique to the knitter who creates it—is awe-inspiring. Why would I want to do anything else?””

I was at my local knit night last night and the subject came up about knitting repeated items for sale in a shop.  People who can do this amaze me, and I’ve always wondered why I have a hard time with the idea of me personally accomplishing this.  I confessed that my favorite way to knit was to make one of an item (or a couple, if necessary from a design perspective, or for gifting), create the pattern, and then move right onto the next project.  I do not relish doing something more than once, which is why designing patterns is the perfect fit for me.  Then to read this article the very next morning, and have someone else put into words exactly WHY I feel this way was such perfect timing…as well as confirmation that I’m doing the right thing…for me.  🙂

I love the anticipation of starting a new design.  The sparking of a new idea, the turning it every which way in my mind, “chewing” it until the taste is almost palpable, until I know the piece and how it should grow from my loom before it’s even written down on paper, the bit of anxiety that it won’t come out exactly as I envisioned, the sculpting process of a new “baby being birthed” from just string and pegs,  and then to finally see the stitches and sections meld together to make what was once only a spark of an idea into something of value, originality, beauty, spunk…with a tiny piece of me in each stitch.

I’ve been quiet lately, but it’s only because I’ve been deep in the process above.  I have “birthed” over 30 new “pieces of me” over the last year and am now embarking on the rather dreary part of designing…the typing up all the technical information, making it as clear and concise as possible, so that all of YOU will finally be able to share in the joy of making these things along with me.  I simply can’t wait to share them with you!

Continuing the journey, making fun things with string…

Bethany~