This stupid sweater!!

For two years now I have told myself I will publish my first sweater pattern, and it will be a Sizing With Spreadsheets pattern.

Three striped sweaters in varying colors

Since then…I have knit not one, not two, but THREE samples. All of them have made improvements upon the previous versions, but the design isn’t yet where I want it to be, especially if I intend to have test knitters try it out! It’s annoying enough that I will have to eventually bite the bullet and frog these sweaters if I want to reclaim the yarn; I would never do that to testers.

Despite the many frustrations, I still love the concept for this design and think I can make it work. The issues are twofold - first, raglans can be tricky to fit in general. Second, the stripe sequence makes neck shaping impossible, so I’ve deepened the neck to the point where I can’t just use average raglan lengths, I need the raglan length - X.

After 3 attempts, I have yet another calculation to try, if I can get over my apprehension about knitting another dud. I’ve already promised myself that this time I will STOP at the end of the raglan and try it on a bunch before even THINKING about splitting the sleeves. Now that I’m thinking about it, it would probably be good to block it on the needles, especially since the yarn I’m using (Felici) drapes nicely after blocking when knit at this gauge.

A less crucial issue, but still one I’ve been noodling on, is the number of yarns I should use for the helical stripes. The prototype of this sweater used 4, and the self-striping was broken up enough that the sleeves don’t look like big stripes of colors.

The first sample of my design was done with 6 yarns, which is technically possible but not really advisable. I feel faint when I consider frogging it, and I know at some point a knitter will need to frog to switch yarn or needles or fix an error. If I don’t want to deal with it myself, I can’t expect someone else to.

The second and third samples use only 3 colors, but unfortunately the stripes group up very obviously on the sleeves (which is why I used 2 solids in the worsted weight sample).

But! I had a shower thought the other day about how I can make 4 colors work while still getting the visual result I want with the yarn changes. I shall be incorporating it into my next…fourth sample.

Please send fortitude, as at some point I will need to frog the previous versions…!

Back from a break

I had a nice, if unintentional, break from knitting, designing, and social media generally. I wish I hadn’t, in the sense that I wish I could be on all the time, but it might be time to accept that my energy levels come in 6-month waves, and I should probably start making plans for another similar “vacation” in about 6 months!

What did I do while away? Honestly…mostly stress about the US slip-slip-slipping further into a wh*te supremacist nightmare and then avoid said stress by playing video games. Stress can also make me slip back into bad eating-disordery thought patterns, which I don’t love, but I have an OK handle on that. I’ve had a pair of Alba socks on the needles for over 2 months, and was FINALLY able to push through and get the second sock bound off yesterday, so that’s the entire extent of my knitting during my downtime.

To be honest, it was hard to get myself back into the designing mindset simply because I don’t think I have a good handle on it yet. I love coming up with ideas and making them real, but get hung up on the selling part. It requires expenditure (paying for tech editing, for example) and marketing (endless social media posts, blog posts, emails), which require both regular effort to create and maintain, and emotional effort to react to. I have a tendency to go all-or-nothing on endeavors, so I get frustrated when a pattern isn’t an instant success and sometimes wonder, why can’t this business totally replace my day job already?? This isn’t a fish for compliments, by the way, just an explanation for why I get stuck between enjoying the publishing journey and feeling like a failure for not being a knitting millionaire. (If that statement made you laugh, trust me, me too lol)

What am I working on now? Well, I unexpectedly found myself waiting in the car for 3 hours while my partner had retina surgery, so I have a shawl for waiting in the works. Super Sock Scarefest has started to build their schedule for 2022, so I’ve got a fun pattern in the works for that. I have another sock design I was hoping to get out during Pride month that, uh, did not go out during Pride month, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate it later in the year!

I have other stuff on deck that I enjoyed looking at in my brainstorming notebook, but to avoid overloading myself I’ll hold onto those for another day (or month).

The header image for this post is a lovely-smelling rose bush I got in an attempt to make myself take care of the yard again. So far it’s still alive!