apparknitchik

order and chaos

One of the most important things I have to consider as a designer is the yarn I'm going to use.  What weight is it?  What fibre content?  What colour? Will it drape?  Will it pop in a lace pattern?  How can I best use the colour in the design?  Can I place beads on it?  Will it stretch?  Will it hold its shape?

There are probably more questions, and probably things I consider without really thinking about them, things I know/understand by now that I don't state explicitly, but which I'm likely considering as I handle the yarn and think about what I want to do with it.

So -- what about the indigodragonfly Linen/Silk yarn that I got to create a new design?  Let's have a look:

 

First of all, ignore the colours -- I am not skilled enough as a photographer to remotely get them right, and to be honest, colour is not necessarily the primary thing I consider at when I'm coming up with a design (I'm working on a post about colour in my designing for AnnieBee's ColouRIOT series, so I'll expand on that more there.)

The Linen/Silk is 65% linen, 35% silk.  It is incredibly soft, mostly smooth -- but the linen gives it the teeniest bit of texture, almost tweedy, but very, very subtle.  indigodragonfly lists it as a "heavy lace/light fingering" weight, and I think that's a pretty accurate description.  There are 653m/715yds to a 115g skein, which is pretty generous if one were going to make a lace shawl.

Which I wasn't.  Or at least, not entirely.

I was going to make a shawl, but I really felt that the Linen/Silk would be gorgeous and drapy in stockinette, and thought of putting small bands of lace between sections of stockinette.  I decided to avoid a triangle, since the last few shawls I'd designed were triangles.  I settled on a half circle shape (first mistake -- more on this later), and began knitting.

And knitting.  And knitting.  My first attempts were actually more like PI shawls, with increases spaced evenly across certain rows to make the shawl grow in size.  But no matter what I tried, I couldn't get a nice balance between the lace and stockinette portions.  Also, I found what I was producing was much less drapey than I would have liked.  So I decided to abandon the PI increases and use a half-circle swirl shape. 

As I started knitting it, I wondered what it would be like if, instead of keeping all the sections even, I made them all different sizes -- so that each of the four panels would be progressively bigger than the one next to it (S/M/L/XL).  Mr. Purldiving helped out by creating a spreadsheet that listed the varying increases in each section, and I kept on knitting.

And knitting.  And ignoring the voice in my head that said, "You know, you really don't have enough yarn for this design." Well, ignoring that voice until the last week.

This is probably the moment where I muse a wee bit about order and chaos and the design process.   For me, both of these things are necessary steps in taking a design from an idea through to the finished product.  But for me, things only work if chaos comes first, and then order.  The chaos -- for me, anyway -- is all the stuff that goes into coming up with the design idea in the first place.  Remember?  All that reading, watching, listening, looking -- somewhere along the way, an idea pops out, and then I can think about what it might want to be in knit design terms.  In my case, that usually means a shawl, because that's what I enjoy designing most.

After I have an idea, I think about what yarn I want to use, what shape I want it to be, how best to interpret the idea using stitches -- either existing ones, or stitch patterns I adapt to suit the purpose (which I'm doing more and more of).  What elements do I want to put together?  How will I start?  How will I end?

Once I've done all this -- well, this is where the order part comes in.  I generally write out a first draft of a pattern, from beginning to end.  At the moment, my charts start out hand drawn (by me), but I often give them to Mr. Purldiving to create pristine charts and insert them into my draft pattern.  I might make changes as I work, but generally, I have the order of it all settled before I even start knitting.

By now, you will have noticed that that's not what I did with the Artist in Residence design.  Oh, I tried -- the first couple of attempts were mostly written out beforehand.  But from the minute I decided to abandon the traditional swirl shape and change the size of the panels in the shawl, I was pretty much working things out on the needles as I was knitting.

There are positives and negatives to this.  There's something to be said for breaking out of your usual method of working  - remember the saying?  "Do what you've always done, and get what you've always got."  I rather suspect if it weren't for this experience, my next few shawls would still have been triangles, and I would have been firmly stuck in a rut as a designer.

The downside, though, is that, because I was juggling a number of details and decisions on the fly, I wasn't really thinking about important facts, like running out of yarn.  Which I was.

So, what does one do in such a situation?  Where you've come up with a decent idea, but you know there's not enough yarn to execute it as it stands, and anyway, the idea was to come up with a one skein idea?

Well.  I'm sure by now that you might have an idea where this is heading.  In the next post, I'll talk about what the options are, and what I've decided to do.

 

ideas aren't the hard bit

Although I did say I went almost a whole year without any new ideas, I do believe that, under normal circumstances, coming up with ideas for designs really isn't all that hard.  One of the most important things you can do as a creator of anything is to constantly feed that creativity, provide it with influences and ideas and images that can inspire you do make something new.  Read (and read a variety of things, fiction as well as non fiction), listen to music (again, variety helps), watch movies, go to art exhibits -- all of this will tip fuel onto your fires of creation.

(Tip:  one thing I always try to do from time to time is to place myself in contact with something that is outside my comfort zone or my areas of interest -- you never know if the book you read or the film you watch or the music you listen to, stuff that is normally not your cup of tea, will inspire your next creation.  Even if it doesn't, the simple act of shaking up your settled world view might be enough to inspire something, anything.)

One of the things I love is Indian movies, but most especially those from the Malayalam language industry (out of the state of Kerala in the south of India).  I just so happened that the same week I got the hank of Linen/Silk, I watched two films:  the first, Chemmeen (which literally means "prawn", but the English title is the more telling "The Anger of the Sea"), from 1965,  is one of the first Malayalam colour films, and it's a gorgeous film based on the novel of the same name, about a myth about chastity amongst those in fishing communities.  When I watched this song, all I could think about was waves and sea and sand:

 

 (Yes, even my DVD print is almost that awful, but this is not the place where I rant about restoring classic films.)

The song is directed at the fisherman going out:  what will they bring back?  Could they bring back the pearls described in fairytales?  The whole song is very pretty and poetic, and filled with those images of the rippling sea. 

The second film I watched was the more recent 2012 film Akasathinte Niram (The Colour of Sky), in which a thief ends up trapped on an isolated island with its inhabitants, an old man, a little boy, a young deaf/mute woman, and another man who stammers.  At first, all the thief can do is obsess about how to get off the island, but gradually, he learns lessons about himself and about life.  But again, what really sticks with you are the images of the sea:

 

 

(Interesing tidbit:  the singer of both songs, from 1965 and from 2012, is the same -- the marvellous K.J. Yesudas.)

I like to think that it was a bit of a coincidence that I had scheduled these films to watch the same week that I'd chosen the Linen/Silk in the very pretty light turquoise colourway "You Punched the Highlights Out of Her Hair!", but perhaps it wasn't as much of a concidence as all that.  In any event, I had my yarn, I had my inspiration, and now I just had to work out the design.

Because ideas?  Aren't the hard bit.  It's what you do with the ideas that becomes just a wee bit more complicated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

thoughts on designing and creativity and stuff. like that there.

When I was first told about the fledgling Artist in Residence idea at Shall We Knit? by owner Karen Crouch, I was enthusiastic about the idea -- what a great way to get to see someone's work, and maybe be able to talk with them.  When Karen asked if I'd like to participate, I said yes -- but not right away, maybe after I'd added a few more designs to my portfolio.

Of course, some of my hesitation was due to the fact that I seriously didn't see myself as worthy of such an honour.  I've never been able to let go of the idea that I'm really only a dabbler when it comes to design.  And last year, I was pretty sure that I was going to be giving up on it altogether.  I went through a pretty dry spell idea-wise last year, and it wasn't until I realized that it was entirely because I also spent most of the year in ill health (nothing serious, just one thing after another), it had affected my ability to be creative.

Still, although I didn't say no, I still preferred to wait.

But Karen asked again, right after I'd had to stand up for myself and deal with the whole Amalia shawl thing, and I thought, "Okay, why not?"  So I said yes.

I had mixed feelings going into the process (it's still hard for me to think beyond "I'm not worthy"), but one thing I always had planned to do was work on a design on the days I designated to actually be at Shall We Knit?

And then the lovely folks at indigodragonfly decided to participate in the Artist in Residence programme, by donating a skein of yarn to be turned into a design during the month.  Their yarns are amongst my favourites:  I love the colours, and I love the humour and creativity that goes into making them.

After some discussion with Karen, I went with the Silk/Linen base, and started thinking of ideas.  I'll share more on the process behind what I've been working on (it's not finished, and I'll expand on why and what I think I need to do) over the next few posts.

 

A Designer's Worst Nightmare

I actually have been naive enough to think that this day would never come.  You know, the morning you wake up, turn on your computer and find a message that says:

"This looks an awful lot like your shawl."  With a link.

And you click on the link, and yes, there it is, the "this" that looks an awful lot like your shawl.

In this case, a "this" that looks an awful lot like a pattern I published two and a half years ago.

Amalia.

In case you're not one of the 2049 people who faved it on Ravelry (more on that in a bit) and don't know what I'm talking about, this is Amalia:

 

 

Actually, it's a photo of Amalia that I've never used for it, because, obviously, it's too dark.  But I've chosen it deliberately, because it's a view that's very similar to the one in the link I was sent to another shawl from another designer that looks very like Amalia.

Now, let me be clear:  I fully believe that similar designs happen independently, and I believe that's what has happened here.  It's inevitable that similar inspiration would strike when we're all working from the same pool of available stitch patterns.  And having messaged back and forth a bit with the designer, I pretty much understand that from a legal standpoint, there's not much I can do here.  The other designer is not breaking my copyright.  The other designer has taken great pains to point out that her version is worked top down, it's in a different weight of yarn, hers has a different shape than mine.  To prove her point, she's also sent me links on Ravelry to designs that end up looking similar because they use the same shaping and edging.

She is not wrong.  From a legal standpoint.

And I get it.  I do.  As I said, pretty much, there's nothing I can do here.

Oh, I could make a hypothetical argument.  Imagine you're a designer.  Let's say, as part of your New Year's Resolutions, you decided to work your way through all your Japanese stitch patterns.  To make it a useful exercise, you decide to turn them into scarves.  And since you're in the business of publishing patterns, you decide to put them out in a series of e-booklets.

And what if (hypothetically) a designer who is known for turning Japanese stitch patterns into scarves (Can you think of one?  I can.  Hypothetically, of course.) writes to you, because along the way, one (or more) of your scarves look almost exactly like hers.

What would you do?

Think about it.  What would you do?

This is an important question.  It's an important question for everyone, but it's especially for those of us who are essentially small business owners, independent artists and creators.  Because it moves us beyond dealing with the mere legal issues of what we do, and goes right to the heart of the moral issues that we occasionally have to struggle with.

In this case, do you argue that you have all the legal rights in the world to procede with your scarves, because you and this other designer are working from the same pool of available stitch patterns, and there are only so many ways to shape a scarf, and you used a different weight of yarn, so yours is a wee bit bigger?

You could.  You would be legally right.

Or do you do what is morally right -- recognize that you have those legal rights, but respect the fact that someone else managed to put together those elements first?  Do you say to that other designer, yes, I see we arrived at this independently, but you did it first, so I respect you and your work, and I'll walk away from those scarf designs that are similar to yours?

Face it -- this is a situation we, as designers, knock up against constantly.  I cannot count the number of times, in talking with another designer, I've heard, "Man, I worked so hard on this, got the sample knit, the pattern written up, it just needs to be test-knit, and then, crap.  Saw someone publish almost the same thing on Ravelry."

I've said it myself, when I've seen a design I've laboured over suddenly turn up.

And maybe it's just me, and maybe it's just my small circle of similarly-minded designer friends, but not once did any of us decide that we were within our legal rights to just go ahead with things.

What we did was respect the work of another designer who happened to get there first.  We shelved our designs to see if maybe, at a later time, we could change them, or salvage something from them, or turn them into something different.

And that's the key thing here, for us as small, independent business people and creators.  For us, those moral imperatives are absolutely key.  It's important for us to respect each other's work, to support each other, and to know when it's time to do what's morally right, as opposed to what's legally right.

I don't know what will happen with Amalia.  It's a design I'm fond of, for many reasons, and a design I'm proud of, for many reasons.  The inspiration for it hit at a time when I needed it most.  In 2010, my husband had been out of work for a very long time, and we were struggling financially and emotionally.  Because Amalia struck a chord with so many knitters (I mentioned there are 2049 people who have favourited it on Ravelry, something that still boggles my mind.  TWO THOUSAND AND FORTY NINE PEOPLE, PEOPLE!), it sold very well, and gave us a much needed boost.  In addition, I entered the shawl in the Kitchener-Waterloo Guild show in the spring of 2010, and it won a prize.  A small thing, but it made me feel so good.

But it was more than that.  Amalia represented the best of the kind of community support that I've been trying to talk about in this post.  First and foremost, I had the support of my wonderful local yarn shop, Shall We Knit.  Owner Karen Crouch and her staff (including Lynne Sosnowski, Cari Angold, and Lise Hymel) either test knit my pattern, or knit versions for themselves, or along with friends like Sue Frost and fellow designer Janelle Martin, encouraged me and shared my happiness in how successful this design became.  Beth Graham, another SWK staffer, did me the great honour of taking Amalia as her inspiration for a crochet crescent shawl called Scarf Theory.  

 

Please to be noting:  Amalia comes in different sizes.  Just saying.

Shall We Knit also kitted my pattern up and took it to shows, and sold many, many kits. Karen didn't have to do that.  But she liked the design, and made the effort to support a local designer, and threw her resources into it and her energy behind it just as she would have for a Name Designer.  That's the kind of person she is, and that's the kind of attitude that makes her shop a great place.  It's a fabulous store.  But it's also a place that believes in community.

I can't even begin to detail the support I've received from that very community in the last couple of days.  I'm an introvert, spend a lot of time isolated at home, and sometimes I forget that there are people out there willing to sympathize with me, help me work through issues, and just give a few words of support.  I don't know how to begin to say thank you.  And my heart swells just to think that there's a community out there like this.

I've been asked the last couple of days what I would like to see as the outcome of all this.  I don't know.  I'm fairly certain the legal arguments are what will prevail, and there's no way, really, that I can complain about that.

I think what I'd really like is that, if you're reading this post, that you think about supporting all the great small, indie, local, whatever designers and creators out there.  Go buy some yarn from a great indie dyer (here's a suggestion:  indigodragonfly or oceanwind knits or waterloo wools ).  Go buy a pattern from a small designer (hint:  Janelle Martin or Meghan Jackson) .  If you're in the Waterloo region, go check out Shall We Knit, and see what great people they are.

Just go out there and support all the great indie business people and creators.  They have heart and soul, and they need to know you love them.

That is all.

 

 

The Thin Green Line

If you've ever had to rip back your knitting, you'll understand how heartbreaking it can be, especially if you're working on a complicated lace piece -- it can mean tinking back hours or days of work.

Many knitters will advocate using a life-line -- that is, stringing a thread through the work.  What the life-line does is secure one row of stitches so that you can take your knitting off the needle and rip back quickly to the row that the life-line runs through.   The life-line holds that set of stitches secure so that you can't accidently rip back further than you'd intended.

If you're interested in learning more about life-lines and how to use them, Jackie Erickson-Schweitzer has an excellent write-up about them over on her Heartstrings website.

This, of course, is the moment where I admit that I rarely use life-lines myself.  I usually figure that if I work at a sensible pace, if I don't work on complicated lace pieces when I'm tired or out-of-sorts, well, I don't need them, and any mistakes I do make I figure I can fix without having to rip back.  For me, that's usually faster than ripping back and re-knitting (although I will admit that there are probably times when there's nothing else to be done).

But, if you take a look at the slowly progressing Hana-bi shawl...

 

... you will see that I have inserted a life-line.

Because Hana-bi is worked bottom-up, and the border takes a while to work, my test knitter asked if she could start working before I actually had the final draft of the pattern written -- so I sent her the instructions for starting the shawl and working the border pattern, while I figured out the rest the shawl.  She commented that it was kind of like working a Mystery Shawl.

In fact, for both of us, right now, it *is* kind of like working a Mystery Shawl, which is precisely why I've inserted a life-line through the last row of the border section.  I know that this much of the shawl works as I've planned it.  Above the life-line?  Well, not total mystery, but I had this vision of how I wanted the top to be shaped, and the Tech Guy and I calculated how to make that happen and created the charts, but, really?

I've never done something like this before, so right now, it feels a little bit like I've stepped off into the knitting void.  I'm prepared to rip back and re-work things if the shaping and the math needs some tweaking -- but I'm not prepared to rip back the whole thing, hence the life-line.  Whatever happens, the border stays the way it is, because I rather like how it looks, so the life-line ensures that if I have to change what's above the border, then at least I won't have to start over again from the beginning. 

I do suspect that what we've charted out will work as planned -- and I do have a couple of other back-up plans if for some strange reason it turns out that I'm wrong.  But I'm very happy to have put that life-line in, just in case.

Fireworks

Yes, it has been that long since I updated the blog, and I'd been thinking for a while that it was time for a bit of a revival.

So I thought what I'd do was trace how a new design comes about, at least for me.  At the very least, it's kind of a way for me to go all kind of "meta" about my process; maybe you'll find it interesting too.

What I'm working on at the moment is a design I called "Hana-bi", Japanese for "fireworks".   As with much of my designing, it started with a trip to my LYS about two weeks ago, and the news that a new yarn had just arrived in the shop:

 

Okay, a few thoughts:  first, cotton and linen are not normally my cup of tea as a knitter, but laceweight is, and this yarn is actually very nice quality and very good value for price.  I'm on a tight budget, so at the very least, trying something out with this gives me a chance to see how it works up, and also gives me scope to move on to a different, maybe more expensive laceweight if I like what I'm noodling out.  Also?  When someone arrives in the yarn shop, and they see the yarn, and there's actually a sample of something in it displayed there, they can get a good idea of how the yarn will work up, whether they ever knit that particular sample or not.  And the yarn is new, so, we figured, well, why not a new design?

And when I say "we", I mean the folks at the yarn shop.  They're a great support for me, and a pretty good sounding board when I have new ideas, AND, they often send me in a direction that sparks something new, as was the case here.

Then we talked colour. I have a partiality towards green.  I'd likely make everything I ever designed in green, because it's my favorite colour.  You, though, may not like green.  The nice folks at the yarn shop remind me of that fact, that there are lots of other colours out there, and they are all loved, by someone.

So, we laid out a few colours of the Pima Lino, and finally settled on one that I believe the folks at Diamond Yarns call "cranberry".  It is, really, and truly, the most vibrant shade of pink that I've ever set eyes on.  And it reminded me of this:

 

The film Hana-Bi, written by, directed by, and starring the great Takeshi Kitano.  I have seen this film.  I love this film.  It's not for the faint of heart, this film.  But, suddenly, my design had a name.

A yarn.  A colour.  A name.  But, you know, no actual pattern.

So, I set about browsing my stitch pattern books, and at one point, thought about doing a variation on Sunspots, until I realized how crazy that was going to be A. in a shawl and B. in a fine laceweight.  More searching led me to the lovely "Fountain" pattern in one of Barbara Walker's treasuries, and at that point?  I knew I had my fireworks.

Next step was working a swatch -- some of you may have seen this, I think I posted a photo of the thing in-progress last week on Twitter, but this is the whole thing done and blocked:

 

Actually, what you can't see is the top of the swatch, which is where I played around with a couple of ideas for finishing it off.  And you can't see a nice close-up of the blackberry coloured bead, which is my current favorite colour of bead, AND FOR WHICH I HAD TO MAKE A FLYING TRIP INTO TORONTO on one of the WORST WEATHER DAYS IN THE LAST FEW WEEKS because I HAD TO HAVE *THAT* BEAD for *THIS* YARN.

Yes, I can get a little obsessive, but I loved that colour bead on this colour yarn so much, that it was worth it.  Totally worth it.

Ah, but I bet you're wondering?  What shape is it?

Originally, I thought I'd do a riff on the crescent shaped shawls I'd designed this year. And I am, but not in the way that you'd think.  I'll write more about that as the design progresses.

For now?  I've cast on almost 500 stitches, and have been slowly chugging along the bottom border:

 
 

Happily, the Tech Guy and I have been working up all the charts, and I've actually pretty much got the pattern written at this point.  Once my sample is done, I'll hand it off to a test-knitter to make sure everything is clear and concise.  I'm so happy about this, we've worked hard to make the charts lovely and despite my not being a cotton/linen knitter, or a pink person, this is working out to be really lovely, and I'm *itching* to get it done!

never doubted I could do it. really.

Seriously -- if I'd thought even for a moment that I would miss the deadline on this, I wouldn't have taken it on.  But I finished it with plenty of time to spare, and it turned out well, if I do say so myself:

The Deets:

Pattern:  Caricia by Anne Hanson of Knitspot

Yarn:  Briar Rose Fibers Sea Pearl (Merino and Tencel, have misplaced the label so not sure in which proportions.)

Started:  April 16th, 2010

Finished:  April 26th, 2010

And I'm quite smug enough to point out that I lost almost two days of knitting time during that 10 day period to illness, so really, 8 days total from start to finish.  AND I managed to finish up a sample of one of my own patterns in time for the DKC Frolic on May 8th as well.

No general pattern modifications -- never when I'm knitting shop samples -- but I didn't have enough yarn to work fifteen full repeats before the ending repeat -- I worked fourteen instead, then worked the instructions for ending it off.  But it's still a pretty decent size nonetheless.

And now, onwards, with a new shop sample:  this time, Pam Allen's Eyelet Tank in CE Pebbles.
 

on track

My goal for today, Wednesday, was to have finished 10 repeats out of the 15 total, and happily, I managed that this morning:

Actually, I'm particularly pleased at having met this deadline -- I've been out of commission for a couple of days, and couldn't knit at all.  So it seems I set some reasonable goals for this project, and maybe I might even be able to exceed them in the next couple of days!
 

tickticktickticktick

I don't normally take on projects with tight deadlines, but this time, I couldn't resist:

The pattern is Caricia from Knitspot, and the yarn is Briar Rose Fibers Sea Pearl (50% merino wool/50% tencel) laceweight.

I'm probably knitting it at a slightly tighter gauge than the photos show at the website, because I tend to like the look of a pattern with stockinette patches a bit better. 

The colour is, off course, off.  It's a subtle variegated, mostly deep indigo with deep olive, but I just can't get it photographed properly.

I started knitting it last night (May 16th), and as of this evening (May 17th) I've got 5 repeats done.  15 total to go before I work the final section and cast it off.

It has to be done before the DKC Spring Frolic at the beginning of May.  Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, right?

Right.

again! again!

Yes, yet again, a third Liesl.  This one is a shop sample in Velvet Wool (really love the Velvet Wool):

And this won't be the last Liesl.  Yep, there's a fourth one in the planning stages -- it'll be kind of an interesting project, which I'll document here once I get around to it (hoping right after this Liesl is done, but the reality is I still have to put a workshop together for the beginning of March, so that'll take priority).