I don’t think I’ve ever knit a pattern exactly as written. (At some level, I suppose very few people manage to knit something, particularly something large, without some mistake somewhere, which makes this statement generally true… but I am referring to something else, which is a deliberate set of pattern modifications). I switch yarns and switch weights which inevitably changes the guage and number of pattern repeats. I get tired of paying attention to a long, complicated lace pattern and decide that it’s going to be an edging for something that can be knit mostly in some variant of zombie knitting (stockinette, garter stitch, seed stitch, etc) while I watch my favorite musicals and chick flicks. I add a row here or there to give a pattern a slightly different feel. I marvel at the idea that people actually knit a pattern in the actual yarn and color it’s designed for, though I know plenty of people who do just that.
I imagine that one of these days, I’ll scrap the idea of knitting other people’s patterns altogether and do the same thing as I do with designing and sewing ballgowns… find patterns for very basic parts and put them together to build the design just the way I envision it.
Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to taking a class in designing knitting patterns. That might be fun.
The ruffled legwarmers march along and will hopefully come to a happy conclusion next week… I’m now about two thirds of the way knitting the top ruffle on the first legwarmer, which is exciting and fun, if a bit slow going. Apparently, I’m not very good at pf&b, especially when using a deep color of laceweight silk and mohair yarn on dark rosewood rather blunt needles. (Of course, the dark needles do have being a better length to their credit; the 8″ Harmony wood needles I was using before kept getting caught in my sleeves and threatening to stab me. I sense a post in the future about the value of finding the “right” needles to really enjoy a particular project… but I digress.)
I’ve made some several modifications to this pattern, which, very intelligently, I haven’t written down until now. Fortunately, they’re relatively minor. I added an extra two rows at the bottom of the lower ruffle because I didn’t like the idea of increasing and binding off right away. I am changing how the top ruffle works in a lot of ways. First, I think the legwarmers look top-heavy in the pattern picture so I figured I could solve that by knitting the legwarmers in two yarns together and then only using one (the lighter, fluffier one) for the top ruffle. That seems to be working rather well. Unfortunately, I don’t really care for how that particular yarn looks in 1×1 rib, so after the eyelets, I switched to stockinette and decided to split the increases on alternate rounds over about 8 rounds before binding off. So I knit two rounds even (after the eyelet round), round 3 kf&b on every fourth stitch, round 4 even, round 5 kf&b on the second stitch and every fourth stitch after that, round 6 even, round 7 kf&b on every fourth stitch, round 8 even and bind off knitwise.
We’ll see if it ends up looking how it does in my mind. I have high hopes.
