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September 21, 2004

Leaving on a jet plane

don't know when I'll be back again... errrr... actually, yes I do. I'll be back next Tuesday. I don't know if I'll be able to check email or post or anything while I'm in Scotland so the following are the things I was pondering tonight and thought I would share with you so you can ponder them as well if you care to. They aren't well organized thoughts and I wasn't too articulate. It's more a stream of consciousness thing. Feel free to discuss and comment in my absence. I look forward to seeing what you've got to say.

Isn't knitting the coolest?! I mean really! You take this string and these sticks and make a bazillion loops and you get fabric. You can even do it without seams. I was just sitting in the laundromat drying some clothes and reading EZ's knitters' almanac again. Brilliant. Seriously. Every time I read it I remember how great knitting really is and how wool is so beautiful (as opposed to all that man made stuff) and how much I really love designing. So this got me thinking about what I knit and what I design and why. I thought about some of the patterns I have seen recently and I looked at the sweater I was wearing.

Let me digress to tell the story of my sweater and then I'll go back to my original meandering train of thought: I really wanted to make a nice, simple, green, cotton sweater. I found the perfect yarn on sale at Phildar and bought it and hadn't got around to using it. Then I went to Austria, but my baggage didn't. Feeling hot, dirty and poor, I went to H&M to buy emergency clothes and found a green cotton sweater for 15 Euro. It was exactly what I had wanted to knit, so I thought why bother! and bought it instead. OK, back to my original train of thought:

So I was thinking that I've seen a bunch of why bother patterns lately. What I mean is sweaters that look like (and strive to look like?) exactly what you can buy in the stores. And not even the interesting stuff in the stores. The boring, standard stuff. I don't want to knit or design why bother sweaters. They're too darned boring. Pretty boring to design. Really boring to knit. And I was just hoping that I'm not alone out there. I think I'm not, but I hope that there is a growing population of people who love beautifully designed, beautifully knit items. I know there are loads of people out there learning how to knit and making scarves and stuff (I won't bother to rattle on about that since Julia already did it eloquently a while back - see "Stop the Scarf Knitters") but I hope that the growing popularity of knitting will turn into an increasing appreciation for the art, rather than a quick fad, or worse, a dumbing down of patterns and magazines in general. I mean, isn't part of the point of knitting to make things that you couldn't buy in the store? Things that are more beautiful, more personal, fit better? It's certainly not cheaper. I guess a plain old St st crew neck sweater can be that when it's handmade, but it can also just be boring, unoriginal and no better than something machine made and store bought, depending on the pattern and the execution (dare I call it a waste of time?). I don't want to knit things I could find in any chain store. So I guess what I am saying is I am going to try to knit more quality, rather than quantity. That said, I would like more quantity too.

Thanks for reading my rambling. I hope you have a wonderful week filled with new discoveries and beautiful, high quality knitting.

Posted by kate at September 21, 2004 10:51 AM