Winging it
By JC | September 13, 2010
Sometimes, I can really crank out the knitting:
cardigan in progress
That’s the body of a cardigan, knit from the bottom up through some subtle waist shaping to within a couple inches of the armhole shaping. It’s the Creative Focus Silk I mentioned in my last post. The game plan—after much head scratching and some sketching—is to have rib in the lower body and sleeves, and lattice patterning in the upper body.
Three things made it possible to go from the cast-on on Friday to what you see here:
- A weekend retreat. Nothing says knitting time like a couple days away from everything! (Though I am paying for it now with a phenomenal backlog of email and other tasks.)
- A profound desire to get through the mindless ribbing to the more interesting lattice pattern. The irony, of course, is now that I’m past the ribbing and need to cross stitches on every right-side row, progress goes at a snail’s pace and I long for the speed of the ribbing. sigh
- Letting go and just winging it. Normally, I write out at least part of a pattern, even if only in rough draft form, before starting to knit the sample. But hey, I needed something to work on at the retreat. And I’ll be able to decipher my chicken-scratch notes later, right? (Sure you will, says the sarcastic voice in the back of my head.)
To ensure the project doesn’t stall completely now that I’m home from the retreat, I’m imposing a Minimum Daily Knitting Requirement. It’s something I do to nudge myself into slogging through non-trivial knitting projects. I pick a given quantity—a number of rows, pattern repeats, or whatever—to complete each day. If I don’t finish one day’s MDKR on that day, I have to complete it the next day in addition to the next day’s MDKR. No rest for the weary! Keep up with the MDKR or else!
For now, I figure the MDKR for this sweater will be two rows. Sounds pretty measly, doesn’t it? But that’s kind of the point. Every day, I’ll sit myself down and work through those two rows… and, most days, I’ll find some momentum and finish more than two rows. The point is make sure I sit down and make some progress each day. Of course, once I divide fronts and back and I’m working on fewer stitches, I’ll adjust the MDKR—say, 4 rows on the back, or 8 rows on one of the fronts, or whatever it takes to keep the project moving along and end up with a finished cardigan.
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