I was 15. Mom and I had bought too much acrylic worsted yarn, it was tricky to substitute for the ribbon yarn the pattern called for, and since we’d bought the pattern at a going out of business sale. The shop owner didn’t have any time to help us figure it out, in fact, the store may have been out of business as we shut the door and headed for the car with our yardage and patterns.
I may have had babysitting money to pay for the yarn, or I may have been too recently arrived in Massachusetts to have contacts willing to let me watch their children. The question of who really owned the yarn always made projects a bit uncomfortable, especially when I was bent on experimentation. So in a way, I was happy to have too much. And I did what any self respecting, slightly overconfident crocheter with too much yarn would do – made a second sweater with it. My only problem was, I didn’t know how to decrease!
So I made the bodice top down (it may not have had any armseye shaping) crocheted into the armseye for the top of the sleeve, then made little sleeve bottoms and sewed them together to get a puff shape. I thought the lacy chain stitch zig zag joining the sleeve halves was cute.
The next summer we went to Old Sturbridge Village, and Dad bought me two or three crochet books. From those books, I definitely learned how to decrease.
I haven’t thought of this project in years, but a Ravelry thread brought those sleeves to mind, only it wasn’t quite the right place to indulge in an “I was such a cute naive designer when I was young” story, though it did demonstrate the problem of “when do you start calling yourself a designer.” Do you just need to be able to create a garment that works and fits to be a designer, or do you need to master your craft, meet deadlines and write patterns in a way that won’t make your tech editor call you names in order to be called a designer?
But here is a fun question: what brilliant/stupid things did you do when you didn’t know any better?
2 Responses
I love your story! Most of my early designs either suffered from not basing them on a common shape, or trying to use the cheapest yarn I could find, often odd lots in closeout bins.
That’s pretty brave, striking out without a pattern that young! Too bad you don’t have a picture. 🙂
My first design was after I’d been knitting for a few years and was mostly a disaster. I knit body and sleeves in the round, then decided I wanted a sleeve cap instead of raglan decreases and created the most ill-fitting sleeve cap you could imagine. I still wore the sweater, until I figured out I was allergic to the alpaca yarn I’d used and had to give it away. It was probably for the best, haha.