Friday nights are my teen ager’s swimming lesson at the posh YMCA. It used to the be gym for a corporation, so it has nicer floors and a prettier layout than the downtown Y; but then it was built as one building to make people happy to work there, not in several expansions becoming a maze.
The chairs in the wait-for-Karate-Class-to be-done-area are not particularly posh however; when I put a skein around the back of one, it kept getting stuck. So I recruited R, a sweet girl, to help me wind my yarn.
This week, I was feverishly swatching directly from the First Treasury of Knitting patterns. I need to buy a new copy, mine has water damage and some mold starting in the upper edge. I was also making lots of mistakes, because I hadn’t charted the patterns first, just pulled out my needles. I need my charts – and I didn’t even have a square of post-it-notes to keep track of what row I was working.
R sat down at my table (the generations had flipped, she was waiting for her Mom to be done Spinning, and she didn’t want to Zumba, the fast instructor was there and she knew she’d trip on her classmates.) She felt my swatches, admired the texture of the Sawya by Mirasol, and started looking through the Second Treasury. I was stuck on my swatch, so I put it by, and started exploring Walker with her instead. She wanted to know what she needed to do to make more patterns than garter stitch (she’s almost done with her first scarf.) I tried to steer her to the knit and purl patterns, away from the slip stitch, cable and lace all in one patterns, but as she pointed out interesting pattern after interesting pattern, I realized that many of them could actually be her next step: knit plus slipped stitch, or knit plus twist stitch. It was fun to realize how few new skills she really needed for her next thing, as long as she didn’t try to do them all at once.
I made my son wait a few minutes as she wrote done the addresses for Ravelry.com and Knitty.com, I reminded her that other free patterns aren’t always excellent, and told her how to get to In the Loop (she works in Plainville anyhow, so it’s on the way.) She asked if there were stitch dictionaries available at the library, but were printed in color now? That made me laugh. If I see a color sample, it’s hard for me to imagine it any other color, so I like BGW in black and white.
I’ve always said I’ve never managed to teach anyone knitting or crochet, but I’ve bumped folks up from basic skills to more advanced ones. Perhaps what I really do is teach knitters to think like designers. I think R’s attitude was, find a stitch dictionary in color, then make a scarf out of my choice of stitch – who wants to pay for patterns.
Oh dear, I wonder if she’ll ever buy mine with that mindset.
Maybe next week I’ll start filling her ears with respect for fellow designers – you learn by copying, you learn by reading other patterns, and if you want to start knitting right away, you can skip the math part. Even if the math part is your favorite, because sometimes it’s your fingers that want to play, not your inner designer.
And if that fails, I’ll point out that most indie patterns cost less than a fancy coffee, and so do whole pattern magazines. And if they have been tech edited, they won’t ruin your relaxation time with muttering, plus you can contact the designer to tell them how much you loved the experience – or politely ask for clarifications. Such a value for the price of a fancy coffee, a mere fraction of the price of a nice skein of yarn…
…I’d better bring a colorful stitch dictionary, this may be a hard sell.