Day six (belatedly) - Something to aspire to

The main area of skill I aspire to improve is designing. As has already been seen here I've done a little dabbling into design, but not yet taken it as far as I would like: I have not yet tried a full garment design for example. I have to admit that I never dreamed that I would ever have designed and written the pattern for an item of knitwear, though at one time I did not see that knitting itself was something I would ever do, so times change.

The principal thing that gets in the way of this designing aspiration is the sheer quantity of brilliant designs by other people that I want to knit up, my mental queue is forever extending and I have projects and projects clamouring to be made. Rather than learn from books, straight or "dry", I have learned most of what I know about knitting from knitting other people's designs, looking at how they have achieved different effects and soaking up the technical information that way over the whole of the time I have been knitting. Although all this said, often the act of designing has come out of not being able to find a pattern that exactly meets what I want to make and needing to fill this gap.

Perhaps bizarrely I love writing up patterns and the act of communicating in such a way that my idea can be understood and used by others. Working out how best to convey the combination of creative ideas with the technical information needed is a process I find very deeply satisfying. Even if it involves having to admit that my maths teacher was right - maths can be useful!

So this coming year I aspire to design more, I am still fascinated by colour-work but also more generally by the traditional styles and techniques of knitting, particularly as practised in this country in the past and using these ideas and taking them into the present and the future, re-casting them. At least my training as a historian is not going to waste, just being used in a very different way than I would ever have envisaged.

2KCBWDAY6

I know that technically Knitting and Crochet Blogging Week ended yesterday, but I got rather behind over the weekend, life sometimes overtakes even the best of intentions.