Knit Sisters

I got all my hair cut off this week.  This was kind of a big deal, since my hair was pretty long.  My hairdresser, Linda, measured and said she cut off about 15 inches. 

Here I am, posing with my new haircut and new cardigan, Nicola.  My head feels light and free!!

 

It was actually cool enough to wear Nicola today, which made me happy, even though I had to go to the doctor this morning because I’m just not kicking this cold.  It’s settled in my sinuses, and I’m now juiced up on antibiotics and Allegra.  Then I spent the afternoon in bed.

I did work on Blue Bamboo last night, and made some good progress, although I had to rip out both fronts after I realized that I had made a mistake on the edge stitches.  I had just been feeling pretty pleased with myself for my rapid progress; then I found my mistake.  Sheesh.  Pride goeth before a fall.

Here’s a detail:

Barbara asked in the comments about how much experience I had before I started designing my own garments.  Weellll…that’s really hard to answer.  I was always one of those little kids who loved making things, and would come up with elaborate plans for things I was going to make (like little dolls and their clothes).  Often I didn’t get them made, but still!  I learned to sew and knit at a fairly young age, and so had early experience following other people’s patterns.

When you’re young, you know, you don’t have as much fear, and so it wasn’t long before I was branching out and making up my own patterns both for knitwear and sewn clothing.  I remember making my mother an original sweater when I was a teenager.  I also remember checking out the first Kaffe Fassett book from the library over and over, and seizing on that sort of freeform approach to making sweaters.  I made one sweater in that style, and looking back I can see that I made tons of mistakes, but I did have a lot of fun doing it.  I still have that sweater somewhere.  (I also remember some fairly spectacular disasters, mostly relating to sewn clothing.)

I guess I’ve just always been one of those people who wanted to know how to do things from scratch.  (Well, things relating to textiles.)  I’m rarely able to knit someone’s else’s design without changing it in some way, and a lot of times I just can’t find the “right” pattern that I see in my head.  So I have to make it up!  And from making up patterns to fit just me, it’s been a fairly small leap to expanding the size range.

I hope this answers your question a bit, Barbara!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Blue Bamboo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.