It can’t all just be making up my own patterns all the time, damnit.
One thing I’m acutely aware of is burnout. Quick and epic burnout, like a star going supernova. Because I have a habit of getting really excited about a new creative pursuit, and then quickly getting tunnel vision and I forget about everything else. While focus is great, that focus, in the past, has led to the eventual aforementioned burnout. And I’d really prefer to avoid that with designing, because I really, really like doing it.
So, I took this week to knit myself something from somebody else’s pattern, the Geology Shawl from Verybusymonkey, which has been sitting in my queue for far too long. I love Verybusymonkey’s designs, and after a few months now of working exclusively on things I’ve been designing, it was really nice not to have to worry about figuring things out, but instead, just follow directions.
Speaking of following directions, I’ve been working to sort of create my own stitch library (by sort of, I mean have been, and it’s got a ton of stitches in it now).
I’ve been mostly working on translating stitches from other languages to English, because (shocking), that’s what I speak. Some of the stitches from other countries, while largely the same, are (get this), like reading a different language, and hours of scouring the web for obscure translations for languages I don’t speak has been an interesting experience to say the least.
The past few months have been exclusively dedicated to translating, but now I’m really itching to properly knit swatches of them. So, I’ll be posting these – picture of the swatch, plus my charts – of these stitch patterns.
They won’t all be translated from other languages, some of them will just be something that strikes my fancy at the moment. But I’m pretty keyed up to start a long-term semi-fluid project like this, because I think it’ll give me a nice break between actually designing, plus the opportunity to learn a few new things along the way.