I’m responding to Nat’s excellent question in its own post, partially to give myself some room to ruminate and partially for future reference. I am by no means a knitting expert — there are a lot of techniques I just don’t care to learn, and I’m pretty blissfully ignorant about designing — but, gosh, I’ve been knitting for eight or nine years now, and I’ve learned some things and developed some opinions since then.  I’m still learning how to sew (and that is a craft with a million techniques and nuances out there to discover, I tell you what) but, at this point, I learn more from random blog entries and forum posts than I do from cracking open my Reader’s Digest Guide while sitting in an easy chair.  So along those lines, some knitting-related thoughts.

When so many patterns have been made with countless different yarns, and when every yarn has what seems like equal numbers of lovers and haters, what is one to do? Especially when one is still learning and other than “cannot work with mohair,” doesn’t have much firsthand experience with fibers?

Heh, “cannot work with mohair” is something I learned for myself the hard way.  Fiber preferences and tolerances are entirely a matter of trial and error, and work in mysterious fashions.  I find alpaca incredibly soft and warm, except for some varieties, which turn sneakily prickly on my neck after half an hour.  I find most varieties of wool to be extremely scratchy, except when it’s winter and my skin is apparently too chilly to complain.  I find cotton soothing and soft, except I’m working on two projects with it now and it’s just killing my wrists.

That said, I picked up a copy of The Knitter’s Guide to Yarn from the library a few years ago and thought it was stellar — not only does it give you an exhaustive rundown of different types of fibers, but helps you understand and predict how they’ll behave in different garments, and when combined in different ways.  (Yeah, I should pick up a copy for myself.)  It also gave me necessary confidence in understanding yarn substitutions — for example, not only looking at the recommended gauge, needle size, and fiber content of a similar yarn, but also eyeballing the yards per gram.

So, both experience and vague understanding are my guides here.  Oh, and price.  Just to narrow the field, I shop a lot at Elann, Knitpicks, and a couple of vendors that sell Cascade 220 & Eco Wool, then comb through the reviews at Ravelry on whatever yarns have caught my eye.  (For example, I recently bought some Knitpicks Palette to make some mittens because it’s super-cheap and comes in a huge array of colors; the reviews tell me that it pills a lot, though, so I know that it wouldn’t be a good choice for a sweater or something less tightly knit.)

Ravelry is an incredible resource. In fact, it has SO much information that I’m still trying to figure out how to keep from being completely overwhelmed by it all.

I tend to use Ravelry more as a reference, and not something that I just comb through aimlessly (except when I’m bored).  For example, I had my eye on Vivian for a couple of months before I decided to make it, and in the intervening time I read through the reviews and looked at the photos that people were posting of their own sweaters.  I figured that, since I don’t have a hard time following charts, I’d be fine with the instructions given that I spent some time sifting through them first; I also used photos and comments to guide my decision about what size to make (and to size up the arms, which were apparently very tight.  Conversely, I’ve been wanting to make the Petal Halter — even have the yarn for it and everything — but the reviews have totally scared me away.  If the seaming and sizing and just about everything about it are going to make me want to rip out my hair, it’s not worth it.

I do also tend to browse through the most popular patterns in certain categories when I’m in the mood, too.  That’s how I found Owls, which is so stinkin’ cute I can’t stand it, and Vinterblomster Mittens (ditto).  And seeing projects on Real People is invaluable; I mean, you can never guarantee how your project will turn out, but noticing that something looks like an ill-fitting sack on everyone with my body type is a pretty good thing to know.

A few other miscellaneous helps:

• The tutorials at TECHknitter, which are clear and often quite ingenious.  (I just started using her technique for joining items knit in the round, and wondered where it’s been all my life.)
• Math.  These days, I end up resizing just about everything, and it’s oh-so-liberating knowing how to make my gauge work for my project.  What’s more, it’s really not hard: if I know the number of stitches I’m getting per inch, and look at the number of stitches that make up the circumference of the sweater, it’s pretty easy to figure out how large a certain size will actually turn out to be.

In sum, I guess my thesis is: the internet is awesome because it means that you can grok the knowledge of thousands, and not have to figure everything out for yourself.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 3:15 pm and is filed under diy, notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.