Patterns

In my short history of knitting I have learned the value of a pattern.

Patterns are nice. They tell you how things go together and they give you shape and guidance, faith that your project will turn out; just follow the pattern and you will create something beautiful. They are a record of the solutions that those before us have found to the mistakes and difficulties that have plagued knitters since knitting began, and they are an education in structure and technique; a teacher that shows us how to create.

I also have learned that all of the above being true, sometimes patterns just suck. They can be poorly written, overly wordy, confusing, wrong, or just plain ugly.

I encountered some of the bad part of patterns on my bag project. The first problem I noticed was that while the graph for the cable panel had the decreases relevant to the cable shown, there were other decreases that were only talked about in the extremely wordy, and heavy on the parentheses, written directions (I hate the parentheses) which (parentheses are really distracting) were (I can't tell you how many times I messed up because of the stupid parentheses) very hard to follow. I solved this problem by marking the decrease rows on the cable graph, which only sort of worked because I got so engrossed in the cabling that I still forgot to decrease. Luckily, so far, it seems I have forgotten the decreases in the same spots on both sides of the bag so I'm hoping there won't be any stupid looking lumps or sticky-outy-parts because of the bad pattern writing.

The worst is yet to come though, the most heinous of all pattern crimes in my opinion is when the pattern just doesn't work and doesn't make the finished product look like the picture that made you choose to make it. This problem was discovered when I went to knit the button flap that holds the finished bag closed at the top. The flap consisted of a tapering number of stitches with a strange bind off and cast on for the button hole. I had to look in three different places in the magazine to try and figure out what they were doing and then when I actually did it as they directed the flap looked like total crap. And I mean really bad. The button hole was off center and the flap looked lumpy and weird. I tried three times to do it as they directed thinking that somehow I was mistaken and didn't understand what was happening. After ripping it out the third time though I said to myself, "Screw the directions! I'm doing it my way!" And then I did, I made my normal button hole and left as many stitches as I thought the flap needed to be sturdy and it looked great on the first try. Ahhh...success!

This experience just shows that it's important to remember patterns can be valuable but they aren't always right and sometimes you just gotta go with what you know.

Or else I'm kinda thick and can't figure directions out.

Either way the result is the same, right?