What Comes First, The Pattern Or The Wool?
It’s certainly a good question!
Sometimes you’ll see or feel such a lovely yarn that you have to buy it. It will sit in the stash begging for the perfect pattern to come along where it can be shown off in all its glory. When you find that pattern, the yarn will leap from the shelf and the knitting will fly off the needles, just like it was meant to be. Now, this is not always the case, but when it happens, it is magic! Sometimes you need to make up the pattern yourself as I did in the hat I dreamed up.
Dig through your stash from time to time, and you might be surprised what yarn will speak to you. Listen to it…..trust it….you’ll be amazed with what you can create.
Picture from ravelry.com
Sometimes it’s a good pattern that will speak to you from the pages of a magazine, or from the depths of Ravelry. The February Lady Sweater was one such pattern that grabbed my attention. It was all the rage 2 years ago. I went on a search and found the wool to match the sweater.
Now, whether you are looking for the perfect pattern or the perfect yarn, things have certainly changed a lot in the last 10 years. This fact was illustrated on boxing day in the midst of our “ball winding party”. I had gotten my mom a great ball winder from knitpicks.com, and we were winding up different skeins into center pull balls.
My grandmother, my mom and I were discussing what to knit for a cousin who is soon to be a new dad. My first instinct is to head to ravelry, or now that I’ve joined twitter and connected with so many awesome knitters, I’d ask them what’s good to make for a new baby. My mom went to look in her pattern drawer for books and leaflets of patterns that she’s used through the years. My grandmother wanted to knit the bonnet that her mother taught her to make. She knew that she had the instructions on an index card somewhere.
It hit me, on Boxing day, sitting in a multi-generational knitting circle, that some things really have changed, but in some ways, they haven’t changed at all.
