You, know, one who publishes their patterns! As opposed to doing all the design work and then never writing down anything, which is what I have been doing since, well, since I started to knit? I still remember my very first pair of socks, where I kept going to my mom and asking how she did the heel. I don’t think I picked the best times to enquire, as I got fairly brief instructions, but after a few tries I figured it out! To this day we do our heels slightly differently, because I just sort of figured out how to do one from her verbal instructions and looking at a knit sock. The differences are so slight as to be effectively nonexistent, but they’ve come to light because she’s been acting as my tech editor for all my patterns thus far. My biggest comment so far is that writing patterns can be very fussy, and she’s happy to tell me that I need to go back and fuss over a certain section again.
For all of my mother’s wonderful charms, she doesn’t make the best test knitter, because she can’t be bothered to pay that close of attention to the pattern-something I definitely inherited. So to find test knitters I’ve been using yarnpond, which has the significant advantage of completely formalizing the whole process (did we mention that I’m an engineer?). I haven’t yet finished running a test on there, but I did go through it from the other side, as a test knitter, for the South Woods pullover, and while at times the interface can be a bit quirky, I’m very appreciative of how easy it’s been to find test knitters. I currently have two projects on there (two!), with 6 testers for the shawl and 11 for the socks. I’m really hoping I can keep up with all 17 of my test knitters! They’ve thus far offered me some great feedback, and helped me catch everything from a missing ssk, a k3tog that should have been a cdd, missing commas, and (my favorite) the fact that I kept using the word ‘boarders’ instead of ‘borders’ (kudos to the non-native English speaker who caught that one!). The last one’s probably my favorite purely because I was editing a paper the other day, and the author had used ‘respectfully’ everywhere he should have used ‘respectively’ (i.e. the failure strength and strain are 3.4 GPa and 3.0 %, respectfully), and it made me giggle.
My two tests should be ending on the 24th and 30th, so around the same time and not too long from now. I’m hoping to publish around a pattern a month, possibly alternating socks and shawls. I think I have enough patterns ready to be written up to last me at least a year at that rate, with my recent spate of shawls. I have the next shawl pattern (the angel/butterfly wings one) all written up and ready for testers! I’m waiting on putting it out though until the current tests are done-I’m not quite sure about having 3 tests running at once during the holiday season, in addition to all the ‘real life’ stuff I have going on. I’m excited though to think about what patterns to write up next, and seeing people’s reactions. Thus far I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with how positive everyone’s feedback on my projects has been.
So, that’s what’s new here! There are still, of course, many projects on the needles, so future blog posts are assured. Now though, if you like a pattern I make, you can probably get me to actually write it down for you to knit too.