Process

I love designing patterns.  There are so many parts.  It's like putting a puzzle together only I get to make the pieces.  Challenging, fun, creative.

I thought of a shawlette knit from the yarn I made from Bistro bfl/silk plied with alpaca/corriedale (see previous post).  I could just see it in my mind but when I went to chart it in my design book it morphed a bit.  Then my normally succinct design sense flew out the window and I waffled on which patterns to use.  Sheesh.  Hours were spent pouring through Barbara Walker's stitch books along with several others.  Finally I took myself down to Panera's to spend a couple of hours with no distractions and came up with a plan.  These crossed out, erased, rewritten notes, after about 2 hours with Knit Visualizer, became Version 1 below.

v1  At least it got blocked so it counts as a swatch.

Well it didn't take me long to realize I needed to use a smaller needle (US7) and modify a couple of things.  This became the modus operandi for this piece.

Version 4 is below.

v4

By yesterday I had frogged v1, 2 (was just typos and recharting so not knit), 3, 4, 5 (was similar to 2) and 6.  Fortunately each time I could see the problem before I had done more than 25 rows so only a few hours were ripped back.

Just how many iterations could there be before I got this pattern right?

V7 was to be IT.  I was sure.  

Past Row 25 and onto fresh yarn from all the kinky stuff I had been reusing.

Row 36 brought me to a good stopping point as I was anxious to see a completely knit pattern set and excited to have moved on.  The coloring is working out really well, with nice bands of striping. I went to bed rather tired so left the shawlette to critically look at today.

The light of morning shone on the fact that we were back to Square 1 and my good friend Knit Visualizer.