Proud Mary Part I (or Easy Bake Sweater)

I was lying in bed the other night, feeling incredibly self-satisfied and proud, having just finished sewing up a cable knit MacBook cover I had made for our college bound niece. It was my first real foray into the art of cable knitting on a large scale (having only worked small cables on socks before), and the end result had far exceeded my expectations. Not one to pat myself on the back for long, it occurred to me that “doing a good job”, in this instance, meant that I read the pattern (which someone else had written) and re-created it without fucking it up; in other words: it wasn’t that I did a “great job” knitting, I did a great job following the instructions.

In a situation like this, it seems a little narcissistic to be proud of myself for being able to read. It almost feels like i made a cake using a boxed mix and canned frosting and then congratulated myself because it tasted wonderful. It’s made to taste wonderful; if you’ve followed the directions on the box correctly; it will always taste the same kinda wonderful, every time you make it.

Don’t get me wrong, knitting patterns are absolutely not boxed cake mixes. In fact, many of the patterns I’ve gotten, online and in books, are written so poorly that it’s almost impossible to figure out what the author wants you to do. See, unlike cake mixes, anyone can write and publish a knitting pattern; there’s no FDA for knitters and, therefore, zero quality control. Hell, even I’ve written one. T’warn’t nuthin to it. Furthermore, even the ones that are written clearly, occasionally have errors. The pattern chart for the laptop cover had a bad “key”, with the same explanation for two different symbols. It was only by searching online that I found out what I was supposed to do. Sadly, you don’t know it’s a faulty pattern until you start working it and hit a dead end.

Then, even if the pattern’s good, there are still dozens of silly mistakes that could be made. Stitches get dropped, increases and decreases get missed; you can easily misread a perfectly written pattern, etc. I once made a pair of fingerless gloves and, while working the 2nd glove, I went to try it on only to find that t was, easily, 3 inches too short and I couldn’t open or close my hand. It turns out that I’d skipped an entire section of the palm portion of the pattern. User error. Reboot.

There are also the variables created when I’ve substituting yarns or needles or attempted to re-vamp a pattern by adding fun stitch patterns or colors, to make it more "CawfeeGuy". More often than not CawfeeMate, will help me out with substituting yarn, only after forcibly nudging me to make a gauge swatch. Not everyone is as lucky as I am, to have a gauge wizard handy. I’ll admit, there have been times when I said “fuck the gauge” and tried a pattern myself, only to find that the sock I had started would barely fit a child (and since I don’t knit for children, it got ripped out and restarted).

Hm. As I finish writing this (over the course of 2 days), it strikes me that maybe I should be proud of my work. Even though I used the yarn the author recommends in the book (something i've never done before), we all know my gauge wasn’t quite spot on even close. I'm lucky it fit a netbook, let alone a MacBook.

Moreover, it occurs to me that every knitter should hold his/her head high when a project turns out perfectly! There are alot of pitfalls and crocodiles you've got to jump over to get something perfect.