Karen:
00:00:07
Hi, and welcome to Make Good, the podcast about yarn and knitting from Scratch Supply Co. We're recording today in downtown Lebanon, New Hampshire, and we're really excited to be here. I'm Karen.
Jessica:
00:00:15
And I'm Jessica.
Karen:
00:00:17
So today we're going to be talking about about trusting the process. We got a letter from B that kind of prompted this episode. So I'm going to read it and then we're going to talk about it.
Jessica:
00:00:26
Great, let's do it.
Karen:
00:00:28
Could you do an episode about trusting the process and trusting your pattern? I can't be the only knitter that panic frogs her project if you rows in because, quote, doesn't look right when it is clearly too early to make that decision. I am working on a top down camisole with the knitting for Olive 100% silk fingering weight yarn. I should also note this is my first time knitting with a fingering weight yarn. As I worked for my first tenish rows, it just didn't look the way I thought it should. After frogging and restarting this cami three or four times and getting the exact same results every time, I decided to just keep going. Lo and behold, it was right the whole time. I would probably have this thing done already. Please tell me I am not the only one.
Jessica:
00:01:10
Oh, B, you're totally not the only one.
Karen:
00:01:13
Not even close.
Jessica:
00:01:15
I think that this happens to every knitter at some point in their knitting life, and for many of us, at many points in our knitting life where you're just like, I don't know about.
Karen:
00:01:27
This, especially if it's something you haven't really done before and feel like, oh, yeah, even though it's in this weird place right now, I can see how this is going to come together. It takes a lot of experience and a broad range of experience to be able to do that, for sure.
Jessica:
00:01:44
Maybe we should frame this by asking what we even mean when we say things like trusting the process. Because B has asked us about trusting the process, and I feel like that's a conversation that I've had with people in the shop. But what do we mean when we say this?
Karen:
00:02:02
A lot of times, the first step in doing this is just trusting that the pattern wouldn't have gotten to you if it weren't capable of producing a functional finished item.
Jessica:
00:02:10
Right. For many designers, this is their job or their part time job. It's their creative passion at the barest of minimums, which is not a small thing. People who are designing knitwear really care that knitters are able to make the things that they have designed. So whether you can tell from the actual pattern or not, you should expect that at some point they've used some combination of things, like a technical editor looking over this pattern that you have purchased from them.
Karen:
00:02:43
Tech editors are the people who can 3D print with their minds, yes, but.
Jessica:
00:02:47
They aren't born that way. They build those skills.
Karen:
00:02:50
So if it has gotten past a tech editor, it's a good sign.
Jessica:
00:02:54
Designers also use test knitters, which are groups of knitters that have volunteered to work the pattern to check for clarity and reproducibility. Test knitters may have made this thing in a number of versions, like different sizes. Swatching has definitely been involved. Knit your swatches. There's a bunch of knitting math based on gauge from that swatch and sample knitting. So the designer themselves or their sample knitting partner has actually taken this pattern and produced the thing that the pattern says it's going to make.
Karen:
00:03:33
There's a couple of different kinds of uncertainty as you're looking at a new pattern. And it could be like, I've started making this and I just don't believe that the sweater is going to have the number of arms that I need it to have. Right? That's kind of a different issue. But there's also is this pattern going to give me the results that I'm seeing in this picture? Okay, I'm looking at the picture, I'm looking at what's in my hand, and I just don't feel like what I'm going to get at the end of this is what I want. And the best way to go about that is to access the resources. A lot of patterns will have a hashtag somewhere or Ravelry if that's accessible to you or making or any other sort of makery community, for sure.
Jessica:
00:04:12
Knitters love sharing information. Many of us are introverts, but we're also kind of social creatures around our craft. And if there were a pattern out there that was just impossible to make, it was consistently problematic. First of all, probably it will have been brought to a designer's attention and there will be some errata listed somewhere. But if that hasn't happened, there's definitely a conversation online about it somewhere where they're like, this cowl is actually closed at one end. It's not a cow. You would know that, like, you would be able to access that information if it existed out there somewhere. So use the hive mind.
Karen:
00:04:51
One of the things I really like about the Ravelry pattern database is the difficulty rating that is dependent on the makers and not the designer. I feel like the equivalent to this is like family recipes. Your great great grandmother has this cookie recipe that she's passed down and it says, a heaping cup of sugar. But she doesn't mean like a baking cup, she means one particular cup that she had on her kitchen shelf.
Jessica:
00:05:18
That's how my grandma baked. Yeah, she used her coffee cups to measure right.
Karen:
00:05:23
The sort of knitting equivalent of that. Is the designer going, oh, it's easy. And then if you have a bunch of knitters who are saying, no, it isn't right. Excuse me, it's not easy.
Jessica:
00:05:34
So sometimes as part of this believing in your designer process, you're looking at the pattern and you're like, I have no idea what this is telling me, but you're not finding a whole bunch of information online where other people are saying, this made zero sense. At that point, you have to say, well, maybe I just think differently than this designer does, and I need some teamwork, I need a second set of eyes to look at this with me. So at that point, go to your knitter friends or go to your Lys or email or DM the designer, however they like to be contacted and say, you know, what? Line 52 of this pattern, I cannot make heads or tails of it. Can you explain to me what's supposed to be happening? And sometimes just a second set of eyes is all you need to bring that clarity to the pattern, and that will help you move forward and make progress. And sometimes designs are just plain difficult. They're complex, or they're some sort of, like, innovative new approach to something. And you're like, how is this even happening? I've never thought of knitting from this direction to do this thing. Or It's a really unique construction, and that's exciting. That's great that you're going on this adventure with this designer. Just because a technique or a process is unfamiliar to you doesn't mean it's not going to work.
Karen:
00:06:56
Can we talk about the Ziggurat method?
Jessica:
00:06:58
Yes, we sure can.
Karen:
00:07:00
So the Ziggurat method is a sweater design method by USA Turcosa. The way I remember her explaining this is that this was a method of sweater construction that she came up with because she doesn't like weaving in ends. And so she was like, okay, how do I do this with the smallest possible number of ends to weave in? And if you go to the ravelry group for her method, it's just people telling each other, no, no, trust it. No, no, trust it. I knit twelve connected rectangles, and none of them look like a sweater. And I don't feel like I know what I'm doing. But you just have to trust the process.
Jessica:
00:07:34
Eventually it comes together.
Karen:
00:07:36
I love it when a plan comes together.
Jessica:
00:07:40
I think another dimension of this trusting the process is also believing in yourself. So at some point in time, all of this was new to you. Not just this one pattern that you're kind of stumbling over, but like, everything you had to learn to cast on and to knit and purl and bind off. And all of those things happened for the first time for you, and the second time and the third time, and you didn't feel comfortable with any of it until eventually you did. So if you were able to go from zero knowledge of your fiber craft to wherever you are now in that journey, like, you have to know that you can continue to learn and build your skills and expose yourself to new things and challenge yourself and find success. And it might not happen the first try or immediately, but you can do the hard things and don't let the.
Karen:
00:08:33
Entirety of the process overwhelm the individual steps of the process. You're making this thing one stitch at a time. Take the instructions one stitch at a time.
Jessica:
00:08:43
You can always connect with your resources and your knitter support systems. There's tons of information out there from talking to actual people at an Lys to like, YouTube and knitting classes and books and blog posts and technique videos on Instagram. We're probably the most fortunate knitters ever to have lived because we have more access to resources and information and access to one another. Regardless of where we are physically in the world, we can connect with someone who is also interested in this thing or has information about this technique and we can figure it out. We can teamwork it what's going to work?
Karen:
00:09:25
Teamwork. All that being said though, you might still be feeling squarely looking at your project and you're like, what can you do to figure out whether that's a justified feeling or not?
Jessica:
00:09:37
Well, when you're feeling like it's time to just yank your needles out of your stitches and throw the yarn on the floor and then be sad you didn't, then frog it, you might want to troubleshoot a little bit first and just do some checking to reassure yourself. The first piece of advice I have for you is one that to me, I think it's kind of weird. A lot of knitters resist. Read your pattern all the way through. I feel like we've maybe even talked about this before, but take a minute and read from beginning to end. You might not be able to visualize what this is going to look like at every stage of what you're reading, but reading from beginning to end will help you catch kind of atypical instruction or help you identify things that you might not be familiar with before you actually get to them. Like there might be a part of your pattern that tells you to do XYZ things and then on the next page, because you had to turn the page, it tells you at the same time also do this thing. And if you don't know that that's coming, you might just do the first set of instructions and then miss this synchronous piece of information that's really going to cause you a problem down the line. So reading through will help you kind of identify and troubleshoot those things and tell you that you need to get out your highlighter or your postit notes or something to help guide you through this process.
Karen:
00:11:11
I am totally one of those pattern reading resistant people. And I think a lot of designers, when they have one of those, like, at the same time do this other thing instructions, they've started putting notes. It's like, read these two sections before you go. And my impulse is, of course you want me to read the whole thing. You can't make me every time I'm like, of course the designer wants me to read the whole thing. They are trying to help you.
Jessica:
00:11:34
Oppositional defiance.
Karen:
00:11:38
You could also do a little bit of finish work just to kind of preview the end result for yourself. So do a wet or a steam block if you think you're going to end up with like tension issues or something like that. Gauge issues. If it's a top down sweater, you could try it on. If it's top down hat, you could try it on. If it's a bottom up hat, you could try it on.
Jessica:
00:11:56
Yes. The blocking while still on the needles I think is one of our most valuable tools as knitters and it is one that A I find a lot of knitters are resistant to and B it is often the solution. We definitely have had impromptu steam blocking parties with people who have come into the shop with partially knit projects and sometimes steam blocking saves the day. And sometimes steam blocking is the thing that tells you, well, this isn't going to work, it's time to frog it. There was a bidder of ours who came in with a giant color work poncho and she was positive that the floats were too short and that the tension and the color work just wasn't going to work out. And she had put many hours of work into this project and she was ready to frog it and was kind of upset. And we got out our little steamer and gave it a little heat and a little moisture and those stitches just flattened right out and settled and it saved her from having to rip back the entire project. And it wasn't a big ordeal like soaking in a tub and pinning and all of that. Just using the steam setting really opened up those stitches and gave her the reassurance that she needed to be able to finish her project. And it worked out beautifully in the end.
Karen:
00:13:17
Sometimes we come across some resistance to the in-progress blocking because then it makes your blocked fabric different than your not blocked because it's not created yet. When you do the blocking fabric, sure and that will go away when you block the entire finished object, for sure. It does feel weird though. It bothers me. And lifelines, if you feel like this feels like it's starting to get a little not so sure, just throw a lifeline in there. And what a lifeline is, is a piece of scrap yarn, barber cord or some other cable piece of dental floss, something like that, that is run through one row of stitches that if you do need to rip back, it will hold that one row like complete. So you can put your needles back in and if you don't end up needing to rip back, you just take the cord out.
Jessica:
00:14:06
They're incredibly useful and I think underutilized it's a really easy thing to anchor in your knitting and can make a huge difference particularly if you're working lace or cables, you can use it at any point in your knitting. Like maybe the gauge of your sleeves turns out to be different than the body of your sweater because it's smaller circumference knitting. And it's nice to be able to pull back to where you split the sleeves from the body, but it's really where there's like lots of yarn over and decreases or held stitches for those cables that it makes a huge difference when it comes to frogging and reworking sections.
Karen:
00:14:46
I would say all of that comes with a little bit of a caveat, though, because if you're knitting along and you were like, something is just not right, investigate that because you might be correct.
Jessica:
00:14:57
Sure.
Karen:
00:14:58
And maybe you did something like you're in the yoke of your sweater and you're supposed to increase two stitches every six rows and instead you increase six stitches every two rows and you're looking at this thing going, I'm not a triangle. Like, I'm not that much of a triangle. This doesn't seem right. It is always better to catch that kind of thing early before you get like halfway through the body. Absolutely.
Jessica:
00:15:24
I think that it's really easy to have this little poking feeling that tells you, I don't know about this. I think something's off and to brush that away and be like, it'll be fine, it's going to be fine. I'm just going to finish this. And then you realize that something was wrong at a point where you're like, oh, this hurts. Now I need to go see if Jessica will just frog the whole sweater for me because I can't bring myself to do it.
Karen:
00:15:54
But for the most part, trust the process. Trust the designer and the tech editor and the test knitters and the people who have knit the project before you. Friends don't lie. If they all successfully created a finished object, it's probably not that there's something funny going on with the pattern. There might be something funny going on with the way you are reading the pattern, but more likely it is just trust it and go forward. It's going to be okay.
Jessica:
00:16:22
Situation and swatch.
Karen:
00:16:31
And really it's just yarn for sure.
Jessica:
00:16:33
At the end of the day, you can frog it and rewind it and then just knit it again and then it's more knitting time for you to really who's the winner? The person who has to knit their sweater twice. So speaking of catching mistakes and frogging things and fixing things, karen, what's on your needles?
Karen:
00:16:54
Well, nothing, because I cast off my oak moss last night and it's soaking right now and I'm going to block it as soon as we're done recording and I'm really excited about it. Yay. How did the rest of it go? It went really well. I have really enjoyed Elizabeth Zimmerman's son bindoff. The tuku wall does not lend itself to sone bindoff in large circumference. You know how when you're like embroidering if you're somebody who does embroidery and you trim the embroidery thread, because otherwise you just end up with this, like, huge knot. So when you're doing a sewn bind off, you have to leave three times the circumference of what you're binding off. That's a lot of yarn at the beginning of the bind off, in particular when it's sticky, like the tucu wool is. Sure, it's a little grabby, but I love this sweater. It's a really nice sweater. It is way too warm for the sweater right now. Even just trying it on. Like, once I got it off my needles before I blocked it, I was like, this is really exciting. And then I was like and I'm taking it off now. This is DK weight finish wool, and it does not belong in the first couple of days of August.
Jessica:
00:17:56
No.
Karen:
00:17:57
How about you? What's on your needles?
Jessica:
00:17:58
Jessica so I'm still working on my Easy V from Caitlin Hunter. And can I tell you, I love it. I finished the yolk, which was a phenomenal amount of knitting. Like, I had so many stitches on my needles, every round was taking me an exceptional amount of time, like, way longer than I felt like it should because I've got so much positive ease, and it's also accommodating your arms, and it's just a lot of stitches. I got through all of the color work in the yoke, and at the end of every color section, I was like, oh, I'm kind of running out of yarn. Am I going to have to join a second skate for one row of color work? And because it's the dream state from Spin Cycle and there's so much color shifting in the marls, I was like, I'm never even going to be able to find a point in my second skein that lines up with where I'm ending this, so you better not run out. Like, there was a lot of hostile mental whispering at the yoke of this sweater, and I made it. I won Yarn Chicken, and I have three tiny balls of yarn that I wound up that are like the size of a grape and the size of a key lime. They're tiny.
Karen:
00:19:12
The most down to the wire game of yarn chicken.
Jessica:
00:19:13
I felt triumphant. And also now I feel confident that I'm in good shape for the color work on the sleeves, because I very clearly needed a second skein to be able to finish this project. But I split from my sleeves last night, and I'm about to cruise along on the body all in one color, so my speed will increase dramatically. And who knows? I could be wearing this sweater. I would ambitiously say next week, but probably by September. So in a month I'll be done. But it's really good. I'm loving it. So this week, we're mixing things up. This week I'm going to ask Karen. Hey, Karen, are you ready for a letter no. Well, guess what? Get it together. I'm asking.
Karen:
00:20:03
Anyway.
Jessica:
00:20:20
So this week, our letter is from Ash.
Karen:
00:20:22
Hi, Ash.
Jessica:
00:20:24
So if you follow us on our Instagram, you have, via photos, met Ash before because Ash sent us a picture of their out of control growing Penguino that is really going to be a cozy weighted sweater. So Ash has written to us with a question. I'm having neurological issues currently and have lost the use of my left arm. The doctors can't give a timeframe of when or if I will regain use. I'm an English style knitter, so the left hand doesn't do much past holding the left needle anyway. I've ordered a Shetland knitting belt to hold the left hand needle, but will have to change my whole knitting style and set up to use it as it uses very long DPNS. And I'm generally a knit pro interchangeable metal needle type guy and I hate DPNS. Is there another method of knitting with only one arm or hand that you know of that I haven't heard of? I have no strength in that limb at all, so I can't simply jam a long straight needle in my armpit and hold it there, granny style.
Karen:
00:21:24
Oh, Ash. Okay, so I have a couple of different suggestions that might be worth trying. And it's a little bit of a mishmash of different things that they may or may not work for you. The kind of bad news is, I think that the needle that sits in the Shetland knitting belt is going to have to be a DPN. But if you end up going with the Shetland knitting belt, your working needle, the one that you're holding in your right hand, doesn't have to be. It could be a regular straight needle. I have a thought about how you could try to use circulars, but almost everyone I could find who has adapted for their own one handed knitting ended up just working with straight needles. So that may be a temporary accommodation that you're going to need to make. There is a company in Australia and the acronym is Ta DAC T, and it's the technology for aging and disabilities. And they sell a one handed knitting aid. It kind of looks like a PVC pipe, almost like a tripod with a grippy thing on the top, and it holds a knitting needle. And so that is intended to function in the place of the hand that's not able to hold the needle, so it could go on either side. The video that I watched, the person was sort of sitting with the base of the tripod, like, wedged under their thigh. I checked and they do ship outside of Australia. It's possible somebody local to you could rig something similar up for you. And I think it would be possible to use a circular knitting needle with that, but you would have to keep unclamping the top to slide your fabric in and out of where the needle is held and it may just be more trouble than it's worth. There are a couple of YouTube creators who do tutorials on one handed knitting. There's a woman named Mary, but her YouTube account name is first name Mary, last name one hand knitter. She tried the under the arm thing for a while. Very similarly for kind of a different reason. She also doesn't have the strength to hold that she did recommend. As you're sort of figuring things out, you might want to use something called decim. It's spelled Dycem and it's like a really grippy kind of rubbery plastic sheet material that comes in rolls like those therabands that she said just made it a whole lot easier to try to hold and manipulate stuff with the side of her body that doesn't have the ability to grip. There's also a woman named Elizabeth Ward who has an entire YouTube channel on knitting after an amputation. And she mentioned that when she was figuring out how to do this for herself, she found working with plastic needles was really helpful while she was feeling awkward because it was grippy and slow. But it was grippy and slow in a way that let her sort of practice and adjust. And then she immediately ditched those and went to metal needles because the plastic was grippy and slow and she wanted to go faster. So that might be something too, if you have plastic needles kicking around. Elizabeth has videos on techniques. She has how to tension when you can't hold with fingers on the hand that you would be tensioning with under normal circumstances. She sort of wraps things around her arm. She has tutorials on specific stitches. Mary has videos on her technique that combines the Shetland knitting belt with Portuguese knitting and that's how she tensions. So she has one of those Portuguese knitting pins. And we've talked about Portuguese knitting a little bit before. And the two ways you sort of tension yarn with Portuguese knitting, you could wrap it around the back of your neck or you could use a Portuguese knitting pin. She said that for her with one hand, she found manipulating the pin in and out of her actual top to be not super functional. So she just put it on one of those ID badge holder neck lanyard things and she can slip it on and off that way very easily. And she did have to adjust her knitting style because when you're knitting Portuguese, the yarn is always coming from the front. And so that was a little bit of an adjustment. But some combination of those two things where you're taking over the tensioning issue and having the other end of your left hand needle supported might work really well for you. There's also a group called Healing Fibers, and their website is healingfibers.org and it's fibers spelled the American way, E-R-S. They do a bunch of different stuff, but one of the things I found very helpful was on their Facebook page, they had shown how they've been using the center tubes of toilet paper rolls and then winding balls of yarn around them. And then they've been using freestanding toilet paper roll holders and then attaching it to that. And so that can let go with you, but that's how they're encouraging people to tension their yarn if they can't tension it with a hand.
Jessica:
00:26:15
Oh, neat.
Karen:
00:26:16
Of course, people are like painting their toilet paper holders and making them aesthetic crafty. Crafty, yeah. So I hope some of that is helpful. I think either something that could sort of grip the other side of your circular needle or some version of combining Portuguese knitting and the Shetland knitting belt might work really well.
Jessica:
00:26:35
It feels like it's going to be one of those you won't really know until you try situations like looking for options that other people are using and then just kind of experimenting a little bit to see what feels most functional for you. And probably at the beginning, none of it will feel very functional. This will be a little bit of patience and adjusting and troubleshooting until you can make it work.
Karen:
00:26:57
I wonder if there might be like an occupational therapist out there who is also a knitter who would have some ideas, because that's a lot of what occupational therapists do. But I think it would have to be somebody who already knits because I think it would be hard to explain both the mechanics and the necessity of it. You know what I mean?
Jessica:
00:27:16
Sure. I think it would definitely be easier with someone who is already familiar with the ergonomics of the process.
Karen:
00:27:22
Yes. And I don't know if that's something ash that you have in your area or if maybe there's an occupational therapist who is listening to this who could send in some information or might have some resources, but we'll put it out there and see what happens.
Jessica:
00:27:36
Excellent.
Karen:
00:27:37
I hope that helps.
Jessica:
00:27:40
I think that's all for us this week.
Karen:
00:27:42
I think it is. You can listen to us anywhere. You get your audio podcasts, including where you're listening to us right now.
Jessica:
00:27:48
Rate and review us. It helps other knitters find us and tell your friends. Your friends love getting podcast recommendations from you.
Karen:
00:27:55
You can follow us on Instagram at makegoodpod.
Jessica:
00:27:58
Big, huge thank you to our Patreon supporters. Y'all are amazing and incredible and you help us produce this podcast every single week without ever taking on advertisers.
Karen:
00:28:09
You can visit our website, makegoodpod.com, and check out the show notes. You can also send us questions either via the contact form on that website or at deerscratch@scratchsupplyco.com. And please include your pronouns.
Jessica:
00:28:21
We'll talk to you next week. Bye.
00:00:07
Hi, and welcome to Make Good, the podcast about yarn and knitting from Scratch Supply Co. We're recording today in downtown Lebanon, New Hampshire, and we're really excited to be here. I'm Karen.
Jessica:
00:00:15
And I'm Jessica.
Karen:
00:00:17
So today we're going to be talking about about trusting the process. We got a letter from B that kind of prompted this episode. So I'm going to read it and then we're going to talk about it.
Jessica:
00:00:26
Great, let's do it.
Karen:
00:00:28
Could you do an episode about trusting the process and trusting your pattern? I can't be the only knitter that panic frogs her project if you rows in because, quote, doesn't look right when it is clearly too early to make that decision. I am working on a top down camisole with the knitting for Olive 100% silk fingering weight yarn. I should also note this is my first time knitting with a fingering weight yarn. As I worked for my first tenish rows, it just didn't look the way I thought it should. After frogging and restarting this cami three or four times and getting the exact same results every time, I decided to just keep going. Lo and behold, it was right the whole time. I would probably have this thing done already. Please tell me I am not the only one.
Jessica:
00:01:10
Oh, B, you're totally not the only one.
Karen:
00:01:13
Not even close.
Jessica:
00:01:15
I think that this happens to every knitter at some point in their knitting life, and for many of us, at many points in our knitting life where you're just like, I don't know about.
Karen:
00:01:27
This, especially if it's something you haven't really done before and feel like, oh, yeah, even though it's in this weird place right now, I can see how this is going to come together. It takes a lot of experience and a broad range of experience to be able to do that, for sure.
Jessica:
00:01:44
Maybe we should frame this by asking what we even mean when we say things like trusting the process. Because B has asked us about trusting the process, and I feel like that's a conversation that I've had with people in the shop. But what do we mean when we say this?
Karen:
00:02:02
A lot of times, the first step in doing this is just trusting that the pattern wouldn't have gotten to you if it weren't capable of producing a functional finished item.
Jessica:
00:02:10
Right. For many designers, this is their job or their part time job. It's their creative passion at the barest of minimums, which is not a small thing. People who are designing knitwear really care that knitters are able to make the things that they have designed. So whether you can tell from the actual pattern or not, you should expect that at some point they've used some combination of things, like a technical editor looking over this pattern that you have purchased from them.
Karen:
00:02:43
Tech editors are the people who can 3D print with their minds, yes, but.
Jessica:
00:02:47
They aren't born that way. They build those skills.
Karen:
00:02:50
So if it has gotten past a tech editor, it's a good sign.
Jessica:
00:02:54
Designers also use test knitters, which are groups of knitters that have volunteered to work the pattern to check for clarity and reproducibility. Test knitters may have made this thing in a number of versions, like different sizes. Swatching has definitely been involved. Knit your swatches. There's a bunch of knitting math based on gauge from that swatch and sample knitting. So the designer themselves or their sample knitting partner has actually taken this pattern and produced the thing that the pattern says it's going to make.
Karen:
00:03:33
There's a couple of different kinds of uncertainty as you're looking at a new pattern. And it could be like, I've started making this and I just don't believe that the sweater is going to have the number of arms that I need it to have. Right? That's kind of a different issue. But there's also is this pattern going to give me the results that I'm seeing in this picture? Okay, I'm looking at the picture, I'm looking at what's in my hand, and I just don't feel like what I'm going to get at the end of this is what I want. And the best way to go about that is to access the resources. A lot of patterns will have a hashtag somewhere or Ravelry if that's accessible to you or making or any other sort of makery community, for sure.
Jessica:
00:04:12
Knitters love sharing information. Many of us are introverts, but we're also kind of social creatures around our craft. And if there were a pattern out there that was just impossible to make, it was consistently problematic. First of all, probably it will have been brought to a designer's attention and there will be some errata listed somewhere. But if that hasn't happened, there's definitely a conversation online about it somewhere where they're like, this cowl is actually closed at one end. It's not a cow. You would know that, like, you would be able to access that information if it existed out there somewhere. So use the hive mind.
Karen:
00:04:51
One of the things I really like about the Ravelry pattern database is the difficulty rating that is dependent on the makers and not the designer. I feel like the equivalent to this is like family recipes. Your great great grandmother has this cookie recipe that she's passed down and it says, a heaping cup of sugar. But she doesn't mean like a baking cup, she means one particular cup that she had on her kitchen shelf.
Jessica:
00:05:18
That's how my grandma baked. Yeah, she used her coffee cups to measure right.
Karen:
00:05:23
The sort of knitting equivalent of that. Is the designer going, oh, it's easy. And then if you have a bunch of knitters who are saying, no, it isn't right. Excuse me, it's not easy.
Jessica:
00:05:34
So sometimes as part of this believing in your designer process, you're looking at the pattern and you're like, I have no idea what this is telling me, but you're not finding a whole bunch of information online where other people are saying, this made zero sense. At that point, you have to say, well, maybe I just think differently than this designer does, and I need some teamwork, I need a second set of eyes to look at this with me. So at that point, go to your knitter friends or go to your Lys or email or DM the designer, however they like to be contacted and say, you know, what? Line 52 of this pattern, I cannot make heads or tails of it. Can you explain to me what's supposed to be happening? And sometimes just a second set of eyes is all you need to bring that clarity to the pattern, and that will help you move forward and make progress. And sometimes designs are just plain difficult. They're complex, or they're some sort of, like, innovative new approach to something. And you're like, how is this even happening? I've never thought of knitting from this direction to do this thing. Or It's a really unique construction, and that's exciting. That's great that you're going on this adventure with this designer. Just because a technique or a process is unfamiliar to you doesn't mean it's not going to work.
Karen:
00:06:56
Can we talk about the Ziggurat method?
Jessica:
00:06:58
Yes, we sure can.
Karen:
00:07:00
So the Ziggurat method is a sweater design method by USA Turcosa. The way I remember her explaining this is that this was a method of sweater construction that she came up with because she doesn't like weaving in ends. And so she was like, okay, how do I do this with the smallest possible number of ends to weave in? And if you go to the ravelry group for her method, it's just people telling each other, no, no, trust it. No, no, trust it. I knit twelve connected rectangles, and none of them look like a sweater. And I don't feel like I know what I'm doing. But you just have to trust the process.
Jessica:
00:07:34
Eventually it comes together.
Karen:
00:07:36
I love it when a plan comes together.
Jessica:
00:07:40
I think another dimension of this trusting the process is also believing in yourself. So at some point in time, all of this was new to you. Not just this one pattern that you're kind of stumbling over, but like, everything you had to learn to cast on and to knit and purl and bind off. And all of those things happened for the first time for you, and the second time and the third time, and you didn't feel comfortable with any of it until eventually you did. So if you were able to go from zero knowledge of your fiber craft to wherever you are now in that journey, like, you have to know that you can continue to learn and build your skills and expose yourself to new things and challenge yourself and find success. And it might not happen the first try or immediately, but you can do the hard things and don't let the.
Karen:
00:08:33
Entirety of the process overwhelm the individual steps of the process. You're making this thing one stitch at a time. Take the instructions one stitch at a time.
Jessica:
00:08:43
You can always connect with your resources and your knitter support systems. There's tons of information out there from talking to actual people at an Lys to like, YouTube and knitting classes and books and blog posts and technique videos on Instagram. We're probably the most fortunate knitters ever to have lived because we have more access to resources and information and access to one another. Regardless of where we are physically in the world, we can connect with someone who is also interested in this thing or has information about this technique and we can figure it out. We can teamwork it what's going to work?
Karen:
00:09:25
Teamwork. All that being said though, you might still be feeling squarely looking at your project and you're like, what can you do to figure out whether that's a justified feeling or not?
Jessica:
00:09:37
Well, when you're feeling like it's time to just yank your needles out of your stitches and throw the yarn on the floor and then be sad you didn't, then frog it, you might want to troubleshoot a little bit first and just do some checking to reassure yourself. The first piece of advice I have for you is one that to me, I think it's kind of weird. A lot of knitters resist. Read your pattern all the way through. I feel like we've maybe even talked about this before, but take a minute and read from beginning to end. You might not be able to visualize what this is going to look like at every stage of what you're reading, but reading from beginning to end will help you catch kind of atypical instruction or help you identify things that you might not be familiar with before you actually get to them. Like there might be a part of your pattern that tells you to do XYZ things and then on the next page, because you had to turn the page, it tells you at the same time also do this thing. And if you don't know that that's coming, you might just do the first set of instructions and then miss this synchronous piece of information that's really going to cause you a problem down the line. So reading through will help you kind of identify and troubleshoot those things and tell you that you need to get out your highlighter or your postit notes or something to help guide you through this process.
Karen:
00:11:11
I am totally one of those pattern reading resistant people. And I think a lot of designers, when they have one of those, like, at the same time do this other thing instructions, they've started putting notes. It's like, read these two sections before you go. And my impulse is, of course you want me to read the whole thing. You can't make me every time I'm like, of course the designer wants me to read the whole thing. They are trying to help you.
Jessica:
00:11:34
Oppositional defiance.
Karen:
00:11:38
You could also do a little bit of finish work just to kind of preview the end result for yourself. So do a wet or a steam block if you think you're going to end up with like tension issues or something like that. Gauge issues. If it's a top down sweater, you could try it on. If it's top down hat, you could try it on. If it's a bottom up hat, you could try it on.
Jessica:
00:11:56
Yes. The blocking while still on the needles I think is one of our most valuable tools as knitters and it is one that A I find a lot of knitters are resistant to and B it is often the solution. We definitely have had impromptu steam blocking parties with people who have come into the shop with partially knit projects and sometimes steam blocking saves the day. And sometimes steam blocking is the thing that tells you, well, this isn't going to work, it's time to frog it. There was a bidder of ours who came in with a giant color work poncho and she was positive that the floats were too short and that the tension and the color work just wasn't going to work out. And she had put many hours of work into this project and she was ready to frog it and was kind of upset. And we got out our little steamer and gave it a little heat and a little moisture and those stitches just flattened right out and settled and it saved her from having to rip back the entire project. And it wasn't a big ordeal like soaking in a tub and pinning and all of that. Just using the steam setting really opened up those stitches and gave her the reassurance that she needed to be able to finish her project. And it worked out beautifully in the end.
Karen:
00:13:17
Sometimes we come across some resistance to the in-progress blocking because then it makes your blocked fabric different than your not blocked because it's not created yet. When you do the blocking fabric, sure and that will go away when you block the entire finished object, for sure. It does feel weird though. It bothers me. And lifelines, if you feel like this feels like it's starting to get a little not so sure, just throw a lifeline in there. And what a lifeline is, is a piece of scrap yarn, barber cord or some other cable piece of dental floss, something like that, that is run through one row of stitches that if you do need to rip back, it will hold that one row like complete. So you can put your needles back in and if you don't end up needing to rip back, you just take the cord out.
Jessica:
00:14:06
They're incredibly useful and I think underutilized it's a really easy thing to anchor in your knitting and can make a huge difference particularly if you're working lace or cables, you can use it at any point in your knitting. Like maybe the gauge of your sleeves turns out to be different than the body of your sweater because it's smaller circumference knitting. And it's nice to be able to pull back to where you split the sleeves from the body, but it's really where there's like lots of yarn over and decreases or held stitches for those cables that it makes a huge difference when it comes to frogging and reworking sections.
Karen:
00:14:46
I would say all of that comes with a little bit of a caveat, though, because if you're knitting along and you were like, something is just not right, investigate that because you might be correct.
Jessica:
00:14:57
Sure.
Karen:
00:14:58
And maybe you did something like you're in the yoke of your sweater and you're supposed to increase two stitches every six rows and instead you increase six stitches every two rows and you're looking at this thing going, I'm not a triangle. Like, I'm not that much of a triangle. This doesn't seem right. It is always better to catch that kind of thing early before you get like halfway through the body. Absolutely.
Jessica:
00:15:24
I think that it's really easy to have this little poking feeling that tells you, I don't know about this. I think something's off and to brush that away and be like, it'll be fine, it's going to be fine. I'm just going to finish this. And then you realize that something was wrong at a point where you're like, oh, this hurts. Now I need to go see if Jessica will just frog the whole sweater for me because I can't bring myself to do it.
Karen:
00:15:54
But for the most part, trust the process. Trust the designer and the tech editor and the test knitters and the people who have knit the project before you. Friends don't lie. If they all successfully created a finished object, it's probably not that there's something funny going on with the pattern. There might be something funny going on with the way you are reading the pattern, but more likely it is just trust it and go forward. It's going to be okay.
Jessica:
00:16:22
Situation and swatch.
Karen:
00:16:31
And really it's just yarn for sure.
Jessica:
00:16:33
At the end of the day, you can frog it and rewind it and then just knit it again and then it's more knitting time for you to really who's the winner? The person who has to knit their sweater twice. So speaking of catching mistakes and frogging things and fixing things, karen, what's on your needles?
Karen:
00:16:54
Well, nothing, because I cast off my oak moss last night and it's soaking right now and I'm going to block it as soon as we're done recording and I'm really excited about it. Yay. How did the rest of it go? It went really well. I have really enjoyed Elizabeth Zimmerman's son bindoff. The tuku wall does not lend itself to sone bindoff in large circumference. You know how when you're like embroidering if you're somebody who does embroidery and you trim the embroidery thread, because otherwise you just end up with this, like, huge knot. So when you're doing a sewn bind off, you have to leave three times the circumference of what you're binding off. That's a lot of yarn at the beginning of the bind off, in particular when it's sticky, like the tucu wool is. Sure, it's a little grabby, but I love this sweater. It's a really nice sweater. It is way too warm for the sweater right now. Even just trying it on. Like, once I got it off my needles before I blocked it, I was like, this is really exciting. And then I was like and I'm taking it off now. This is DK weight finish wool, and it does not belong in the first couple of days of August.
Jessica:
00:17:56
No.
Karen:
00:17:57
How about you? What's on your needles?
Jessica:
00:17:58
Jessica so I'm still working on my Easy V from Caitlin Hunter. And can I tell you, I love it. I finished the yolk, which was a phenomenal amount of knitting. Like, I had so many stitches on my needles, every round was taking me an exceptional amount of time, like, way longer than I felt like it should because I've got so much positive ease, and it's also accommodating your arms, and it's just a lot of stitches. I got through all of the color work in the yoke, and at the end of every color section, I was like, oh, I'm kind of running out of yarn. Am I going to have to join a second skate for one row of color work? And because it's the dream state from Spin Cycle and there's so much color shifting in the marls, I was like, I'm never even going to be able to find a point in my second skein that lines up with where I'm ending this, so you better not run out. Like, there was a lot of hostile mental whispering at the yoke of this sweater, and I made it. I won Yarn Chicken, and I have three tiny balls of yarn that I wound up that are like the size of a grape and the size of a key lime. They're tiny.
Karen:
00:19:12
The most down to the wire game of yarn chicken.
Jessica:
00:19:13
I felt triumphant. And also now I feel confident that I'm in good shape for the color work on the sleeves, because I very clearly needed a second skein to be able to finish this project. But I split from my sleeves last night, and I'm about to cruise along on the body all in one color, so my speed will increase dramatically. And who knows? I could be wearing this sweater. I would ambitiously say next week, but probably by September. So in a month I'll be done. But it's really good. I'm loving it. So this week, we're mixing things up. This week I'm going to ask Karen. Hey, Karen, are you ready for a letter no. Well, guess what? Get it together. I'm asking.
Karen:
00:20:03
Anyway.
Jessica:
00:20:20
So this week, our letter is from Ash.
Karen:
00:20:22
Hi, Ash.
Jessica:
00:20:24
So if you follow us on our Instagram, you have, via photos, met Ash before because Ash sent us a picture of their out of control growing Penguino that is really going to be a cozy weighted sweater. So Ash has written to us with a question. I'm having neurological issues currently and have lost the use of my left arm. The doctors can't give a timeframe of when or if I will regain use. I'm an English style knitter, so the left hand doesn't do much past holding the left needle anyway. I've ordered a Shetland knitting belt to hold the left hand needle, but will have to change my whole knitting style and set up to use it as it uses very long DPNS. And I'm generally a knit pro interchangeable metal needle type guy and I hate DPNS. Is there another method of knitting with only one arm or hand that you know of that I haven't heard of? I have no strength in that limb at all, so I can't simply jam a long straight needle in my armpit and hold it there, granny style.
Karen:
00:21:24
Oh, Ash. Okay, so I have a couple of different suggestions that might be worth trying. And it's a little bit of a mishmash of different things that they may or may not work for you. The kind of bad news is, I think that the needle that sits in the Shetland knitting belt is going to have to be a DPN. But if you end up going with the Shetland knitting belt, your working needle, the one that you're holding in your right hand, doesn't have to be. It could be a regular straight needle. I have a thought about how you could try to use circulars, but almost everyone I could find who has adapted for their own one handed knitting ended up just working with straight needles. So that may be a temporary accommodation that you're going to need to make. There is a company in Australia and the acronym is Ta DAC T, and it's the technology for aging and disabilities. And they sell a one handed knitting aid. It kind of looks like a PVC pipe, almost like a tripod with a grippy thing on the top, and it holds a knitting needle. And so that is intended to function in the place of the hand that's not able to hold the needle, so it could go on either side. The video that I watched, the person was sort of sitting with the base of the tripod, like, wedged under their thigh. I checked and they do ship outside of Australia. It's possible somebody local to you could rig something similar up for you. And I think it would be possible to use a circular knitting needle with that, but you would have to keep unclamping the top to slide your fabric in and out of where the needle is held and it may just be more trouble than it's worth. There are a couple of YouTube creators who do tutorials on one handed knitting. There's a woman named Mary, but her YouTube account name is first name Mary, last name one hand knitter. She tried the under the arm thing for a while. Very similarly for kind of a different reason. She also doesn't have the strength to hold that she did recommend. As you're sort of figuring things out, you might want to use something called decim. It's spelled Dycem and it's like a really grippy kind of rubbery plastic sheet material that comes in rolls like those therabands that she said just made it a whole lot easier to try to hold and manipulate stuff with the side of her body that doesn't have the ability to grip. There's also a woman named Elizabeth Ward who has an entire YouTube channel on knitting after an amputation. And she mentioned that when she was figuring out how to do this for herself, she found working with plastic needles was really helpful while she was feeling awkward because it was grippy and slow. But it was grippy and slow in a way that let her sort of practice and adjust. And then she immediately ditched those and went to metal needles because the plastic was grippy and slow and she wanted to go faster. So that might be something too, if you have plastic needles kicking around. Elizabeth has videos on techniques. She has how to tension when you can't hold with fingers on the hand that you would be tensioning with under normal circumstances. She sort of wraps things around her arm. She has tutorials on specific stitches. Mary has videos on her technique that combines the Shetland knitting belt with Portuguese knitting and that's how she tensions. So she has one of those Portuguese knitting pins. And we've talked about Portuguese knitting a little bit before. And the two ways you sort of tension yarn with Portuguese knitting, you could wrap it around the back of your neck or you could use a Portuguese knitting pin. She said that for her with one hand, she found manipulating the pin in and out of her actual top to be not super functional. So she just put it on one of those ID badge holder neck lanyard things and she can slip it on and off that way very easily. And she did have to adjust her knitting style because when you're knitting Portuguese, the yarn is always coming from the front. And so that was a little bit of an adjustment. But some combination of those two things where you're taking over the tensioning issue and having the other end of your left hand needle supported might work really well for you. There's also a group called Healing Fibers, and their website is healingfibers.org and it's fibers spelled the American way, E-R-S. They do a bunch of different stuff, but one of the things I found very helpful was on their Facebook page, they had shown how they've been using the center tubes of toilet paper rolls and then winding balls of yarn around them. And then they've been using freestanding toilet paper roll holders and then attaching it to that. And so that can let go with you, but that's how they're encouraging people to tension their yarn if they can't tension it with a hand.
Jessica:
00:26:15
Oh, neat.
Karen:
00:26:16
Of course, people are like painting their toilet paper holders and making them aesthetic crafty. Crafty, yeah. So I hope some of that is helpful. I think either something that could sort of grip the other side of your circular needle or some version of combining Portuguese knitting and the Shetland knitting belt might work really well.
Jessica:
00:26:35
It feels like it's going to be one of those you won't really know until you try situations like looking for options that other people are using and then just kind of experimenting a little bit to see what feels most functional for you. And probably at the beginning, none of it will feel very functional. This will be a little bit of patience and adjusting and troubleshooting until you can make it work.
Karen:
00:26:57
I wonder if there might be like an occupational therapist out there who is also a knitter who would have some ideas, because that's a lot of what occupational therapists do. But I think it would have to be somebody who already knits because I think it would be hard to explain both the mechanics and the necessity of it. You know what I mean?
Jessica:
00:27:16
Sure. I think it would definitely be easier with someone who is already familiar with the ergonomics of the process.
Karen:
00:27:22
Yes. And I don't know if that's something ash that you have in your area or if maybe there's an occupational therapist who is listening to this who could send in some information or might have some resources, but we'll put it out there and see what happens.
Jessica:
00:27:36
Excellent.
Karen:
00:27:37
I hope that helps.
Jessica:
00:27:40
I think that's all for us this week.
Karen:
00:27:42
I think it is. You can listen to us anywhere. You get your audio podcasts, including where you're listening to us right now.
Jessica:
00:27:48
Rate and review us. It helps other knitters find us and tell your friends. Your friends love getting podcast recommendations from you.
Karen:
00:27:55
You can follow us on Instagram at makegoodpod.
Jessica:
00:27:58
Big, huge thank you to our Patreon supporters. Y'all are amazing and incredible and you help us produce this podcast every single week without ever taking on advertisers.
Karen:
00:28:09
You can visit our website, makegoodpod.com, and check out the show notes. You can also send us questions either via the contact form on that website or at deerscratch@scratchsupplyco.com. And please include your pronouns.
Jessica:
00:28:21
We'll talk to you next week. Bye.
