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knitting highs and lows
14 Mar 2019 01:32 pmI'm making okay progress on this zigzag blanket, partly out of frustration because I tried to start the Briochevron Cowl pattern by Stephen West, a very popular pattern designer, with my new beautiful merino... and had to start over about 4 times yesterday because the pattern is badly written. It's not the most unclear pattern I've ever seen and there aren't exactly errors; it's just full of omissions that don't signal they are omissions, so you don't know which parts you're going to have to look up beforehand.
The only indication that the pattern is only clear and intuitive to an expert brioche knitter and is actually almost in a kind of shorthand is a note in the introduction that brioche knitting howtos and "classes" by a particular person are great. I've never completed a project in brioche, but I have completed some square samples of brioche rib based on detailed howtos, and it was because they were so fun that I decided I wanted to make a big project; and I thought that since I had the hang of brioche rib and understood what the anatomy of brioche is more or less it should be fine (particularly as the pattern also touts how simple and easily-memorized the pattern repeat is).
So while I could have avoided much of my frustration over the past 2 days if I'd sorted all the finished projects by the most helpful notes and systematically gone through them highlighting passages before I started, I didn't realize that I needed to do that. In spite of the loud consensus among knitters of the pattern that it is confusing and unclear, there's no note on the pattern page to that effect and no update to the pattern itself (common practices on Ravelry in those circumstances which I have come to expect). When I start over for the 5th time later today I will perhaps be slightly more likely to make it past the fourth row.
In the meantime, I'm possibly going to have to mail order more shades of 7 Veljestä for the zigzag blanket...
The only indication that the pattern is only clear and intuitive to an expert brioche knitter and is actually almost in a kind of shorthand is a note in the introduction that brioche knitting howtos and "classes" by a particular person are great. I've never completed a project in brioche, but I have completed some square samples of brioche rib based on detailed howtos, and it was because they were so fun that I decided I wanted to make a big project; and I thought that since I had the hang of brioche rib and understood what the anatomy of brioche is more or less it should be fine (particularly as the pattern also touts how simple and easily-memorized the pattern repeat is).
So while I could have avoided much of my frustration over the past 2 days if I'd sorted all the finished projects by the most helpful notes and systematically gone through them highlighting passages before I started, I didn't realize that I needed to do that. In spite of the loud consensus among knitters of the pattern that it is confusing and unclear, there's no note on the pattern page to that effect and no update to the pattern itself (common practices on Ravelry in those circumstances which I have come to expect). When I start over for the 5th time later today I will perhaps be slightly more likely to make it past the fourth row.
In the meantime, I'm possibly going to have to mail order more shades of 7 Veljestä for the zigzag blanket...
