More thoughts on creativity and knitting-from-patterns or not:

When I cook,* I rarely follow a recipe. Oh, I may use some basic guidelines - like what's the best setting for the oven, or how much ratio of broth/solid food is good. But I substitute at will - No lemon? Vinegar's fine. Can't eat carrots? Well, water chestnuts CRUNCH like carrots but sweet potatoes are ORANGE like carrots - it depends on what you need.

Most of the time, things work out well. Better than "well" a lot of the time.

But I think cooking's a low-risk activity for me. If I mess up, the result may be edible but not tasty - and I don't have qualms about throwing out food if it's spoiled. And at the worst? It's not edible, I have to chuck it, but I can always have cereal or soup or something quick as a failsafe.

(*Not when I bake; baking's different. Baking requires greater precision and you substitute or change amounts at your own peril)

But knitting is a little different. So is quilting, these days. I don't have as much time to do it, and it takes far longer to make a sweater than it does to make a stew. And so, I guess, I subliminally do a cost-benefit analysis: what's the benefit of doing something wild here, versus what's the cost if it doesn't work out. And for cooking, the cost is low enough and the potential benefit is high enough (or: substituting ingredients means I don't have to run out the the wal-mart, and I regard avoiding a run to the wal-mart as an Absolute Good) that I'll do it.

(It may also be that I've been cooking for longer than I've been seriously knitting or making quilts.)

But with a sweater: you've got the yarn, some of which doesn't survive frogging (mohair, I'm looking at YOU.) And there's the time. And there's the finding-the-stitches-again after you've raveled back the screw-up.

And you know - part of it may be that I've simply not knit enough sweaters of one basic type (e.g., topdown raglan or cardigan with set-in sleeves) to really have a "body sense" of the shapes, like I have a "body sense" with socks or hats (and even then - I'm not so comfortable popping a stitch pattern other than plain old knit-purl variations on a hat). Maybe it will come with time and I need to be less hard on myself.

(Well, I need to be less hard on myself IN GENERAL but also here).

(And I also need to get past the making-them-too-big stage. I think I need to try a 42" finished bust in the next "fitted" sweater I do to see how that works. Knitted fabric is not woven fabric; I think I work under a woven-fabric paradigm, where if you make the blouse a bit too tight, you're going to have gaposis, but if you knit a sweater a bit too tight, it'll stretch and maybe even give you that Lana Turner look.)

But for now - I like knitting from patterns. I read through them and visualize what I'm doing at each step. And sometimes there is that little epiphany moment of, "oh, that's how you get it to do that" and you learn another technique - or a shortcut for a technique. And I suppose I could look at is as all the knowledge I am accruing right now making sweaters may pay off in the future, just like all the crazy reading I did as a kid (seriously: I read Dante's Inferno at age 13 because I knew it was a "classic" and I figured it was Good For Me to read classics) benefits me know because I know all the crazy allusions that writers make in their books and stuff.

No learning is ever wasted, no matter how small it seems at the time.

And besides: perhaps I can convince myself of the fact that by making another person's pattern, I honor that person by using what they created. (Just like I feel honored to find out people are reading my little blog and when they comment on it. Hint.). After all, if I feel like I am Honoring Knitters of the Past if I put the Print 'O' the Wave lace pattern into something I'm making, or if I do a pair of "Chipman's Block" mittens (and, oooh, I just remembered that I have yarn and a pattern for that stashed away and I said last spring I wanted to do a pair of those for fall), isn't it Honoring Knitters of the Present if I make up a sweater or shawl they designed, and give their creation life?

After all - can't it be argued that you give a book life by reading it? And isn't knitting a pattern into being the equivalent of reading a book?

And besides. The thought of people judging me as somehow a "lesser" knitter because I choose to make sweaters from existing patterns rather than designing my own - well, to use an outdated slang word, that's whack. And I realized how whack it was when one of my friends was talking about the Insane Children's-Sports Involved Parents she deals with - where they are JUDGING her for not showing up to her son's game in the Special Printed T-Shirt that was made up for the team (when she had somewhere else to be later) or when she didn't show up to every single practice and game.

I mean - too much time on the hands and not a high enough opinion of themselves, in my opinion. (Usually the judgemental people are like that: not comfortable enough in their own skins so that they need to think of everyone else as "less" in order to feel ok about themselves. Yeah, that's cheap pop psychology, but I spent enough years being teased in school and such to develop a bit of perception about the behavior of many people who put others down.)