I'm almost (within 2 rounds) up to the heel-divide for the Snicket socks. The pattern gets easier as you work on it and as you figure out its logic.

I did have to stop and carefully try on the partial sock - it looks awfully narrow but it does fit.

This is shaping up to be another busy week. In addition to a full day of classes, I have two meetings - one which I'm probably going to have to run away from early in order to get to Youth Group on time.

And I'm thinking about something I read - I can't remember who it was said it, but it was some fairly-newly-famous knitting designer and "celebrity" (Vickie Howell, maybe) who was interviewed somewhere. She (I know at least it was a she...maybe it was Stefanie Japel...) commented that she didn't knit much "for fun" any more, and the people in her family she wanted to make sweaters for were going sweaterless, because of the time demands of designing - of making swatches, of doing the trial pieces, of revising and rewriting and bowing to the demands of the publishers or the yarn companies ("Your sweater's perfect! Now change it in these ways...)

And you know, I'm going to keep that in mind when I get into one of my periodic "why am I not designing? Why do I not have patterns published somewhere?" funks.

Because I NEED to knit for fun. I NEED something in my life where I'm not being told at some point in the process what I need to do with it. Maybe it's different if you're a semi-full-time designer, and your "fun time" is playing with your children or doing something else. But my "fun time" is when I do crafts. I get enough of "This is great, now just change the entire thing" attitude in my work.

I think that was kind of an eye-opening comment. (Again: I am kind of an idiot about some things). It didn't really occur to me that designing a sweater for publication carries with it some of the same effort and frustration that writing a journal article does. (Oh, ugh. If it were that bad, I marvel that so many people HAVE published patterns). But it must - the sheer amount of time involved.

There is also a quotation from Yo-Yo Ma:

"There is this idea in the modern West that we must all be original; we all must be authors in the sense that authorship is individual."

Yes. Again - the idea that interpreting written music, maybe making a few changes of phrasing along the way (Ma talks about trying to blur the line between "writing" and "performing," which apparently once WAS a blurry line) and playing it is a creative act, that it is not merely reproducing what someone else has already made. And couldn't "bringing a sweater to life" by using someone's pattern almost be seen as a sort of corporate authorship (I think that's what Ma is getting at: that a lot of traditional music really has no one single author, everyone who plays it adds a little to it over time)?

Is knitting a sweater from the pattern enough like that? If you use your own choice of yarn, if you maybe change a shaping or a cable or a stitch pattern? Or will it be seen (at least by the "Sniff- I NEVER knit from another person's pattern" crowd) as basically a non-creative act of copying? I don't know.

Another thought - 140 or more years ago, there were few, if any, written patterns. People had to figure things out on their own or go by what had been passed down orally to them. I suspect lots of people would have jumped at the opportunity to have printed patterns to work from. But now, patterns are everywhere, and in some circles you're seen as a "follower" if you use them. (Sometimes I wonder how much of what is the "fashionable, cool attitude" is simply a rebellion against the status quo...sort of like the kids I knew in college who stopped listening to certain bands "because they got popular.)

I don't know. It's funny - and kind of silly, when you think about it - how hierarchies seem to spring up over things. If we were in a culture where knitting was not basically a luxury activity - where we HAD to make our own sweaters and socks and we'd be cold in the winter if we didn't - there probably wouldn't BE any "oh, you knit from a PATTERN" or "Oh, you used such a SIMPLE design" type of snobbery. I suspect that necessity has a way of driving out that kind of attitude.

Not that I WANT there to be more "need" in the world. But sometimes it would be kind of nice to cut through all the weird over-layers of attitude about what we do and just get into the heart of it - that we can make stuff, stuff that is useful, stuff that is beautiful. And didn't William Morris say something like "Never have anything in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful"? So something that is both useful and beautiful should be doubly good, whether you made it from a pattern or not, whether it's knit of some kind of exotic, sustainably-farmed fiber or from acrylic, whether it's the current top-of-the-chart style or your own idiosyncratic vision.