“What Makes You Devious?”

My teenaged son asked me that this afternoon as he was supervising my attempts to get reacquainted with WordPress.

Frankly, it’s shorthand for lazy. I’m a pretty lazy knitter. There are things I don’t like to do, like sewing up, ripping back, or redoing anything, and I’ll often do a fair bit of other work in order to avoid doing those things.

I also just … don’t really like being told exactly how to do things. I often ignore instructions. I figure it’s my hobby and I can treat it like I want to.

I like patterns; they’re fantastic inspiration. But I don’t tend do things as written. I like to pull apart a pattern so I can understand it, then put it back together the way I want it. 

Sometimes that gets me pretty far down the rabbit hole.

Take the current work in progress (or to be more accurate, one of them): Skylark. It’s a classic Rowan pattern, which means it’s knit in pieces, then sewn up. I figure if I wanted sewing to be my hobby, I’d’ve bought the fabric instead of creating it. I prefer to knit things all in one piece when I can (and for this cardigan, I think I can).

So I started off, as you probably do, by printing out the pattern and circling all of the instructions for my size. Then crossing half of those out and circling other instructions for other sizes, because I’m short, but wide. I need a small length and a large width. I need the largest size sleeve cap to accommodate the Irish-peasant upper arms bequeathed to me by my grandmother, but the sleeve increases need to happen at a faster rate because those peasant arms are too short to reach the upper shelf. So I scratch out, and scratch out again, and remember that I want to rearrange where the cables are in relation to the “side seams” (that I removed), so I rewrite the order of patterned and cable stitches. And after remembering to remove two stitches at each side that will be seamed, and putting back in one to be purled for a faux seam, I feel close to knowing the correct number of stitches to cast on, until I remember that I don’t want the cables to flare at the bottom* so I will have to cast on fewer than that. And I’m not doing the twisted stitches the pattern calls for but rather mistake rib, but that won’t affect my stitch count (much, I swatched to make sure … remember that thing about how I hate having to rip out? I do swatch.) so I think I’m about ready to start.

And by the time I’ve done all that, I’d’ve probably been halfway finished knitting the sweater if I were a person capable of just following the instructions as written. But I’m not.

Are you devious? What makes you that way?

*There is a neat trick to this, and I’ll cover it in a future blog post.