Performing Surgery

I love to design sweaters. There is absolutely nothing that gives that feeling of accomplishment like working on and finishing a sweater that you've designed yourself. The only problem with me is....I can't work from patterns. I never follow them. I have issues when it comes to reading directions and sometimes I feel a lot like Stephanie; like I want to shoot my foot off rather than keep making the mistakes I am making.

Okay, here is the deal. Normally, when I design a sweater, I pick up needles and yarn, and just knit. I knit what my heart desires. Sure, there MAY be a sketch but there usually isn't a write up. I have gotten a lot of requests for certain patterns of mine and since I find it so difficult to write up a pattern after I've knit a piece I decided to write up the pattern (charts, etc.) before hand. The only problem with this is I CANNOT FOLLOW A PATTERN. Even though it is MY pattern, I cannot seem to follow it. I tend to do my own thing, and the only problem with that is figuring out what the hell I did after I've done it. So, instead of trying to figure out what I've done, I've been doing a bit of surgery. First I wanted to change a design element, without ripping-accomplished! Then, last night I realized that I crossed a cable the wrong way (on all three cables) so I wanted to fix it without ripping (and this was like 8 rows down with other crossovers in the mix)-accomplished! Finally, after fixing the cables, I realized that I screwed up something else in the cables (I should have learned to read the pattern I wrote by now) so I fixed two of the six mistakes this morning and hope to finish the other four at lunch and finally be able to make some more progress.....AND learn to read the charts I've made.

Did I mention that I love designing sweaters?