[knitting] two things

I am presently in the market for convertible mittens/arm warmers/... primarily for Admin: the LRP purposes. Also, I am picky.

Consequently I spent some of this afternoon (while A was napping on me) scrolling through fifteen pages of patterns on Rav, culminating in the frustrating experience of finding three different variations on a pattern I'm interested in, all by the same designer, none of which are available online any more. (The Wayback Machine will get me to the pages where I can click the "buy" button, but no further. The designer has rav messages turned off. I have left a forlorn comment on one of the patterns, and messaged the person with the project marked as started and finished in January 2024 to ask if they have a secret source that would let me pay the designer money.)

Relatedly I have been reminding myself of the state of the art on plant fibres that are good for cables (still "none") and, also, contemplating asking someone with An Appropriate Stash whether I can put some of their alpaca on my face to check it's still bad. In the event that alpaca is still bad, the problem reduces from "go hunting for reversible cable patterns, I SUPPOSE" to "ugh, fine, I can reverse engineer this and just do it all in rib" despite the fact that I'm decidedly out of practice at same.

But. One of the places I wound up while doing these checks was a KnitPal blog post. It's not particularly exciting but it's a fairly solid intro, and while I might disagree with their choices about infographic design I do respect that they've clearly put thought into making them.

... AND THEN YOU GET TO THE LAST FOUR PARAGRAPHS. For maximum effect (insofar as that's possible given this introduction) I recommend reading in situ, but I excerpt the relevant section below.

( Read more... )