Patterns and Recipes

I must be more excited about this blog than I thought I was, because, despite going to bed extremely late (as usual), I woke up bright and early after only four hours sleep with a blog topic spinning around in my head -- patterns and recipes.

Comparing knitting to cooking is probably nothing new as a concept, but it's not a comparison that I'd personally ever considered before. Yet, now that it has popped into my head, it seems so very obvious. After all, a pattern is a recipe for knitting a specific item while a recipe is a pattern to be followed in creating a specific dish. The process is the same even when the products are quite different.

Both recipes and patterns start off with titles, followed by a list of ingredients / materials. Milk, flour, sugar versus needles, yarn, finishings. Measurements are given in cups and spoonfuls... or needle sizes and balls of yarn. Then the instructions are set out step by step. If followed exactly, you end up with a duplicate of the item created by the recipe / pattern writer. If you make substitutions, you end up with a similar product that -- hopefully -- works as well as the original, but which may be better... or worse.

Success lies in the cook's / knitter's experience and depth of knowledge of the ingredients / materials. When you've been cooking for a while, you know when you can or can't get by with substituting margarine or olive oil for the butter, or when you can thrown in that extra spice to enhance the flavour without ruining it. Once you've developed experience as a knitter, you're able to achieve the same gage when using a different yarn than the one called for in the pattern. You can use different stitches and adapt the patterns to different sizes.

Eventually, you become confident enough in your skills that you start cooking / knitting without the recipes / patterns, and you start creating your own. The cook buys some lovely seasonal strawberries and suddenly has an idea for a brand new dessert. The knitter falls in love with a yarn and visualizes a garment for which she has no existing pattern. Each in turn then sets out and creates something totally new.

When I was growing up, both cooking and knitting were equally esoteric. I took home economics in high school and learned to follow recipes. Later, when I was out on my own, I started adapting recipes to the ingredients I had on hand or that were seasonal. Then, one day, I threw the cookbook aside for most of the things I was making and just cooked.

Now the same thing is happening with my knitting. I took an adult-education class back in the '80s and learned to follow patterns, which is all that I did for years afterwards. Slowly I started adapting them, firstly by using different yarns than the ones called for, then by changing the stitches. This past year I finally picked up my needles, pulled a yarn from my stash, and just started knitting with an idea in my head but no pattern on paper to follow... and it worked.

So, I guess my next step is to teach myself how to take the things I’ve knitted without someone else's pattern and recreate those steps so that someone else can make the same item. Tomorrow I hope to present my first ever pattern for others to use. Wish me luck in writing it up tonight.

My Newest Passion

Knitting, knitting, and more knitting! Yup, the Nightowl has a new passion and is spending her late night hours (hey, there's a reason for the nickname) doing... guess what? Why knitting, of course. So, I decided it's time to start a blog dedicated specifically to my knitting adventures, ponderings, and grumblings.

I spent a fair amount of time looking for a catchy name for this blog, but I discovered that knitting is so popular, most of the kewl names have already been taken. I finally decided to do something using my oldest and most popular nicks, Nightowl, because the 'n' sound of 'nightowl' goes so well with the 'n' sound after the silent 'k' in 'knit' -- and I discovered that there are already other knitting nightowls populating the net. Never one to give up on a good pun, I decided to add the silent 'k' to 'Knightowl' and, while I was at it, to 'nest' as well. Thus Knightowl's Knitted Knest is born. Welcome to my new nest.