Chicken or Egg?

Every six months, in preparation for TNNA's Great Wall of Yarn the members of the Association of Knitwear Designers do swatches for the yarns submitted by the yarn companies. As someone who loves to swatch, this is a wonderful distraction for me, and despite the fact that I don't really have time, I usually sign up to do three yarns. I always request natural fibers, which are my preference, and I frequently get nice luxury fibers to work with.

I use this as an opportunity to let some yarn talk to me about what it wants to be. This means that I sit down with some stitch books and look for appropriate stitch patterns. To me this is one of the best parts about what I do. No matter how many times I have looked through those books--and my Barbara Walkers are so handled that I have had them rebound--everything looks different when you have a specific

yarn in mind. Sometimes a pattern that I've loved just all of a sudden has the right yarn for it, and sometimes something I've never really noticed, just leaps off the page.

I then gather up my stitch patterns and the yarn, find the right needles, and usually sit on the couch and begin to make tiny sweaters. I love to do this! It means that I get to blend the stitch pattern with a garment shape.

Sometimes it works on the first shot, and sometimes not. Some patterns have to be swatched before I can start and others I just do a guesstimate and take off. Rarely is it a completely forward process, but it is fun for me because there is also no expectation except to make a nice, tiny sweater. And I don't have to write the pattern!

These are pictures of the three sweaters I did for TNNA in June. Yarns are for Winter 09/10. If you look closely at the purple sweater you'll see that I didn't do the armhole bind offs evenly and the pattern doesn't sit quite right. I was drinking a martini. I loved the stitch pattern.

I had to adjust it to work in the round, and I wasn't wild about how the bobbles looked, but that wasn't important at that point--I just needed a nice sweater.

I loved how I carried out the details on the tiny sleeves and neckline, but couldn't imagine that the pattern would look so great circling a real person's hips. But I really liked it, so I have now tweaked the stitch pattern, and done a swatch in a yarn that I was looking for a project to match to.

This yarn was at a better gauge, and this hat gave me the opportunity to rework those bobbles and finishing off the top was just too fun! A swatch like this is also a good test of how the yarn behaves when it is ripped. I redid portions of this many times. If you look closely you can see that my small bobbles change from the first repeat to the second as I refined my process; I had gotten fed up with ripping by then, so I just left it.

This is on its way to becoming a Y2Knit pattern. Hopefully it will be complete for a January release. The hat pattern will be included!