When your pattern notes are making their way across the ocean (Daily Update: 5/9/19)

The plans for the baby blanket are progressing well. Claire has some colours in mind to recreate the original colour scheme I had, and she’s shipping them out to me on Monday. So I’m taking the time until then to clean the pattern up and write it properly so that I can basically knit the sample as a pattern test for myself.

I thought I was taking pretty detailed notes while I originally created the blanket. The first few sections (the white seed stitch and the first colour change) were mostly fine, I just needed to clean up some formatting and punctuation, but I double checked the row and stitch counts and they didn’t quite line up. So I’ll have to keep an eye on those as I work the sample to make sure they’re actually correct. But then I got to the first lace section, and the pattern just said “work chart”. So I headed over to Stitch Fiddle (where I draw up all my charts)… and realised the chart wasn’t there. Turns out that for that section I drew the chart up in a notebook, which is currently making its way to Sydney in a shipping container. Whoops. So I spent a good bit of time staring at the lace, trying to reverse engineer the pattern from it. I think I’ve figured it out, and I did it in Stitch Fiddle so at least it’s in a format I can include in the final pattern now. I guess this is why it’s good to make a second copy of your pattern to double check your work!

I’m almost done with the main body of my sleeveless shirt. The colours have gone slightly haywire, but it’ll probably look ok once it’s done. I think I need to figure out how to learn a bit more about colour theory and combinations. I used to be a bit dismissive of the need to choose good colours for patterns since people can choose whatever colour they want for their own FOs, but colours definitely make a huge impact on how your items end up looking in photos. I think knowing more about it would be a good concrete step towards getting better photos.

Lastly, I started an Oliphant Kat Slack workspace today! There were some people from my old job that I wanted to keep in touch with, and one of them suggested using Slack. I’ve been toying with the idea of starting some sort of community space for a while so I figured this might be a good start. It’s mostly my crafty friends from my old jobs so far, but if it stays active for a while I might start trying to add in other people I know too.