…is where I’ve been lately, in case anybody was wondering. Actually, even if nobody was wondering, that’s still where I was, and I have to say it’s not my favorite place to be.

Turandot ran true to form in the writing and production stage. I’m still kind of at a loss to understand why this one sucked the juice out of me as it did, but there you have it - right up until the moment I handed over the package to the postmaster (and yes, the good news is that a few days ago I did hand over the package to the postmaster!) it was blood, sweat, tears, and albatross all the way.

Worth it, though.

Mind you, writing patterns is always hard. I don’t expect no different, nohow. Connecting all the little components together and making sure there’s continuity and flow and that things make sense both individually and in context - hard. There’s an awful lot of bouncing back and forth between the forest and the trees and it’s dizzying and confusing at best. Hard. (We dizzy and confuse ourselves so you don’t have to - at least that’s the goal, she said touching wood and crossing fingers. All part of the service, see.) In theory, it’s supposed to get easier over time, as you build up the design equivalent of library functions - layout styles, structural conventions, boilerplate text like glossaries and technique descriptions that appear repeatedly from one pattern to the next. And in fact that is true to a certain extent. I have built up a library. The only problem with that theory is that almost every time I use a “library function” I come up with some way to refine it, a forehead-slapping why-didn’t-I-think-of-that-before moment, so I still end up doing some wheel-reinvention. Hard.

Worth it, though.

For instance, I’ve always had a problem with needle nomenclature and the idea of writing a pattern specifically for one needle configuration or another. I’ve seen people walk away from a sock pattern written for DPNs because they only use 2-circs, or vice versa. Apparently either you have to write alternate needle versions for each pattern (I’ve done this, in one or two cases, and I have to say it doesn’t exactly simplify the management of inventory), or you have to do custom instructions for individual customers (I’ve occasionally done this too), or you have to leave the knitters hanging and just hope that the ones who need to can make the mental conversions for themselves.

I don’t think this is good enough.

(Not to mention that you can get into absurd problems if you identify your needle positions by numbering them consecutively - Needle #1, Needle #2, etc. - and you also happen to have specified Needle sizes #1 and #2. Yes, there are ways around this, and I’m not about to launch into the needle-sizing rant yet again - take that as read. Suffice it to say, however, that despite my best efforts at clarity I have two past patterns that are evidently crying out for a re-write on this point, to judge from some of the e-mails I’ve received. Sigh.)

I realize you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and I don’t kid myself that this will work for everyone - but over the past few months I’ve been gradually working my way toward a “needle-neutral” approach to pattern writing. There are inevitable exceptions: I really think, for instance, that needle configuration makes a big difference in a Turkish cast-on, and that using two circs yields infinitely better results than using DPNs. (And I haven’t really even tried to imagine how you’d do it on magic loop, if that’s even possible; thought about it briefly, but it made my brain hurt something fierce, so I decided to postpone that line of thought to some less stressful time…!) But overall I think that transparently needle-neutral is the way to go where possible, and Turandot is the first time I feel I’ve actually achieved it.

(Hmmmm. Perhaps this is not unrelated to the degree-of-difficulty question? I spend days on end doing the impossible and then I look back and scratch my head and wonder, gee, why was this one so unusually hard? Hmmmm. Duh, I’d say.)

So that’s where I’ve been. Meanwhile, life went on and I wasn’t entirely idle in other areas. (Go look at the Kitri Shawl Progress Page if you’re at all inclined to doubt this….) There was Aaron’s christening. There was a cat funeral. (Not one of my own, I’m thankful to say, not even one I knew well - but still… dead is dead.) And I assume there was dinner and laundry and garbage and cat boxes and sleep and all that sort of stuff, though I can’t say I remember much about it.

(I do remember the weirdness of the 6th, of working on the drawings and charts for Turandot while listening to Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma” over and over again on the radio. His death wasn’t unexpected, but it did make the moment a little more surreal and a great deal sadder. And still… dead is dead.)

At any rate, that particular ordeal is now over at last, and now I can plunge full-tilt into the next half-dozen ordeals. The next half-dozen ordeals being:

1. Rhinebeck
2. Rhinebeck
3. Rhinebeck
4. Rhinebeck
5. Rhinebeck
6. Rhinebeck

- not necessarily in that order.

Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Sock Designs, Turandot, Bloggerei. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.