The Art of Ripping it All Out, or, I Suck at Math

I have been fairly absent from the blogosphere for the last few days. I wasn't intentionally ignoring my meager audience of four; I've just had a lot going on. I've been in contact with a female photographer who needs some babyKNITS samples for her photo sessions (I can't wait to get started and see the professional photos that come out of it!) and I'm also working on a new project which has grown bigger than previously intended.
Remember that beautiful cake of yarn? Well, I probably should have left it alone—it was so perfect in its latent, undisturbed potential state, and I had to go and ruin it.

Seriously, I ruined it.

© flossieKNITS

Although I do love that when I put it on top of my vase, it sort of looks like an appendageless character gazing wistfully out my window, I still wish it always looked caked.

Alas, when you rip out your knitting and re-roll the yarn, this is what it looks like. 

For the record, I have been knitting and reknitting this yarn for over a week now.

I'm trying to design a hat. I figured, what could be easier than designing a hat? Take a basic hat formula, and apply some fancy stitches to it.

Well, both the first and second time I tried this, I wound up with a hat that looked, as The Doo graciously put it, "Like those skullcaps they put on patients when they want to run brain scans."

 

Yikes. Don't be fooled by how happy she looks. That is not attractive.

Mind you, I created this awful, brain tumor cap twice. I was convinced there was a way to make it work, but there isn't. There is no way this will ever work outside of a doctor's office. 

So I started knitting something completely different, something that shirked the very idea of design, and I will leave it at that because I don't want to give it away yet. And it works, for the most part, although again, I had to rip it out twice because it wasn't working exactly the way I wanted.

In case you don't know (or haven't read previous entries), I am butt-stupid at math. It's not that I can't do it; it's that my brain just doesn't process it quickly. I have a permanent math roadblock in my brain. I can see a word once and remember it forever; I can use words I've seemingly never heard, and properly, but if I see a group of single digit numbers and have to add them, it will take me longer than I think it should.

I also cannot, for the life of me, imagine the way something is constructed by just writing it down or drawing it out. I have to actually pick up the needles and start knitting it to see how it needs to take form. And if it doesn't work, well, I rip it out... and listen to my mother or The Doo squeal in horror at all the hours of work being frogged.

I am the worst possible choice for a knitwear designer. I know it. I think about it constantly. But I want to do it so badly, I'm just plowing through the math dyslexia to see what the other side looks like, if I can get there.

This new design is all about my math dyslexia. It's pretty impossible to mess it up—believe me, I'm trying. It's also something that I believe will be universally accepted and enjoyed by knitters, but perhaps I'm being full of myself.

It's going to be a free pattern, so look out! It will be a while before it comes out though, because I plan on submitting it to Knitty for First Fall—if Knitty rejects it, off to Ravelry it will go.

Wish me luck.

Flossie