I don’t watch a lot of knitting YouTube videos. It’s just not something I have in my normal entertainment rotation (currently I am watching True Detective on Max…WHAT IS HAPPENING)…
Anyway, I somehow landed on a Fruity Knitting podcast with the owners of Knitting For Olive based in Denmark. I loved the story of how the Mother/Daughter business started. Pernille was a new grandmother knitting baby garments. Other new grandmothers and mothers started seeing the finished garments and wanted to make some themselves. So, Pernille and Caroline started a company writing patterns. They had them test-knitted and started selling them through their business website in Europe.
They became more popular, and people wanted them translated into English. So, they did that; they just translated word for word into English and popped them into Ravelry.
They quickly learned that American knitters expected more. They needed row-by-row instructions and stitch counts. They loved the garments but were not satisfied with the very simplified patterns Knitting for Olive was publishing. So, as smart businesswomen, they changed that. They listened and changed the patterns for American knitters.
I thought expectation of what a pattern should provide very interesting. Because we see this in the shop a lot. We expect the pattern to tell us everything: every step, stitch by stitch, line by line. We are working with a pattern now in our 4 in 12 sweater KAL. There is a point in the sweater where it says “work as established to end”. It is causing some knitters confusion because every row isn’t written out. You have to figure out yourself if you should be knitting or purling by reading your knitting, not the pattern.
I’m not sure if we just don’t trust ourselves to figure it out or if we don’t want to make a mistake or what. Instructions like this, or instructions that say, “continue in this manner until you have” or “follow instructions for the right shoulder as left working decreases as needed”. Instructions like that just seem to freak American knitters out.
A woman, we’ll call her Mary, came in a few months ago with instructions from a yarn shop in Europe. I think it was Italy. She loved the sweater in the Italian shop and asked for the yarn and pattern. The woman in the shop gave her one page of instructions with drawings of the front and back of the sweater with about four lines of writing…IN ITALIAN! She came in to ask a few questions, we laughed about the pattern, tried to figure some of it out, and she went home to make it. She came back in a few months later and had finished the sweater! We were all so impressed! Now, I’m not saying that we need to have one-page patterns for sweaters, but I do think we could be more like Mary. We need to try things, be gutsy, be brave enough to try something even if you have to rip it out! Try something, trust yourself, if that isn’t right, try it again a different way.
Remember, it’s about the process right?