I love to swatch. Love it.
Think I’m joking? Well, kinda. I’ve had this raging case of knitting ADD lately. Swatching has been my salvation. I want to work on a project, I just can’t decide which project or what yarn or even if I should knit or crochet. I’m not focused enough to devote myself to any one thing and wary of the idea of getting sucked into a long term project.
On the other hand, I don’t want to waste time on a small, but ultimately throwaway project that I’m only making because I want to make something, not because I feel strongly about a mug cozy. Swatches are so low commitment, low time investment. Swatches can be unravelled without guilt. Swatches are the one-night stand of crafting.
Still, I should probably qualify. I love to swatch new patterns and techniques. I love going through stitch dictionaries and dreaming up what the patterns want to be. I like playing around and changing up the stitches and rows to see what happens. I like seeing how the stitches look in different yarns. So I guess what I really like is swatch-sketching.
Swatching for gauge to make sure things fit? Not so crazy about that. That’s more like swatch-working. Feels like a job, especially if it doesn’t work out the first time. (Who are those weirdos who always get the suggested gauge anyway? It almost never works that way for me.)
But I digress. At my most desperate hour of project frustration, I decided I had to go back to basics. My projects may be a tangled mess or yarn and sticks but a swatch? I could handle a swatch.
The extra bonus is contributions for the Walker Treasury Project. Woot!
Grand Trefoil (above) is a pattern that’s always caught my eye because it looks like a cell structure you might see under a microscope. I wanted to try it out to see how it might work with other stitch patterns.
I have a seed of an idea that would use a variation of Pier-Glass so I wanted to knit that and see how it responded.
I’m glad I did. While the pattern is stretchy, I expected it to respond a bit more like ribbing than the swatch did.
I also added an old swatch I did for Double Faggoting,
which turned into the inspiration for Straight-laced.
I finished Straight-laced about a year ago. The first version was done in Cascade Fixation. I’m considering trying another version in a thinner elastic like Patons stretch sock.
All that swatching did the trick, just as I hoped and the swatching muse did not disappoint. Since finishing the Walker swatches, I finished two actual projects. That, however, is a post for a different day.
