Tag: handmade

How I Duplicated My Favorite Pair of Pants

Have you noticed I am not sewing as much as I used to? As Marie Kondo instructs, if it doesn’t bring you joy, let it go. That’s been my relationship with sewing, honestly, since 2024. Sewing and I had hit a rough patch in our relationship. No longer in the euphoric beginning, nor going deeper and bonding through the big sewing wins. We were burned out in the grind of sewing, striving to be better but lacking the proper knowledge to do so. Therefore, we’ve been on a break – off and on since 2025, and it’s been good.

It’s given me time to reflect on what I want to pursue, sewing, specializing, and what I feel like I should make because of the internet. It’s given me time to ponder what drives me to make my own clothes. When I began sewing, I was intrigued by historical styles, and then I drifted into more feminine items like dresses, blouses, and skirts. Shorts and pants were made and quickly cut up for scrap because they were such enigmas for my mind to understand. On this break, I’ve given myself room to figure out what I like to wear, which is key to sewing your own clothes. You can chase all the trendy patterns and styles, but if you don’t want to wear them, then you have a very expensive wardrobe of your own sweat equity that is useless to you. My desire was to break this cycle.

Going into 2023, I wasn’t sure what to make anymore or what I wanted to sew, but I felt this compulsion to keep going because I was so committed to this new hobby. A hobby I wanted to become my future career. It’s been in the midst of the slowdown that my artistic point of view has recalibrated. I like pants (trousers), overalls (dungarees), denim (dungarees), comfortable silhouettes like that of Lucy & Yak, and that is what I want to make.

This has only intensified since the Trad Wife trend co-opted the flouncy dresses, giving me the ick at the thought of associating with something I have always strived to avoid. Growing up in communities dominated by the Reformed Presbyterian church (a denomination I do not belong to and never shall) and Christian Nationalism spreading its snakey tendrils throughout the Christian bubble – I want nothing to do with the Trad Wife and all it represents.

That brings us to the present day, March 2026. After 2 years of sitting in my fabric stash, I finally started to cut the trouser fabric I bought to make my own pants in 2024. Too intimidated by my own past failure, I let it hide in my crafting closet, all of 2025, for fear of failing again. I did fail at pants in September 2025 with another fabric, so it was not unfounded fear. But what is the point of living in fear, especially for something so small? Would I learn that I am not very good at sewing? Sure, and who cares?! Is crafting a competition? No. It’s about making incremental steps towards success through practice.

For my birthday, Kyle gave me two garments from Lucy & Yak, something I had dreamed of since 2019. A pair of denim dungarees and a pair of corduroy pants. And you know what I thought of looking at them folded? What a lovely thing to take a pattern from. Use brown craft paper or wrapping paper, and feel free. I traced methodically, marking the seam allowance, and back from the front pattern piece. I carefully laid out my pattern, mirroring the right and left pieces for the front and back. Then, over two weeks, I slowly sewed these pants together by hand with a fresh sewing needle, which makes all the difference. Don’t be cheap like I used to be; buy new needles regularly to save your hands. Sew with courage, because this might be the time it all clicks. What if you never let yourself succeed? That would be more terrible than failing again at doing the hard thing.

I wish you happy sewing and good-fitting pants that make you smile every time you wear them.

Catch of the Day Sweater

In 2025, sardines and other tinned fish became more than just food; they appeared on beaded bags, shirts, and prints. They also made their way to the fiber arts community, which inspired me to make a fish print sweater for Kyle, who enjoys fishing IRL and in video games. I just like the video game version.

The Design Concept

When planning a garment with a colorwork motif, I always consider scale, placement, and repetition. To do this, I use what I learned in art class many years ago – the seven fundamentals of art. So I consider line, shape, color, value, form, texture, and scale. In the catch-of-the-day sweater, it was important to make the fish wearable and to ensure good form and function. How do I make the fish on this sweater make sense? I decided to hang freshly caught fish on the sweater to help with the scale of the art. I placed them in the center, on the front, only to keep the perspective of this in focus. I thought placing more fish would become overwhelming to the eye and become unwearable.

Adding more fish would have required adjusting the scale and the color, meaning I would have simplified the sweater down to two yarn colors only, with sections of fair isle colorwork, which is a smaller, more concentrated technique. But I like the color contrast of using two colors, representing two types of fish with slightly different scale patterns. How big is too big? How do you represent a fish, with their scales and texture? For this, I went to Pinterest to find cross-stitch or knitting colorwork charts for inspiration. I believe I settled on a cross-stitch pattern because it had the detailed lines and scale I was looking for. I wanted the fish to look realistic, although it could be in an imagined world like Animal Crossing New Horizons or Stardew Valley. Whimsical? I think that is the best way to sum it up.

To make my pattern, I used the cross stitch reference and transferred it to graph paper by hand, tweaking some areas to make the inspiration my own. I did this in the same application for my Red Velvet Cosmic Knit Tank project. Next, I needed to determine the scale of the fish within the sweater pattern. It’s important to plan out how many stitches you need to complete the colorwork section across your rows and keep it centered. To do this, subtract the number of stitches in your colorwork pattern from the number of stitches in your row. Divide the sum by two and adjust to keep the stitches on either side equal, to keep the pattern centered. It is also important to note how tall the color work pattern is compared to the garment you are knitting, to allow enough room above and below that the graphic motif makes sense and doesn’t look misplaced on the garment. I think I literally held my pattern up to Kyle’s chest to figure it out.

Fiber Content

For this sweater, I went in a different yarn direction to try something new. I chose a wool and acrylic blend from Knit Picks called Mighty Stitch. It was underwhelming. The yarn, while soft, pills something fierce. It is also a slim worsted weight, which was exaggerated by the large needle size I used – US 10 or 6 mm. This created a breathable, airy sweater, but dang, did it throw off my pattern and design. Eventually, I had to face my fate – I was running out of yarn, and my panel was too narrow. Not exactly the outcome you want after spending a week on the front panel with the intricate fish design. I would rather start over than frog the color work, always.

I had some decisions to make. I originally purchased the Mighty Stitch on sale, but when I ran out of yarn, it was not on sale, and I wasn’t interested in doubling the price of this already too expensive project that was in the process of failing. So like Miss Frizzle recommends, I got ready to “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!” I went to my closet of yarn and fabric and began to dig through the stash for something else I could introduce into the design. I found a warm-toned gray and neutral black yarn from Big Twist that was also worsted weight. Because the Mighty Stitch is a washable yarn, I felt comfortable combining the two yarns. I had already introduced acrylic yarn to the project through the mint and teal fish, using scrap Big Twist for those sections. Always check your fiber content, though, to avoid incompatible fibers that will make the project hard to care for over time.

Making a Change

The original design was changing from color palette to overall concept. This sweater would need to have color blocking sections now, to stretch the main green color. I decided to not only change up the design, but to change up my technique, opting for crochet on the sleeves to make the sleeves go faster. Knitting is a slow craft, and for some reason, knitted garments for Kyle have this curse of going horribly wrong and also knitting up slowly because of the hiccups. I wanted him to be able to wear this sweater for the bulk of the winter season of 2025-2026, and I was knitting this in August-October, so I took a shortcut. But in my defense, the texture of the sleeves, ironically, looks like fish scales to me. Especially with the gray and black colors!

The second change I made was adding width to the sides of the front panel to make the sweater a drop shoulder. I then knit the back panel wider from the start, and added a section of gray on the middle to upper back panel. It adds a nice contrast to the overall composition of the sweater, while making the sleeves feel cohesive.

Men vs Women Shoulder Shaping

The shoulders gave me such grief in this project! I’m used to making sweaters for myself and my female form. The bust makes the shoulders rest differently than I realized, and this came back to bite me. For a man’s sweater, the back needs to be longer. Especially the shoulder section on the back of the sweater is going to ride up the back, and be too long in the front. This happened, and I was bamboozled on how to fix it. Enter short row shaping and the principles of perspective and scale.

I learned that I needed to add short rows, meaning only working a section across a row to add length to a specific portion of the back panel, the back middle. To do this, you work back and forth on the section, evenually go back to working across the entire row. In addition, I made the back collar and back ribbing longer to compensate. These simple changes made the sweater appear the same length back and front, draping across the shoulders pleasantly, even if one side was technically longer. It doesn’t matter because of the role of perspective. Magic!

Final Thoughts

I learned a tremendous amount of knowledge from the Catch of the Day sweater, and I am grateful it all came together in the end to make a sweater that Kyle enjoys wearing. I have saved my patterns to attempt this again in the future with better yarn and proper dimensions to make the pattern fit well from the start, instead of scrambling to adjust at the end.

#79 – Craftivism

This is a new term for me, but it is genius. Craftivism is activism through crafting. It is using your art and everyday things to show what you believe and to speak out against injustice. And to use an internet term, this has completely “changed my brain chemistry” to think of using my knitting to say what I believe, just like art.

What made this a tangible thing for me to get started in community was the Welcome Blanket collection at my local yarn shop. Together, sections of knit and crochet squares would be collected and seamed into blankets, like receiving blankets, to welcome immigrants to the United States. With all the ICE-y conditions out there, it’s swimming against the current in a way that aligns with my beliefs and what we are called to do as Christians – love your neighbor and take care of immigrants. Not to worship power, money, and excuse racism like some so-called “Christians” in my country are doing. Seeing my crochet square stitched together with other like minded indivduals’ fiber art was powerful. It reminded me of how we are stronger together and how doing small things, as a community, makes a difference. I also enjoyed reflecting on my own immigrant heritage and sharing my story of how my family came to the US and why immigration is necessary.

As an American who is not Indigenous, every part of my family tree came from somewhere else. Some of my family came from Germany, I believe, in the early 1900s, since my great-grandmother, who was born in 1912 in the US, spoke German as her first language at home. Some of my family from Ireland left County Cork’s farmland during the potato famine to escape certain death from the genocide of starvation by Great Britain. Some of my family from County Armagh immigrated in the late 1800s to the US, went back to Ireland in the early 1900s, and came back again to the US during the Troubles. The rest of my family came from Canada in the 1960s. If we are not members of Indigenous nations, then we are all here because of immigration. To act like immigration is dangerous, un-American, and unwelcome is not American to me. We all came from somewhere else. Let’s love our neighbors and support them in this new chapter of their lives, which came about because of a very difficult decision.

The second opportunity that brought Craftivism back on my radar was the Melt the Ice hat. This hat was used from protest by Norwegians in the 1940s during the Nazi occupation of Norway. Minnesotans, many of whom are descended from Norwegian immigrants, but now are a rich community of immigrants from all over the world, brought the hat pattern back to raise money for the Immigrant Rapid Response fund, which provides assistance for immediate needs – food, rent, etc. This fundraiser raised $650,000 with a $5 pattern during the Melt the Ice MAL in February 2026. If you are not aware of what has been going on in Minneapolis, there has been violence, there has been death, there has been kidnapping, and unlawful occupation of a city by federal forces in the name of corruption and power. Making the hat felt like there was a healthy place to channel my grief and anger over what is happening while bringing community together – Craftivism is powerful.

Have you ever heard of Craftivism? Would you participate in it?

DIY K-Pop Band Tees Using Embroidery and Knitting

In 2025, one of my goals was to try my hand at crafting my own K-Pop Merch. Some bands are easy to find Merch for, and others, well, you are left to your own ingenuity. The bands I selected to try for this are NCT 127 and NMIXX, which I have tried and failed to find band tees for that I liked. For this project, I used two different techniques – embroidery and stranded colorwork knitting.

NCT 127 Embroidery

My first idea was to pick up a blank T-shirt from the craft section and get to work. The shirt I chose was a Gildan tee from Walmart, which I DO NOT recommend. This shirt is so freaking thin. Horrible quality compared to the blanks I have found at Michael’s, Dollar General, or even Hobby Lobby. But as I was dubious of my embroidery skills, I went ahead with the Walmart shirt as practice. That was the right call, because dang, embroidery is not as straightforward as it looks.

For this project, you will need: an embroidery hoop, embroidery floss bundles, a marker or pen to sketch your design on your shirt, and backing like embroidery interfacing or a fabric scrap that I used (because I forgot that the embroidery needed a backing).

For the design, I chose something simple. The song, the band, and a little imagery. I love their early album Cherrybomb (2017), but the song is almost 10 years old now, and it’s kinda hard to find any NCT Merch with it at this point. Seemed like the perfect option for a first try. I wasn’t expecting my stitches to be so tight; I felt like I was fighting myself across the whole piece. This was because I forgot about the backing for stability, and all this embroidery on this poor quality shirt, yeah, it wasn’t great. Afterwards, I added a backing to the embroidery with a scrap piece of another t-shirt.

Is it my best work? No. But is it a start for making better projects in the future? Yes! And I wear it anyway in the garden and as a sleep shirt.

Red Velvet Knitting

My desire for Red Velvet Merch was entirely motivated by the confusing announcement in April 2025 that members Yeri and Wendy did not renew their contracts with SM Entertainment, but Red Velvet was not disbanding. They have become one of my top girl groups after their release of Cosmic in 2024, so it seemed only appropriate to use the album Cosmic as my muse for a cotton knit tank with stranded colorwork. It’s a bit easier to find Red Velvet Merch on sites like Teepublic, from which I have bought a shirt. This project was more about expressing my love for this album, and I hope that Cosmic will not be their last release as a group.

You will need: a pencil, pen, graph paper, and stitch markers. (Along with your basic knitting supplies – needles, yarn, scissors, tapestry needle)

To start, I searched Pinterest for album artwork and a logo. I found a lot of options to use as a compass for the project, but decided the simplest option would be best. I opted for one color to keep the floats simple. To make my colorwork charts, I always use graph paper and a pencil to be able to adjust the marks that I transfer from the image. Once I am happy with my design, I trace over it in pen and use a pencil to cross out the lines of the pattern as I complete the project to mark my progress. To understand the dimensions of the image as I worked, I also marked the “canvas” with stitch markers. It is also important to note your garment construction and how that relates to your chart. I made this tank knitting bottom up, so I began working on my colorwork from the bottom of the chart.

I am thrilled with how this project turned out! As my first stranded colorwork project with this complex of a design, it was far easier than I thought to complete. You just have to plan out your image and be patient with your floats. Try not to hold too tightly and remember that blocking will help the tension relax.

Bat Ear Beanie

I’ve shared several animal ear projects on the blog before, the Cat Ear Beanie, and my Loverboy re-creation Bunny Hat, but now, without further ado, may I present the Bat Ear Beanie! This was made with less than 100 grams of local spun wool I found at my farmer’s market, held double with less than 100 grams of Knit Picks Snuggle Puff yarn in Neptune. I decided to crochet this hat instead of knitting, as I did with previous projects, to have a bit more freedom in the creation. Crochet reminds me of sculpture or papier-mache. You can always add onto the stitches in ways that the tension of knit stitches does not allow, and for that, the bat ear project seemed like a great place to practice my crochet technique once again.

The hat was crocheted in the round – so much easier than knitting in the round, in my opinion, with double crochet stitches, and was knit like a normal hat. I don’t have an exact pattern for it, but you can easily make it to your measurements. The yarn I used, one strand Snuggle Puff, a heavy worsted, and one strand local wool, a DK weight, resulted in an Aran/Bulky-weight yarn. Because of this, I used a 5.5 mm hook to create my stitches. I chained the number of stitches I needed based on my head measurement and double crocheted around and around until the hat was long enough to cover my ears and most of my head, then I began my decreases. I wanted a gradual curve shape for the crown of this hat. Go slow, and remember, you can always frog and try again if the shape is not what you want. After the hat was complete, I plotted my bat ears.

What makes an animal hat special to me is the scale and placement. What I learned with my cat ear beanie was that you can make the ears too wide and too big, leading to a sloppy effect. With the bunny hat, I learned you can put them too close together, not allowing the ears to drape properly. The effect can change the entire character of the piece, so place your ears with care and think about how you want to wear it on your head so that the animal cuteness is achieved. For this hat, I was inspired by the hat Felix from Stray Kids wears at the beginning of the Creed music video from 2025.

I began my bat ears by picking up stitches on the outside of the hat. I also crocheted these in a round, to give these good structure. By crocheting these in a round, to keep the tension even across the ears, so that they would stay upward like a bat. I used single crochet stitches and tapered the ears accordingly, simply weaving in the end to the inside of the hat, with a tapestry needle.

Why did I choose a bat? To raise awareness for bats. Did you know that bats are not a nuisance, but an essential part of the ecosystem? But due to misunderstanding the nocturnal animal, mainly I would say due to vampire lore, they are seen as dangerous. Yes, they can carry rabies like many wild animals, but this is not a reason for the animal to go extinct. Their habitats are under threat, and they deserve the space to thrive. They eat pests, contribute to the pollination process, and help spread seeds.

The Search for Affordable Yarn – A Review

When my go-to yarn, Big Twist, was temporarily discontinued in 2025, I felt adrift in a sea of unfamiliar yarns with unfamiliar prices. Which raised an interesting question: what will be my new tried and yarn? I thought I would share this journey with short reviews of the yarn I explored in search of a new favorite.

Yarn Criteria:

What am I looking for in a yarn? Big Twist was my favorite for a few key reasons – affordability, quality, color range, and ease of accessibility. Big Twist had a large selection of colors in a worsted weight that did not split easily or snag in knotted tangles. The skeins contained 380 yards, selling for 4.49 USD, which made sweater projects affordable. It was easy to source in person. Now I am not looking for in-person yarn purchases like I used to. It’s just not possible at this time.

Wool of the Andes

Wool, worsted weight, has a large color range, and can also be purchased in a superwash variety. This yarn is a Knit Picks, made from Peruvian Highland Wool is sold for 4.99 USD per 110-yard skein. I like how sticky this yarn is. When it is stitched up, it stays in place and has great stitch definition. It’s not too itchy. I am sensitive to wool, and I find this yarn to be fine. I also used the superwash for a hat, so that could be where the extra scratchy feeling came from. I think this is a great yarn for budget wool, and for beginners, the best part is that it arrives in a skein, not a hank that you have to unwind. Yes, I would buy this again. I just purchased this for an upcoming rabbit-related project.

Mighty Stitch

Silky and soft. This yarn had great sheen for an 80% acrylic, 20% wool fiber. It was labeled as worsted, but I found it to be too thin compared to my other worsted yarns, which created some issues in my project. This Knit Picks yarn is 7.99 USD for 208 yards. When I purchased this yarn, it was on sale, but still more than I am used to paying for acrylic. Due to the thinness of the yarn, I failed to meet the gauge. I found myself using a lot more than I thought I would. The most disappointing thing was the way it slides out of knots, which was a problem for the colorwork and color blocking sections. The yarn also doesn’t respond well to my husband’s beard. I found this out because I knit him a sweater, and the top was falling apart where it caught on his beard. Would I buy again? No. I don’t trust it not to pull out of the weave, and I felt let down by the price for the experience.

Lion Brand Pound of Love

I found these oversized yarn skeins at Michael’s, and I was thrilled. Lion Brand is a fantastic budget yarn that I used before on a previous sweater project. At 1020 yards for 11.99 USD, this yarn has been a game-changer for experimentation. I can try new projects, have room to mess up, or be able to make gifts, blankets, etc, on a budget. It does not split. I can knit or crochet easily, and it meets the gauge. My only negative critiques are the color range and the composition of the fiber. I wish there were more colors; the range is small compared to Knit Picks or Big Twist. I also wish acrylic were not made from plastic. I wish this were wool, and was kinder to the environment. Yes, I will buy this again. It is the best budget acrylic yarn I have found that is easy to purchase and would be a great beginner yarn to learn with.

Loops and Threads Soft Classic

Before Big Twist fully came back in Fall 2025, I thought Loops and Threads may be Michael’s brand expression of Big Twist, after they acquired Joann’s IP and the yarn vendor contracts, so I gave it a shot, and I have some mixed feelings. The color range is large, which I like. Some of the shades are lovely, and some are a bit garish. Some of the yarn dyeing is odd. Some of the texture of the acrylic fiber is also odd. It can be a bit limp, almost too soft. I love the mushroom and curry color ways. The black yarn I purchased, however, smelled like a cheap pleather purse- a bit fishy and a bit like burnt hair. I still can’t get the smell out of the yarn with airing out, Febreeze, and laundering. Maybe it was the chemical dye? For this reason, I have some pause. But you can’t beat the 3.99 USD price and 354 yards per skein. Let the creativity reign! Yes, I will buy again.

Palette

Palette Fingering Weight yarn from Knit Picks is a 100% Peruvian Highland wool yarn that has become my go-to winter accessory yarn. With its lightweight ply, I combine it with other yarns to create marled and warm hats, mittens, and socks. The hat to the left is three strands of Palette held together on US 7 needles. The hat to the right is made with two strands of worsted-weight acrylic (Big Twist) and one strand of Palette. It’s a non-superwash and has a lovely squish to the skeins. This yarn is already skeined up, no Hanks to unravel, and contains 231 yards for 5.49 USD per ball of yarn. I will rebuy. I actually panicked on New Year’s Eve, that I had drained my whole stash, to find they were at the bottom of a tote bag.

Caron Cakes

I have worked with two Caron Cake varieties in 2025 – Blossom Cakes and Big Cakes. The Blossom Cakes are a blend of 61% cotton and 31% acrylic fibers. They are variegated, worsted-weight cakes of 481 yards that sell for 14.99 USD per cake. They tend to do a BOGO sale at Michael’s, so I get them on sale, or else I would be less enthused about this item. The Big Cakes are also worsted-weight acrylic yarn, which is self-striping. I love the quality of the yarn, but the striping is a bit tricky. I am currently using them for blankets, but I did consider separating the sections of color to make something different. The Big Cakes contain 603 yards, which are sold for 14.99 USD. On a sale, you can make a blanket for a great price. For this reason, I will try the cakes again, with the proper project. They are complicated, and without a plan, they feel like a waste of money. With a good plan, they are a great resource.

Final Thoughts:

I found more options than I expected last year, and this led me to actually be happy that I had to find a new option for my tried-and-true yarn. Moving forward, I don’t have a sole favorite; instead, I feel like a nuanced palette of tastes is the better way to describe it. If you are a new knitter or curious about trying some of these yarns, I hope my thoughts helped. These are all my opinions, and all the yarn was purchased with my own money.

Socks Are Madness

This is a story of a winding road. It is not just passion that makes us try new and difficult things, but also the desire to fit in. Sometimes the road is bumpy, and bumpier still than we expected.

Last winter, I began a journey; at the time, I did not realize how technical this would be, and oh, how I miss the naive wonder of that time. I started my quest to make socks. The sock does not appear technical from the outside. It is a tube of knit fabric which we slip on our feet, most every day. Due to the Industrial Revolution, socks can be knit by machine with ease and speed. This has suspended our connection to the technology that first developed the sock—hand knitting.

In our modern day, socks are affordable and accessible. They are for sale everywhere in a myriad of textures, weights, and styles. We have socks for athleticism, socks for leisure, socks for style. They are boring, mundane Christmas gifts of childhood, and puppets with googly eyes. But what does it take to make a sock by hand?

I gave this a shot last year, and it challenged me! I cataloged my experience in Socks, A Journey, and Socks: An Update, where I began knitting socks flat on straight needles and three months later gave circular knitting a try. My first flat knit socks were made top down, in a tube style that negates the heel flap and requires sewing the sock into a tube. They are loose in fit but warm and great socks to wear around the house. My advanced tries, knitting in the round and turning the heel, were more of an adventure. My tension was tight, and my heel flap a nightmare, unable to be duplicated into a second sock, for how off script my technique became. I didn’t grasp the why of what I was doing and therefore messed up the pattern.

This summer, I went to a local yarn shop where I began my journey to sock more traditionally. I picked up a pair of small-gauge double-pointed needles and sock sock-making kit with proper sock yarn of wool and nylon, to do it “properly” and oh my, did this bomb. The toe-up pattern, new to me from my previous projects that were cuff down, pushed me far out of my depth. I sank instead of swimming. The four double-pointed needles and my uncoordinated hands created tension and laddering in the knit, which looks exactly as it sounds. I tried three times to knit a few centimeters before the stitches fell off the needles, the sock falling off with the stitches. In desperation, as the needles were 29 USD and the sock kit 29 USD, I was feeling very silly and wasteful purchasing new needles and new yarn that I couldn’t do anything with.

So I pivoted to my trusty straight needles until I saw my mom later that weekend, and she lent me a pair of small-gauge, small-circumference needles to finish the sock. Still baffled by the heel flap and the vague instructions on the pattern, I tried German short rows for shaping the heel. In a fortnight, I completed the first of the two socks. I cast off and handed it to Kyle to try on, and the size was all wrong. I tried to frog it back into a skein of yarn, but the splitty yarn tangled, ripped, and became a ball of knots. It was over, and I was furious with myself for wasting time, money, resources, and, honestly, hurting my eyes squinting to see my tiny stitches for almost two weeks to accomplish nothing.

Socks are madness. And maybe I should stop beating myself up about my failure when socks are one of the hardest things to make by hand. I am an overachiever and a perfectionist, so this type of failure cuts me deep. I obsess, I rage, and I fall apart in the madness of learning something that may take years to execute once, not even perfectly. But you know what? I have made good socks before! Comfortable, almost perfect for what I was looking to achieve, socks. But I rejected them as being good because I was embarrassed at how I made them. I didn’t follow the right techniques, I used the “wrong” yarn, and I didn’t turn the heel.

Sometimes I have major imposter syndrome as a knitter. I feel like a fraud because I don’t use the exact same patterns, same tools, same yarn as everyone else on the internet. But why is that a bad thing? I’ve listened to other knitters in podcasts discuss how the sameness of knitting is making it boring. Apparently, at Rhinebeck or other knitting events, it is easy to see the same sweater throughout the sea of people, and that is a new thing. Listening to knitters, who have been knitting long before 2020, when I really started knitting consistently, knitters used to do their own thing. Yarn suggestions in patterns were exactly that – a suggestion.

People were designing more and experimenting instead of knitting in the homogenized way we see today, which is one of the ways I feel like an outsider. I don’t want to knit the same things as everyone else, but I also want to be good at the craft, and it leaves me in this push-and-pull tension. It became clear to me, though, that my search to “fit in” with the proper sock kit and the expensive needles didn’t make me a better maker. It was honestly a bit of a handicap. So I guess my takeaway is to be yourself?

I don’t want to stagnate in my skills, but if I can find my own technique to make socks and other garments with the “non-standard” tools and yarn, then is it really stagnation or just getting creative with where my skill level is at? I’ve been pondering this a lot and have more thoughts on this from both the point of view of a knitter and a sewist. But that will have to wait for next time.

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑