Full

Every now and then I look at my beloved planner and think “this week is PACKED.” Every available space is crammed with appointments or to-do lists or do-NOT-forget-this lists.

Other weeks appear relatively free and clear. I’m learning to keep my eyes peeled during those weeks, though. They can be squirrely. One minute you think it’s the week to knock out some extra projects, and then whammo! It’s your turn for the winter bug, or you get asked to host a small intimate gathering for a hundred of someone’s nearest and dearest, or some other surprise suddenly claims a bunch of time.

And then there’s a completely different sort of full week. The kind where there’s not much going on inside the planner squares, but spaces in your life are being discovered and filled to overflowing.

For good or for ill, you will never be the same person you were before those weeks passed.

We had a week like that this past week. It didn’t look like much on paper, but it was the culmination of a lot of love, labor, planning, and fear and trembling. Elements of it have been whispers of dreams for decades.

Sometime soon I’ll share more about why we made the choices we did to move from a city to a rural small town in our fifties. Some of those reasons can be shared in the joy in the images and videos below. I’m really happy to share them with you.

From Mr. Darcy, Mr. Knightley, Emma, Harriet, Lizzy, Georgiana, Anne, Kitty, Eliza, Betsy, Jane, Charlotte, and Lucy, newly arrived from Illinois, greetings. We hope your week is full, in the very best way.

Greg’s Got Questions

Thank you to those of you who participated in the poll last week!

The winning question was: How does a knitting pattern designer go about creating a pattern that covers such a wide range of sizes? And what makes that difficult?

One way to think about this is to picture a plain t-shirt in your mind. Most folks can wear a plain t-shirt, regardless of age. And as you increase sizes from the smallest to the largest, a lot of the changes in the shirt are proportional, predictable increases over the same basic shape. That works really well until kids hit puberty. Bodies start getting curves and angles and rectangle shapes are no longer adequate. People sprout up and out and every body gets its own quirks. (That same style/cut of t-shirt is going to look very different on a muscular male athlete than it is on a Marilyn Monroe figure.)

You can see this in clothing departments for young kids. We cruise along, sizing by age for years (18 months, 4T, 6-8 years) and then we suddenly start a numbering system that half the population will obsess about for the rest of their lives.

One of the great aspects of knitting is that you can customize your garments to fit. So, if you need a broader chest on your boyfriend’s sweater, you can make that adjustment. If you’re a little curvier than a “standard model” (whoever that mythical being is) you can add shaping (add fabric), so your piece of clothing doesn’t pull and stretch awkwardly. You can add short rows to the back of the neck to make the neckline rise higher in the back and not sag too low. You can make your sleeves 3/4 if that suits you. You can turn a cropped sweater into a tunic.

That kind of flexibility in knitting allows designers to use the same basic pattern for all ages/sizes and add specific modifications or suggest modifications to larger sizes when it would create a better fit.

Greg’s Questions for This Week:

Here are the questions up for the vote this week. I’ll answer the winner in the next newsletter. (As a matter of procedure, the poll function takes you to another page to submit your vote, so if that happens to you, you’re on the right track!)

Question 1: WHAT WERE WE THINKING?!!!!

Question 2: What’s your favorite experience you’ve had in creating a custom knitted garment for someone?

Question 3: What have you enjoyed the most about filling out the “Beast” part of our Beast to Blanket business? And, what have you not enjoyed about it? Bonus question on top of the previous bonus question I snuck in on you: What has surprised you the most?

Happy knitting,

Kiersten J