Genius from the outside

My sister-in-law Rita visited from Utah this week. Rita sews, knits, quilts, and crochets, and brought along two crocheted bookmarks that her mother had made, wondering if we could, between us, figure out the pattern. As a crocheter-turned-knitter, I thought that going backwards to get the pattern would be easy. Doubles on a base of chains. Nothing to it.

It turned out to be a two-hour project involving muttering, false starts, frogging, and frustration. What was interesting, though, were the assumptions that we started with (the first one being that it was doubles on a base of chains) and how hard it was to get past the assumptions.

Once we finally did, we went in strange directions involving incomplete dbls (puff stitches, not great for a bookmark) and amebic freeform creations. Rita finally said, "My mom would have done things the simplest way, and really regular," so we bagged the chain three alternating with chain five ideas and went back to a granny base. Clarity came when one of us started flipping the bookmark front to back and using slip stitches to get from one cluster to the next.

What I got out of this, besides a pattern for a bookmark I'll probably never make, was a) respect for those craftspeople who are able to untangle the genius of previous craftspeople, and b) a reminder that those assumptions that we start out with are probably not only wrong but crippling. Maybe those knitting geniuses are able to do it because they start midway through the process, after discarding the first assumptions.

I tried to take a picture of the pattern, but it came out as a white blob (okay, that's pretty accurate); but here are Rita (brown hair) and me working it out.

Are knitters geniuses?

I've been knitting off and on for about 10 years, and while I'm by no means advanced, I'm the kind of knitter that has to try something new with each pattern. I'm not content to knit a stockinette-stitch box sweater with one color, there has to be at least a little bit of visual interest. But because of that I end up picking patterns that at some point manage to completely confound me. I will read it over and over and can't seem to make sense of it, to the point where I end up involving my non-knitter but very analytically-minded husband. This makes me wonder whether I lack the organizational and number-oriented skills to become a really great knitter. I think knitting is more like baking than cooking, you really need to follow the recipe perfectly and not just throw in a little of this 'n that. And I'm always amazed at the designers featured on sites like www.knitty.com who in their other lives are molecular biologists and astrophysists while simultaneously managing orphanages and traveling around the world. It's not just that you have to be smart - you have to be a certain kind of smart. I'm beginning to think you have to be more left-brained analytical than right-brained creative. You have to be able to count and remember numbers, and I'm very NOT number-oriented. I guess the reason for someone like me (more on the creative, visual free-flow side of things) is to train my brain to think this way - orderly, analytically, following direction. But boy do I get frustrated when I can't figure something out. Oh, but the good thing is my husband actually does help me figure knitting directions out, even though "knit" and "purl" is the extent of what he knows.