Tuesday, March 29, 2011

One Year Older, One Year Wiser

 

How much progress have I made in crafting terms this year? Goodness, I'm a veritable crafting diva now. Haha. Or not.
I discovered that I don't knit funny, I knit combined continental. Yes, it is a thing. And it looks like perfectly normal knitting, thank you very much. I knit two hats and a cabled scarf, plus I did half a sock (but, sadly, no photo to prove it.)

I crocheted tons of stuff. Really, I did. I can't begin to show you all the things I crocheted last year or I'd be commited to an asylum. However, more importantly than the actual crocheting was learning how to write a pattern. Write a pattern that other people could follow. Uh-huh! It's not as easy as you might think and it requires all kinds of mathematical skills that I thought I'd left behind when I skipped down the avenue of St Mary's secondary school on my last day of school, waving my school tie in the air in glee. If my long-suffering maths teacher, Sr Helen (now working out the Pythagorean equation beyond the Pearly Gates) had realised that little Miss Gingerbread would be employing the basic principles of geometry, trigonometry and algebra of her own free will and in her leisure time, she would've exploded with joy.
In any case, despite great leaps and bounds in my mathematical education, I continue to be plagued by lapses of discalulia, guaranteeing that I shall never be placed between Newton and Archimedes at a celestial dinner party. But I keep on writing patterns, using my trusty 99c calculator to help me work out stitch repeats and hexagon angles.

5 comments:

iggystar said...

Rotfl! You tickled my funny bone this morning!

Sigh, I didn't know you needed to know much math to write a pattern. I guess that means I'll never be a designer. My math is atrocious!

Voie de Vie said...

Nicely done! Nobody gets that math is important in design!!! Of course, it would help if math instructors provided relevant examples. If only those sisters would have asked you to design a new habit-as-cloaking-device ... or something. :)

And I want to sit near neither at that celestial dinner party - give me the writers any day of the week, thank you very much.

Quinn said...

Congratulations on your pattern designing-and-writing-and-photographing skills!

(And I am having a Sister Helen Thomasina flashback!)

Unknown said...

What a cute post.

I agree, nobody knows that math is going to come in handy until it's too late.

Sr Helen must have taught you something, at least you knew what you didn't know and worked out how to know it again..

(I went to a St Mary's too. A long way from yours though. I had a Sr Francis.)

Handcrafter said...

I may be a bit odd, but I make word problems for my kids based on knitting/crochet projects that I am currently working on.