It started out as me thinking about how to do a King Charles Brocade style knit/purl pattern in the round, and then became scribbling out ideas about different ways to transition into that (for shaping purposes; I’m thinking about how to incorporate it into a hat). I let myself just wander over the paper with the pencil, gridding out blocks and making eye-pleasing patterns.

From a technical aspect, I had been thinking about working out the math, and charting out the shaping and working out smaller patterns that would fit into the shaping. That’s the kind of thinking that gives me a headache – the good kind, I think, the kind that has me pushing at the boundaries of what is easy for me. That’s often a good starting point for me to go into a wandering creative direction, in which the seeds of the technical issue 1) start to annoy me, which often inspires me to find Something Else To Do, and 2) looking at patterns of lines and shapes light up other thoughts about how to express textures, and perhaps colorwork, and wouldn’t it be interesting to incorporate colorwork into the texture pattern, and oh, what if it was done in fingering-weight in strong colors, or in worsted Peace Fleece (have you seen the new colors for 2010 by the way? Baba’s Sienna looks like it would be gorgeous colorworked in a pattern with Volgassippi Blue, Soyuz-Apollo Teal, Baikal-Superior Green, Glasnost Gold, Chickie Masla, and a little hit of Violet Vyehcheyeerom), or in all soft colors (again with the Peace Fleece – Anna’s Grasshopper, Georgia Rose, Lena’s Meadow, Chickie Masla, Latvian Lavender...). This is, unsurprisingly, happening after I’ve done a massive de-stashing and gave my set of colored pencils to a child who has a great enthusiasm for colored pencils (how could I resist? His mother was telling me he calls out to her when she’s leaving the house to “bring back more colorrrrrrs!”). I’m going to make sure I have a pad of graph paper and a few colored pencils packed in my carry-on luggage. Although I can work out these sorts of patterns on my computer much faster than by hand, I find a lot of personal value in working out some ideas with pencil and paper. It’s really soothing and forces my thinking to slow down in some areas, which can lead to a blossoming of more ideas in the long term. It’s also a more peaceful way for me to work out how the patterns are structured, and how different geometric patterns can relate to each other. I can see that there are rules and formulas I could use, and it would probably be faster if I just went with that, but that does involve a certain amount of fighting with my inclinations (which is good for me in some ways, but sometimes I don’t want to be grouchy and breaking pencil tips over a possible border for a winter hat).

I don’t know if I’ll wind up using any of the ideas I have been sketching out, but I am really itching to get my hands on a skein of solid-colored sock yarn and start something smallish, like a baby hat, to start toying with knit/purl texture patterns.