Departure

Not everything I do is knitting related. Sometimes I have to answer the "mommy" page for the toddler standing beside my bed at four in the morning, I need to prepare a project for class, or I just absolutely must scratch my MMORPG itch. In the end though, I almost always end up bringing knitting into it all somewhere. I knit while I rock my child back to sleep in the wee hours, I doodle pattern ideas in the margins of my notebook, or I catch up on knitting blog posts while my game loads. Then, once in a while, something that seems to be a complete departure from knitting gets my attention. For this post the "for instance" would be a post from Creating Passionate Users, a programming blog that my husband happened to have left open in the browser window. A post title on the sidebar caught my eye and I found myself reading Code Like a Girl when I should have been doing my homework.

It must have been the similarity to "throw like a girl" that attracted my eye. Any which way, it did and as I digested the author's thoughts on writing code that is not only functional but beautiful my mind made that slow revolution around to knitting. The things we knit are pretty, so why aren't the patterns? Even in professionally printed books I find that while the content has been carefully laid out, the patterns themselves seem to just be plopped on the page with all the finesse of your third grade lunch lady glopping out the mashed potatoes. So why can't publishers start paying more attention to the design of the pattern? The indentation, the typeface, the spacing... it's more than just a set of technical instructions. A pattern, IMHO, should be a reflection of the finished work.

So maybe it's just me, but can we please "pattern like a girl"?

[In the interest of full disclosure, I have written exactly one pattern, and it too is glopped like potatoes.]