{"id":147,"date":"2008-04-15T11:01:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-15T11:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/?p=147"},"modified":"2008-04-15T11:01:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-15T11:01:00","slug":"messy-tuesdays-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/?p=147","title":{"rendered":"Messy Tuesdays…"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I pulled out the extremely random collection of ideas that is my knitting diary\/notebook, Lara<\/a> Suggested that for Messy Tuesdays I post about it. The more I thought about the relationship between the journal and Messy Tuesdays, the more relevant this seemed. For a journal is like a blog… and it can be tempting to include only beautiful things. The decisions about what to leave out and what to leave in either a blog or a physical journal are related. And I think that as an object with which we invest personal significance or a portion of our identity, the journal is subject to the same editing, censorship, design-considerations and self-consciousness as the blog. The big difference between the journal and the blog, of course, is that nobody ever need necessarily see the journal, while the blog is by its nature a public form for self-expression. I know that the secrecy of my notebook is one of the reasons for both its messiness and its indecipherable nature. Since it doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else, it basically doesn’t. I enjoy the freedom of not having to explain anything to myself in the journal. I am also certain that, like Mess, it contains treasures that a tidier journal could not.<\/p>\n

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For those of you who don’t recognise it I use Debbie Stoller’s knitting design journal<\/a> to which I am deciding I am perhaps unsuited. I have known knitters who still have this book in pristine condition and who reserve only finished patterns and perfected notes for inclusion in its very designed pages. It certainly lends itself to a very orderly creative process and to a methodical approach that I sadly lack. Though it is beautiful and a nice, portable size, the layout works counter-intuitively against the way a Messy Knitter thinks. I don’t know about you, but daydreaming up joyful projects sometimes doesn’t involve thinking up clothes for an average-sized lady. In the Debbie Stoller journal, many design pages feature a drawing of a lady in underwear, presumably all ready for you to ‘clothe’ in knitwear designs. This is very helpful for the Tidy Knitter who undoubtedly does a careful drawing of the fine garment she is planning on aforementioned nice lady and then neatly transcribes in handwriting of font-size approximately 4pt the already perfected (on scrap paper of course) instructions for making it. For a Messy Knitter like me, however, when a knitted Meerkat is the pattern design underway, the only logical thing to do is to scribble out the distracting face of the underwear-clad doll, ignore the restrictive size of the grid on the page and get to it with the rabid note-taking. By the way, I have no idea what that leaf like thing is on there:<\/p>\n

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…so the nicely printed ladies on each page are somewhat unhelpful in terms of assisting with spontaneous, zoological knits. I do see that the layout is very beautiful and that for people with less confident drawing skills it would perhaps be helpful to have a template. But I also wonder if the beautiful design isn’t inhibiting in some way. I am very confident at drawing, but using this journal fills me with the constant fear of somehow ‘spoiling’ it. You’ll notice however, and in the name of Messy Tuesdays I’m proud to say, that this fear hasn’t really held me back:<\/p>\n

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These pages relate to the ideas I had for knitting items out of my Analogue Amnesty<\/a> yarn:<\/p>\n
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I believe that this piece of newspaper poking out of the journal is a basic newspaper version of the earmuffs in that top picture but even I can’t be sure:<\/p>\n
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My koolaid dyeing experiment got stapled into the journal with some scribbled notes and an astounding lack of methodology. I shall never make a professional dyer. I didn’t sample different colours as I went along and my notes basically went straight online<\/a> and never made it into my actual journal. There is little correlation between what goes in the journal, what goes on the blog and what goes into my Ravelry projects page. I think it depends on what is to hand, what I have immediately available and what the task underway needs. I have found blogging and Ravelry both not as good as an old fashioned piece of paper for brainstorming ideas, and in the kitchen these paper notes, stapled into the journal, will be infinitely more useful than any blog post version of the same material:<\/div>\n

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Similarly, there is very little motivation for documenting a FO in the journal when putting the details on Ravelry is so much more gratifying. Other knitters can see it, you can compare your problems with the pattern with the problems experienced by other knitters etc.<\/p>\n

The knitted walking stick cosy in polka-dot pattern was mainly constructed from these scant instructions that are glued into the book somewhere near the front, and this worked wonderfully as I kept the piece of paper folded up in my purse and took it everywhere the knitting project and I went:<\/div>\n

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…more mystifying is the chaotic system I was using for deciding where on the page to write different portions of this improvised dress pattern for Elly<\/a> the elephant I made up from Ysolda’s Elijah pattern<\/a>. The dress was a disaster but the apparently randomly scrawled notes are quite intriguing in retrospect and remind me of when you look at Mess you’ve made and can see how you basically just threw everything everywhere out of the pressing need to get to this one thing. ‘I’ll sort all that out later’ I can practically hear myself saying when I survey this Mess:<\/div>\n

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I guess to the Messy Tuesdays manifesto I could add ‘You are not your perfectly maintained knitters journal.’ Next time I think I shall buy an exercise book with plain sheets on one side and lined paper on the other, and maybe restrict the value to under \u00c2\u00a31 so I am not tempted to fear ‘ruining’ the nice design with my unruly scribblings!<\/div>\n

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I have another post planned about my recent stay in hospital, but I’ll leave that for another day since today is Messy Tuesday. Obviously however, I have recovered well enough to blog and it’s been an amazing experience although I think it will be some time before I can walk unaided. My crutches and incredible shoes are providing a new design-challenge… who knows what new ideas will end up in the journal?!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I pulled out the extremely random collection of ideas that is my knitting diary\/notebook, Lara Suggested that for Messy Tuesdays I post about it. The more I thought about the relationship between the journal and Messy Tuesdays, the more relevant this seemed. For a journal is like a blog… and it can be tempting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pmise-2n","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}