Testing Riva

Thanks to the thoughtful feedback I received from my friends (you girls are the best), my pattern is

now in good enough shape to be tested and I just submitted it to the Free Pattern Testers group on Ravelry. Fingers crossed that enough knitters like it and can fit it in their testing schedule for the next few weeks; I just need 2–3 testers. I would like to publish the PDF by end of May. I know it won’t be exactly scarf season in many places, but it’s always cold somewhere,

right? Waves madly at Andrea in Bolivia. Before I posted to the testers group I set up a designer’s page on Ravelry and I may have goofed there because now I think that it might have been better to do that after the pattern had been tested. A bit of eager beaver syndrome here; I wasn’t at my most alert early this morning between getting up too early and then getting distracted by the baby hummingbirds outside my window. The mama hummingbird we had last year came back to her nest — at least we think it’s the same bird — and had two babies who are now growing very fast and starting to run out of space in the nest. I keep looking out because I know they’ll be gone in a few days and I’ll miss them.

Baby hummingbirds outside my window

First draft

It worked. I finished my first draft Friday afternoon and sent the PDF to a couple of friends for feedback. In the meantime I have already spotted a major omission: the yarn quantity. How could I have missed that? I wasn’t sure of the amount of yarn I had used and kept putting off the estimate until I forgot and was reminded only when I started reading the rules of the Free Testers group on Ravelry. In addition to the guidelines for posting, they have many useful pages to help designers write their patterns. But really, to leave out the quantities?

Finding faults with everything

Another thing I have to specify when I post to the group to find testers for my scarf is an estimate of the time it takes to complete the project. Clueless again; I wasn’t keeping track while I was knitting and figuring things out at the same time.

While I wait to hear from my friends I am working on refining the layout for legibility and to reduce the number of pages. The one thing I thought I didn’t need to revise were the charts, and then I read this great post about charts (thanks Bethany!) that is making me think of useful tweaks. At some point I’ll have to stop futzing.

Slipping

When I started writing down the pattern for Riva, the stash-buster scarf, I thought it would take a few days. After all it’s a simple idea; I did not expect it to take too long. But a string of unexpected social engagements, a nasty intestinal bug, some web work from an old client… and here I am two weeks later without a finished pattern. To be honest I did make some progress. In fact I should have a finished first draft tomorrow or Friday and then I will send it off to a couple of friends who will give me honest feedback and, I hope, spot the unavoidable lapses and oversights of the beginner. After that I am thinking of submitting the pattern to the Free Testers group on Ravelry before publication. The only reason I am posting about this is to force myself to keep to a deadline — will the threat of public shame do the trick? Talking about sticking to a plan, I just read a post by Cornflower about how she plans to finish a languishing project by knitting two rounds a day for the next several months. One of her readers commented by offering to sponsor her if she finishes the project (a scarf) by an earlier date, and I thought what a great concept: sponsorship to beat procrastination. Maybe I can convince Ben to take me out to dinner if I finish this tomorrow. Are you reading this, Ben? It might also help to talk about the reasons I am having a hard time getting this pattern out the door. It’s a first. I have to figure out everything for the first time: what to include, what to leave out, how to structure it, how to phrase things, design the layout, get better photographs, chart the

stitch patterns, make the software do what I want it to, and so on. Even though I worked as a web designer for many years, I’ve never really used Illustrator much and even less InDesign. Most of what I did was in Photoshop and code, so this is new territory and I have to figure out the what and the how at the same time. So I keep finding faults with everything I do: the color doesn’t print out right, the instructions are too verbose, no one will want to do multiple cast-ons (I must be out of my mind!), the design sucks. I shouldn’t be blogging. Back to my layout. Oh, wait, no photos? I can’t bear to post without pictures (what does that say about me?) There. Just to show you that not everybody in this household is a stress ball.

Kelvin

Pipie