WWW: On Color; On Failure and Creativity; Legal Advice for Creatives

A profile of “Knitted Knockers of Canada”, a group making hand-knit cotton prosthetics for breast cancer patients and survivors.

Powerful: a BBC magazine piece about a new exhibition at Mount Ida design college in Massachusetts: “Permission to Fail”. By showing the work that happens before the “aha”, the many rough drafts and failures and incomplete attempts that are required to come to a final product or project, the college aims to examine the process of how creativity happens. Too often, when telling the story of inventions or discoveries or art, we focus only on the final version. Creativity is more about all the attempts that come before the final, and learning and growing through that process.

This connects very nicely with friend-of-Knitty Kim Werker’s “Make it Might Ugly” book. The message is all about getting over your perfectionism, getting over the fear of “not good enough” by deliberately challenging yourself to make something ugly – specifically, to make a failure. After all, if the first attempt is ugly, there’s nowhere to go but up.

Amy and Kate will be in NYC this coming January 15-17, teaching at Vogue Knitting Live. Kate’s teaching a slate of sock classes, and a new class: Getting Gauge – in which she aims to demystify the whys and wherefores of gauge: explaining why it matters, when to check it, what to do about it, how to handle it if you can’t match, and when you don’t need to worry about it.  Amy’s teaching her Tuscany lace shawl class, and a fantastically practical short-row bootcamp. Join us!

(And just to tempt you, there’s an earlybird pricing deal on right now!)

From yarn dyer Space Cadet comes this wonderful blog post on color. Specifically, she addresses the frequently-used terms ‘solid’, ‘semi-solid’ and ‘tonal’, explaining what they actually mean, how they are created, and how they work in your knitting.

Not strictly knitting, but very very useful and interesting: an examination of copyright and usage restrictions on sewing patterns. The author, Kiffanie Stahle, is a lawyer, knitter, photographer and creative business owner, and her website and newsletter are full of wonderful resources on legal and business issues for creative types. To quote from her site, Kiffanie is “on a mission to teach creative entrepreneurs that the law doesn’t have to equal scary.” Important stuff.