Bad Knitting

"Please don't let Draco Malfoy see me in this."

Since learning to knit in the summer of 2002, I have become something of a perfectionist with my projects.  That doesn't mean my projects are unparalleled articles of singular beauty, but I strive to make them to the best of my ability.  In other words, my knitted items might still suck, but they're still as close to perfect as I can make them.  If I know I can make something better, I fix it.

I started a knitting section of this website pretty quickly.  I vowed that my knitting section would be unlike the knitting blogs I had seen on the web:  Many knitting blogs are filled with incomprehensible patterns or no patterns, snapshot after snapshot of projects still on the needles or projects that have been unraveled (Dude, nobody wants to see pictures of unraveled, kinked up yarn with bits of lint stuck in it), or tedious rambling about the poster's private life irrelevant to the knitting.

All of the above are Bad Knitting.

I did not want my knitting to be Bad Knitting, so, when I first started the knitting section of this site, I salvaged files from this site's defunct predecessor and posted pages of my completed knitting projects that had turned out well.  When I learned how to design my own patterns, I posted them here, taking care to make them as thorough and clear as possible.

Pattern design, it should be said, is not easy.  Even a simple striped scarf can involve quite painstaking detail.  I once read about someone making a Harry Potter scarf, and though tempted to make a Slytherin scarf for myself, I abandoned the idea.  I did discover that the person who had posted the pattern to the Harry Potter scarf had obtained it by watching one of the films on DVD, pausing it when there was a good shot of the scarf, and counting the stitches and rows.  I thought that was, while painstaking, an excellent method to ensure accuracy in pattern mimicry.  The detail, clear pictures, and absence of irrelevance in that pattern were Good Knitting.

I eventually opted to follow the example of the Good Knitting above when I finally decided to make a Compo hat.  Having enjoyed the British comedy Last of the Summer Wine for some time, I loved Compo and wanted a hat like his.  I looked online for the pattern but only found other fans of the show seeking the same.  At length I found a pattern, but it was inaccurate and had several problems.  I grew livid reading it, and, incensed, I took a screenshot of the bad Compo hat and, thinking of Bad Astronomy, started this section.

As I told my friend Chris, "It's been said that I'll earn my 15 minutes of fame as the defendant in the most infamous libel lawsuit of the century.  I think I've finally figured out how to accomplish that.  It'd be so pathetically hilarious if someone got bent out of shape because I said their knitting was shit.  It'd be like the Cherry sisters but with yarn.  And they lost that case because the judge said it wasn't libel if it were true."

Unable to resist the temptation of fulfilling my dream of notoriety by sharp tongue, I spent the rest of the day authoring a scathing review of the bad Compo hat I had found.  I enjoyed it considerably and swiftly found more crappy craft catastrophes to mock.

There is no shortage of people willing to post their fiber arts foibles online, so I have no idea how many pages this section will grow to hold.  The only thing holding me back is the amount of time I can devote to it.

Without further ado, I present to you Bad Knitting.