In July I ran the first test knit with the Ravelry Testing Pool group, and it was a raging success! Well, not really… 😂
In reality, the results were very mixed, to say the least. So this is what came out of it: something new (the most exciting thing!), something bad and something good. Let’s start with the most exciting news.
Something New
How often does it happen that you are knitting for days or even weeks and suddenly, mid-yoke, you realise that the garment isn’t going to fit? Your swatch gauge drifted! In fact, in my experience it always drifts with a new yarn. Then you try to adjust and switch to a different size in the pattern… it all becomes confusing and nobody knows if it is going to work out…
So I have built a feature that lets you re-measure partway through the yoke and get a revised pattern. Not only that, it also transitions smoothly from the old pattern, from the point where you stopped, into the adjusted pattern. How great is that! Well, that remains to be seen (read: tested) in my next test knit on Ravelry, starting on 10 November.
The revised pattern option is available for both sweaters: the top-down round-neck raglan and the brioche sweater. For the brioche, I calculate the revisions by hand for now, so they can take a couple of days.
Revised pattern option is available for the top-down knit-in-the-round sweater, is in the works for the brioche sweater.
Also new, but it had to come second after the mid-way pattern revision feature: a long-awaited brioche sweater pattern is now available.
Something Bad
On the launch day back in July, something happened that was completely out of my hands but completely disrupted the knitting-pattern-production pipeline: a technical glitch caused repeated errors in the patterns, and it took me a week to track it down. It did not happen on any day before or after, only on that specific day of the launch!
After that was fixed, the tests run by testers showed way more pattern errors than I’d expected, and fixing them properly took two months… and now we are in November!
Something Good
The good thing is that I realised I need to move slower, much slower, and release only one pattern at a time. Slower, but solid, and it’s already showing that this is the right approach.
Thank you for knitting through the rough patches with me. The next test on Ravelry starts on Tue 10 November!
Yulia Knitpage.com