A new idea
Hi you all! Today I want to share something about the design-process I’m in. I would like to make a small pouch or bag, and I’m thinking of putting a zipper in it to be able to close it. I’ve never used it in my knotting projects, but that’s okay. I’m just going to try it. Because that’s what it’s all about when making a design: just do it and look where it leads you.
Taking a different road
Okay, first retrospecting a bit on what I did earlier. At a certain moment I took the technique for making friendship bracelets, and looked what I could do further with it. I don’t wear bracelets myself actually, so in the end you turn up with a couple of bracelets that are gathering dust in some corner. Of course you give some away, but that ends when your daughters grow up, and their friends also, and they are not interested in wearing friendship bracelets, at least for a while :-).
Of course they always like what I make, okay, usually, I shouldnt exaggerate :-), but I always think it’s fun to look how I can take crafting techniques to a different path.
As you can see on my knotting pages, I started making little bags or cases. When I had figured out how to simply make designs of my own, it was no problem to make designs for wider bands, and eventually how to work in the round.
Inspiration
At that moment I had never seen this before, and I was pleased with the results. We’re talking here about the time that internet was here, but it hardly contained information about hobbies. Google didn’t exist, so we had no ways to search, you just had to know the webaddress of someone with a website. Isn’t it great we have a huge source of examples and tutorials nowadays? But, what I especially want to talk about in this post, is to go be creative yourself! It is great to learn from what you find on the web and to be inspired by it, and take it to create something of your own. Oh, sure, what we figure out probably has been done by someone else in this world also, but it doesn’t block me in doing it. Should a painter feel like he has to compete with Rembrandt for example? Of course not! No, it is wonderful to take a technique, let your mind go over it and look where you end up. If you don’t see it as an important game that you have to win, but do it solely for fun, you will be astonished about the great ideas that will pop up. At least that’s how it works for me. The more relaxed I am, the better my creative insights.
Don’t be afraid to fail
What I permit myself nowadays, is making ‘mistakes’. I deliberately put this between quotes, because, when you start working on a design, you run into things that are not what you had in mind on a regular basis. And that is what I will show you in this report: how my design process works. From my very first idea, what I tried, what did and didn’t work, and what I learned from it. Because you learn from the things you try and don’t work out the way you hoped. And along the way you will sometimes run into ideas of which you think: oh, that might be fun or have a nice effect. Look at the picture of my sunglass case for example. I started with a nice design, but I started to notice I used a lot of the green yarn. You can see this at the top of the case. And I figured out that my case would be very short if I would continue, and I still had such long strands of white and beige yarn. So, at a point I stopped, and started to figure out a pattern that would use a lot of white and beige, and what would match with the rest. So, see the result here. Not bad, ain’t it? So, don’t let anything discourage you, and see every step as a challenge.
Stay tuned
So, look out for my next posts to see how my process goes with designing a pattern for my new bag/case/pouch!