Swatchy

The current baby sweater is close to finished. The arm below is complete, the other arm has about ten stripes, and will likely be done by the weekend. I got in the mood to sew in the ends, so she's much neater now. No picture today, but look for a FO on Monday.

Wendy did an editorial on knitting magazines today, and I commented back, and find I have more to say. By the way, like some unknown number of others I have coffee with Wendy's blog on a near daily basis.

I see the magazines as "eye candy" and like that they dribble in over the year. I go for years without making a pattern from any of them. That's not the point to me. I often put my own designs together by hacking bits from this and that sweater. Last fall I made a vest for my daughter, and took heart shape cables from a Knitters issue, and side cables from another pattern in the same issue, and did the sides in trinity stitch out of Barbara Walker. I especially love the issues that are over twenty years old. Even better, when my grandmothers died, they had knitting magazines from their knitting era. In fact, sometimes in the Vogue "Then and Now" pattern, I find a remake of a pattern from then. The ones my mother had from the sixties and seventies often had models holding cigarettes.

So, here is my not so secret wierdness. I take stacks of ten old magazines, and look through them in the bath room. I rotate them out about once a month. I'm loving the early 90's Vogue right now. My husband keeps car magazines there as well, but he throws his away when he's done.

I file by magazine type, and this is what I think of each one:
Vogue Knitting - I often can't see the point of most of their designs when the issue is published. However, five years later, they look really interesting.
Knitters - Seems to publish more unusual construction methods than the others. Love the Lilly Chin technical articles.
Interweave Knits - I have a hard time finding all the patterns here, as they have a lot of editorial material. They don't seem to shy away from extremely complicated designs.
Cast On - Not a lot of designs, but some of them are drop dead wonderful.

So, as others whine about the latest issue, I see them all as future inspirations.