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[velvetpage]

This letter was written by an eighteen-year-old crocheter. I'm impressed with her analysis and her writing skills.

My feeling on the matter: most people don't notice their skills improving over time. It's only if they go back years later and lay out a series of early pieces of progressing difficulty that they can objectively say they've improved. Since some of my earliest crochet projects were Christmas projects, I have the opportunity to do that fairly regularly, and I can say with confidence that I'm a fairly expert crocheter; I doubt there's a pattern I couldn't tackle, and I've made some pretty complicated items (unlike the author of that letter, I HAVE done lace doilies of incredible intricacy.) As for knitting, I'm an experienced but intermediate knitter. I'm sure I could probably figure out any pattern I decided to try, because I've got the basics and the specifics would come from reading the pattern. But there are many techniques I've never tried - I've done almost no colourwork, and my cabling so far has been fairly simple. I rate patterns that are mostly stockinette stitch with a few cables or details as two or three in difficulty, and lace as a four or five because it takes consistent concentration for me.

So, people rate things as three or four that were just slightly pushing their skill level, but not enough to make them drop the project as too difficult. The user rating system reflects the gradual improvement of skills over time, far more than the objective difficulty of a pattern. I'm sure if I knit more lace, I'd start rating it as a three, too; once I master intarsia, it will cease to be worthy of a five rating from me. Elizabeth's rating of a book as "easy" is still far too hard for Claire, and my rating of a book as about right for me puts it still years out of Elizabeth's reach.

It's all relative.

Comments

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I think we are at about the same level knitting-wises. I might be just a bit below you. I've done relatively difficult cables. I think the sweater that's currently on hold while I do baby projects (http://www.knitpicks.com/patterns/Calluna_Cardigan_Pattern__D50727220.html) would be towards the low end of the "piquant" range on Knitty, and I found the cables (the hard part--there's a 56-row chart, no repeats, and I hate reading charts so I typed out the directions row by row) challenging. The difficulty wasn't in physically doing the cabling--I know how to do that with no problem. It was getting all the little details right, like putting the cable needle in front of vs. behind the next stitches, which I guess is what you'd expect to be difficult for someone with ADHD. I haven't done any colorwork, though. I bought a "Learn to Fair Isle" hat and mitts pattern (http://www.knitpicks.com/cfpatterns/pattern_display.cfm?ID=50777220) and the yarn (rainbow colours of Wool of the Andes) a year or so ago, but it's several projects down the list from what I'm working on now.

[rowyn]

I was thinking of one possibility being that the vast majority of handicrafters being not nearly as good as the very best people in the field. So if you want a scale from 1-10 that covers the full range of difficulty, from "a beginner can do a 1" to "only the top 1% can do a 10", then the difficulty that the average crafter can manage would be around 3 or so, because there has to be a lot of room at the top for progressively more difficult patterns that are mostly out of the reach of the average. This would assume that handicrafters internalize the rating system: that instead of thinking "a 1 is easy for me and a 10 is difficult for me" they rate patterns based on how that pattern's difficulty compared to other patterns that they've done: "It was a bit harder than this other pattern that got a 2, so I'll put it at a 3".

I have no idea if this is the case or not, though -- I don't even know how to knit or crochet. :)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I really don't think it's a matter of their skill not measuring up; I suspect their perceived skill is less than their actual skill. Knitting and crocheting are all about loops of yarn pulled through other loops of yarn; crochet is based on an individual stitch while knitting is a lattice that is very dependent on rows and columns, but the principle is still loops pulled through other loops. Once you master a few basic stitches - knit and purl, a couple of increases and decreases, how to weave in new yarn and what all those acronyms mean in the patterns - getting better is really just about practice. Additional skill is a minor matter compared to just trying new things.

That is, just about any pattern is within reach of any knitter who has mastered those basics, which could be mastered in a very small number of projects by someone who is dedicated. The difference is in the amount of care and attention required while knitting them. One of the reasons I haven't challenged myself too much is that I do much of my knitting while people are over, around a gaming table, where a good chunk of my attention is on the game or the conversation. I COULD tackle the harder patterns, but I wouldn't get to work on them much.