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Ravelry makes the Freakonomics blog!
Feb. 25th, 2011 07:09 pmThis 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.
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.