So, who am I?

My name is Regina Fulton, and I'm a knitter.  Well, slightly more than just a mere knitter.  I design.  When I get the urge to knit something, I roil it over and over in my mind until I get a clear image.  I picture the color, the texture, the feel, the fiber, the fit, the recipient -- every aspect I can think of.  Most times, I start with the yarn and wait for it to "tell" me what it wants to become.  In the end, once a clear image comes to mind, I pull out needles and start swatching.  And swatching.  And swatching!  I swatch until the drape and stitch pattern are exactly what I'm looking for.  Sometimes the swatching process lasts for weeks.  In knitwear design, swatching is an EXTREMELY crucial step.  Get this step right, and the rest of the project goes SO much more smoothly.

Eventually comes the pencil, ruler, calculator, and graph paper.  Figuring the numbers is sometimes annoying and painstaking, but in the end must be done.

Then I cast on.  I knit, I frog; I knit some more, and then I frog some more.  Rip-it, rip-it, rip-it!  Mistakes happen to me a lot.  Sometimes I figure numbers wrong in the calculation step, and I have to go back and re-figure them.  Sometimes I just get mindless and skip a step or accidentally drop a stitch.  I'm human, just like everybody else.  The difference is that I keep that clear final image of my project continually in mind and steadily struggle on toward it.

Sometimes my project ends up looking exactly how I pictured, but more often than not it offers surprises I hadn't planned for.  I learn something new with each and every design.  And I carry each lesson into every subsequent project, incorporating it as necessary to get a more desirable result the next time.

Knitwear design is thoroughly exhilarating and satisfying for me.  It feeds so many aspects of my being.  I do not know what kind of person I would be without it!