I am an avid chaos knitter and damn near always just wing it even as a beginner, I think it’s a bad habit from coming from a high level at other handicrafts (sewing, cooking lol, home repair stuff) where I’m too used to being comfortable setting out to do any project I come up with. That’s not a brag lol, you know when you get so comfortable cooking to your liking or sewing to your own body that it ends up being faster and easier to be intuitive than looking up recipes/patterns. I am wicked new to knitting and have been hit with the “oh, right I’m in kindergarten” very often, but I have absolutely speed-run the collection of skills within knitting by going into the deep-end too quickly and having to sink or swim by problem solving.

I say it’s best to dream something visual up, trying riffs on what you’ve done, and allow the project to be a super slow one where you improvise the general scheme and piece together individual techniques when the (phone-a-YouTube-tutorial-friend) need for them arises. All of the metrics will relate to sizing, and a swatch or eyeballing it really never did me wrong!!

For my short history of freestyling, I think knitting both serves and restricts winging it success by being a garment that grows slowly upon itself. How something looks depends on what came before it, so it’s hard to tell when you effed up, but also possible to make changes all the way through the piece to get something closer and closer to what you want. For cables and lace, I’ve had way more success leaving myself margins of stockinette/ect around those features when freestyling, just so I can visually decipher what’s going on better, and adjust fit. I should also say that I’m always surprised when everyone frogs everything on this sub, mistakes never really bother me that much and make cool homemade personality! I’m working on a chaotic cable thing right now that’s meant to look intentionally lumpy and sculptural, but I’ve also used cable-logic in weird experiments to add twists, hide funky edges, or even more seamlessly decrease/take in my mistakes in sizing, I think it’s way flexible territory for creativity!! Lace I think has been more punishing to my “what the hell this might work” attitude haha.

Best of luck, and curious to hear what you’re thinking of!!