Letter D: Drafting My Own Knitting Patterns

Since I began to knit, I had begun to wonder if I'd ever become someone who could write the patterns I was following so faithfully. After a time, I began to notice the patterns to the patterns (aha, yay English language), and began to draft or otherwise alter patterns to suit what I wanted. Drafting my own patterns was both harder and easier than I thought it would be.

My first attempt at a pattern makes was a limited success with Lan's dress, which was done with size 1 needles and fingering weight yarn. It had some fitting issues around the chest, so I need to either adjust the pattern or simply sew it differently to fit. The latter is the easiest option, but feels less professional... Debating here.

My second attempt was adapting a human pattern to doll size and involved knitting on size 0000 needles with lace weight yarn. It started as a blouse and ended up a capelet. I'm in fact working on the rewrite to make the capelet pattern more understandable and might be preparing it for test knitters soon! So far it's working out just fine this second time around, though knitting on such small needles takes it's toll on my hands and wrists.

And the following is a teaser for the new pattern draft--it's much further along than this, but you can see it when it's finished in a later blog post. This project will get it's own blog post eventually.

My third attempt was Scythe's sweater vest for Rosslyn, where the cut about the shoulders made it so it would not work. So I have to rewrite the pattern about the collar and shoulders to make the cut of the garment work.

My final (so far) attempt at my own pattern was really just drafting someone else's pattern with my own additions of cables and changing a knit sweater to a purl one. I won't be selling this pattern and likely won't ever offer it. Though it technically falls on the right side of copyright laws, I don't feel comfortable. It's simple enough to see how I changed the original pattern and the original designer deserves the credit there. You can find my post about it here.