Designing Knitwear

Oh dear. What was I thinking?

What's that up there, you may ask? Why, it's my first attempt ever at making a pattern! It's the Frost Flowers Dress from the beginning of this year, in fact. While I took a copious number of notes while I knitted this up and did all the math on paper so that I could reference it again later when I wanted to finally type up the pattern, I don't think I realized what a huge chore this was going to be! Not that that makes me want to stop, of course. I'm about halfway done plugging in all the numbers and figuring out all the increases and decreases, although all of it is based off of standard numbers, so I'm afraid it might not actually translate into the larger sizes especially. I have little to no knowledge of short rows besides in theory (I've never had to use them for full bust adjustments and the like), so I can't really add those in, but I'm afraid the dress won't fit bustier ladies too well if they just do the increases I laid out. Anyway, I'll be offering this pattern in sizes 30 - 54.

Remember to take your measurements!

And because of course just plugging numbers into equations that I have to figure out how to do in excel isn't enough work for me (why would it be? Totally easy and didn't take me a couple hours just to realize it wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be let alone format everything correctly!), I decided to make a little compressed miniature me to be the mascot character that guides you through the entire thing! Or at least that's the plan. I don't know if I'll have enough energy left to implement it by the end of all this. I'm only halfway through the numbers - I have yet to even start laying out the actual pages or planning a format I'll want to stick to for the rest of my self-published patterns (if I decide to make any more in the future).

So what I've actually been trying to get around to saying is: I've really been rethinking my attitude towards purchasing patterns. I love to try to figure things out and reverse-engineer patterns just by looking at them, so of course I'm not very given to purchasing patterns so that someone else can tell me how to do something - something that I want to try to figure out myself first before I go and look at the answer, gosh! But now that I'm on the other side of the pattern designing table, I'm starting to think that even if I can just recreate the pattern I want to knit (even if it is a pattern for sale), especially considering the fact that I'll probably have to recalculate numbers anyway since I rarely get gauge (different yarns and all), I should maybe just fork over the $7~$10 for the pattern anyway, just to show a bit of gratitude towards the designer for all that they've done. But that also means a lot of stuff in my queue is going to get shoved down, since I haven't actually bought any of the patterns yet.