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(This post is part of my series for Knit and Crochet Design Week 2012.)
Designing a Simple Knit Beanie: Day 1
(Note to my readers who don’t knit: Even though my Design Week project is a knit, the steps I’ll walk through are common to knitting and crochet, and I’ll be offering up “crochet translations” throughout this series.)
Today’s Design Week theme is sketches. I’m not much of an illustrator, in spite of the fact that my dad is a fine artist who had me drawing quite a bit as a child. For that reason, I start very few design projects with sketching. I usually go to my friends, the stitch guides, first.
(I have many more crochet stitch guides than knitting stitch guides. You can read my reviews of crochet stitch guides here and here.)
The Yarn
For this project, though, I actually started out by choosing the yarn.
- I am not sure if I will keep this hat or use it for a gift, so I looked for a machine washable yarn. (I hate hand washing, but I’ll do it. I’m not sure I could say the same about my unknown gift-recipient-to-be.)
- I’m teaching my ongoing knitting class students how to design a beanie in the round using circular needles. This hat-in-progress will be used for the next few weeks as a sample for this class. I try not to teach too many techniques at once because people sometimes get overwhelmed. Since this project isn’t about colorwork, I decided to pick one, solid color.
- One of my goals is to Surmount the Stash in 2012, so I wanted a yarn from my own stash. It was important for me not to run out of yarn during the project, so I looked for something close to a full skein.
- Most of my students use medium weight yarns, so I wanted my yarn to be medium weight, too.
With these criteria in mind, I dug into my yarn stash and came up with this great skein of Spud and Chloe Sweater in Moonlight (7507). (Side note: Yes, Sweater is one of my favorite yarns, and my design in the upcoming Fresh Designs in crochet (kids) book from Cooperative Press uses Sweater, too.)
Sometimes, I have a clear idea of who the finished project is for, and then I make more of an effort to pick yarn from a specific color family while keeping fiber preferences in mind.
The Stitch Patterns
I usually try to pick out at least three stitch patterns for a new project. A stitch might be more fussy than what I’m looking for on a particular project, or might look weird with the yarn, or maybe is just way more attractive in the stitch guide photo than in real life!
For this project, I looked for stitches that were worked in one color and textured.
After a little browsing, I came up with three potential stitch patterns:
- Sandstorm (p. 76) and Large Wicker (p. 95) from 400 Knitting Stitches: A Complete Dictionary of Essential Stitch Patterns
, and
- Simple Ripple (p. 130) from Margaret Hubert‘s The Complete Photo Guide to Knitting
(reviewed here).
If my primary goal was to sell the pattern, I might also check out the pattern library on Ravelry at this point to see if there is a project of the same type (in this case, a hat) using a similar stitch pattern. If I see something similar, I might choose a different stitch pattern to make my project more unique.
I know I’m a lazy swatcher, so I also made sure that all three stitches could be worked on the same swatch.
If you don’t have any stitch guides, you should get one. (Ba dum dum.) But seriously folks, there are two online resources I use like stitch guides.
- Lion Brand Yarn has a StitchFinder which includes crochet and knitting stitch patterns.
- Knitting on the Net has a library of knitting stitch patterns.
Tomorrow, I’ll share my swatch.
To read other Day 1 posts from Knit and Crochet Design Week, visit FreshStitches.