Daniella asked: [I] would love to know how you go about sizing a garment pattern.

When I was planning this series, I almost chose to do a sweater pattern. I think for new designers, creating a pattern that requires sizing is perhaps the scariest undertaking. Admittedly, I have only designed sweaters for myself, and never had to expand the pattern to multiple sizes. I would still like to design a sweater pattern “live” on the blog – maybe a Design Series 2 is in order!

Anyway, for me size is all about gauge. I know my measurements and my gauge and figure out my stitch counts from that. This is a really great skill to learn even if you are not looking to design. Customizing a garment to fit you exactly is one of the greatest joys of hand knitting.

When writing a pattern of course you need to take into consideration many body types and sizes. There are some great resources that list some standard sizes. I also found this excellent tutorial on how to use a spreadsheet to help with the math!

Tags: design, Design Series

This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 at 6:38 am and is filed under Design Series. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.