Today I am pleased to bring you an interview with knitwear designer Stephannie Tallent. This is the second stop on her blog tour to promote her new e-book Mittens!
As mentioned the other day, Stephannie is an accomplished designer with designs published with Knitcircus Magazine, The Sanguine Gryphon, Knit Picks and of course on her site, Sunset Cat Designs.
COUPON
As part of the tour Stephannie has been kind enough to offer a coupon code to readers on the tour. The code is blogtour and is good for 20% off on all her patterns via Ravelry from February 2nd to the 8th.
GIVEAWAY
Stephannie’s pattern Blue Lupine Fingerless Mitts was just published in the latest Knitcircus issue!
Knitcircus Spring 2011
Blue Lupine Fingerless Mitts
As part of the tour she has allowed me to give away TWO copies of the entire Knitcircus Spring Pattern Collection! To be eligible, simply leave a comment on this post. I will accept comments until midnight Thursday, February 10th and will draw and announce the winners next Friday, the 11th.
And now the moment you’ve been waiting for:
INTERVIEW
First, your designs are all lovely. Looking at them, I notice a lot of cable work, and you mention loving lace on your blog. What is your favorite knitting technique and why?
Well, I really love cables and traveling stitches. Those are my favorites. Why? I love the texture and the interplay of light and shadow. Also, they’re fun and interesting to work. I like seeing the patterns develop as I knit. FWIW, I cable without a cable needle. I think, if you’re going to do a lot of cabling, it’s a lot faster and easier. Also, I think working the cables without the cable needle is more intuitive.
Next, I like colorwork. I’m not at all adept at it, but I like playing with it. There’s going to be quite a bit more stranded pieces this year.
Lace is something I’ve not done so much of, but I’ve started incorporating lace panels into some of my pieces, Zylphia Pilots Her Airship and Emily Prefers to Flounce (both for Sanguine Gryphon) being the prime examples. I really love the panels I chose for Zylphia and will be using those in a coordinating piece — I think that’s the post you saw.
Although I’d like to do some cowls, I’m not really a scarf or shawl person, so I don’t think I’ll start doing those sorts of lace patterns.
Your first e-book, Mittens! looks great! What led you to choose mittens as your topic?
I really like mittens (especially fingerless mitts, which I get to wear more often). Like socks, they’re small, relatively quick projects, but, depending on the weight of yarn, you can get a lot of detail in there. The back of the hand is a better canvas, to me, than the leg of socks for playing with designs and details.
Of course, with Mittens!, I focused on the detailing being in the cuff. I have a fingerless mitten pattern coming out in Spring 2011 Knitcircus that involves knitting the cuff first then picking up stitches for the rest of the mitt. After doing that pattern, I really wanted to explore different cuff options. Mittens! grew out of that.
As a designer myself, I am always curious to hear about the self-publishing experience. What were the most fun and most grueling parts of putting together the book?
Most fun: I really like the design and layout aspect of desktop publishing.
I originally started laying out and publishing patterns via Word. Word’s not meant for that. It’s clumsy and awkward and frustrating if you want to fine-tune the layout. At one point I had problems with the font in one pattern pdf showing up as a blurred image for my testers who had Macs. When I used another PDF converter (other than the one built into Word) they could see the font, but then my schematics (done in Inkscape) looked like crap. I realized at that point I needed to get better software, and ended up getting Adobe Creative Suite.
I did crash courses in InDesign and Illustrator via a one-month trial subscription to Lynda.com.
I love InDesign. It makes the creation of the pattern or layout booklet fun, not frustrating. I really like Illustrator too – I do my schematics in Illustrator. I did my diagrams for Mittens! in Illustrator (showing where to start picking up the stitches for each mitt) too.
I guess I’m a bit geeky about all this.
The hardest part is stopping. Just saying ‘enough’, instead of wanting to tweak things just a teensy bit more.
How do you utilize the internet and social media as a designer?
I blog, and follow a bunch of blogs. I’m trying to be better about commenting. I know I love it when readers comment. I’ve started to tweet in the last couple months. I’m on Ravelry way too much. (I’m StephCat on both Twitter and Ravelry.) I have my own group on Ravelry (Sunset Cat Designs).
I’m not much for Facebook. My blog posts are linked to show up on Facebook, but other than that, I don’t do much there.
If you could pick only one stitch dictionary to use for the next five years, which would you choose?
Oh, that’s not fair. I just posted about stitch dictionaries on my blog. Probably the second Barbara Walker, just for the variety of patterns, not because it’s necessarily my absolute favorite. I think the most unique one I have (including the Japanese dictionaries) is Annie Maloney’s Aran Lace. She created all the stitch patterns, combining cables and lace.
Do you have any future books planned?
I have two collection ideas for this year. One is going to be skewed a bit more to mittens and small accessories, but I plan on including at least one sweater in each, mittens or gloves, cowls….I have the general theme for each, but I’m starting to research and make my own moodboards for each and getting a rough idea on the actual projects.
IN CLOSING
Thank you, Stephannie for both the interview as well as some goodies for the readers. And thank you to Ida for setting up the tour.
Tomorrow, look for the next stop at Purls Entwined. And don’t forget to comment for a chance to win one of two copies of the Spring 2011 Knitcircus pattern collection!
I remember reading your posts on that a while back and thinking- “oh she’s so right, and she hates my 
