Interviews with Knitwear Designers by Leanne Dyck

What is it like to be a knitwear designer? What are the challenges? What are the rewards? How did they begin their career? Who taught them to knit?

photo by ldyck

From 2010 to 2012, for this blog, I interviewed a community of knitwear designers--for this blog. These interviews offer a unique insight into the career of knitwear design. 

Interviews with Knitwear Designers

My advise to knitters is to enjoy the process. You should allow yourself to experience the pleasure of all that yarn running through your fingers, how you feel about your accomplishments, learning new things, and seeing what transpires as you manipulate your yarn and needles. In the end, if you had to knit the same ball of yarn over and over, it could still be a pleasure (well, for a while). We get too focused on the price of the materials we are using and how long it takes and we forget how much we get out of it. Not only do we create things, we entertain ourselves, sooth ourselves, and it helps us get through things we’d just rather not (kid’s sports, waiting rooms, family visits, you name it!)

JillWolcott

Knitwear Designer, Author

Jill Wolcott Knits

Who taught you to knit?

I was taught to knit by my mother when I was five years old. I remember carrying my knitting around the neighbourhood that summer while I was working on my first project—a baby pink scarf. I don’t honestly remember if I ever finished it but I do remember that several of the rows were a dirty grey because I must have been knitting with grubby hands. I also remember counting my stitches at the end of every row and then running home to have my mum fix my dropped stitches.

Holli Yeoh

Knitwear Designer, Author

Where is your favourite place to knit?

Two places: Sitting on the sofa in our basement, the dog snuggled between me and my hubby, watching something good on TV, with a cup of tea at hand. My second favourite place to knit is the streetcar: I have a long commute to one of my regular teaching gigs, and I enjoy very much getting a window seat, listening to music on my headphones, knitting away and enjoying the view as the city goes by. The first is comfier, but the second location has better light!

Kate Atherley

Knitwear Designer, Author

When did you become a knitwear designer?

I’m not sure, I think I always have been. I’ve worked professionally in this business for two years (this interview was conducted in 2012) but I am just now getting to the point where I feel okay to call myself a “Knitwear Designer”. I honestly think people throw the term ‘designer’ around way too much. Designers are those who work tirelessly for their art. It’s like a home baker calling themselves a Chef. There is a big difference!

How did you become a knitwear designer?

WORK!! Lots of work! I average about 100 hours a week. I wake at seven and work until bedtime. That's the only way to make it in this business. You have to be willing to put in the time.

Rohn Strong

Knitwear Designer, Author

Crafting a Handmade Home

How did you become a knitwear designer?

Like many people, I started altering patterns, then I morphed into designing my own patterns just for myself, then decided to start developing patterns for public consumption.

Stephanie Tallent

Knitwear Designer, Author

SunsetCat Designs

I've always created. I majored in crafts (jewellery, ceramics and textiles) in art college and received my degree in Fine Arts. I was working as a jeweller, both teaching and designing, and was feeling uninspired. We wanted to have a baby and I felt that the toxins I was exposed to at the jewellery studio were just too risky. Knitting was my passion though and it was consuming all of my free time. I decided that it was time to apply my design skills to knitting.

It didn't occur to me that I had no instruction or experience in knitwear design. My art college education gave me a good grounding in design in a general sense and I applied that and my common sense to figuring out how to design knitting patterns. There were few resources at the time although now there are many books on designing your own knits.

Holli Yeoh

Knitwear Designer, Author

Tell me about your first pattern. Where was it first published?

About ten years ago (2010), I was shopping at the Boulder Handweavers’ Guild annual sale and I saw a marvelous felted bag that I wanted to buy. It was $75, and quite outside of my budget at the time. I was with my mom at the sale and we decided we would try to figure out how to make the bag ourselves, so we went to the local yarn shop, bought some wool yarn and a book with some information on felting, and I went home and started to play. I ended up with one of my favorite bags of all time—I still use it today—and it also became my published knitting design.

My first published design was in Family Circle Easy Knitting. I always loved that magazine and was sad to see it go away!

Donna Druchunas

Knitwear Designer, Author

Sheep to Shawl

What is the most rewarding aspect about being a knitwear designer? What’s the most challenging?

Creating something that people love to knit is a fabulous feeling! I think self doubt is the most challenging. Every time a design goes out, it’s a part of me, and I’m hoping that I wasn’t fooling myself into thinking it looks good!

Rosemary Hill

Knitwear Designer, Author

Designs by Romi

What is the most rewarding aspect of being a knitwear designer? 

It's exciting to see knitters' reactions to my designs to see if they understand what I'm trying to communicate with them. Being able to spend my days immersed in the knitting—both the physical knitting and the planning and making it work part—are immensely rewarding.

Challenging?

Marketing and paperwork are definitely challenging for me. I would love to be able to just create and have someone else swoop in and spread the word for me and do my books.

Holli Yeoh

Knitwear Designer, Author

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Guest Post: knitwear designer Jill Wolcott

I am a hand knitwear designer.  Unlike most hand knit designers, I didn’t come to this because of my love of knitting.  In fact, I re-discovered hand knitting after I began to do machine knitting which I came to as a fashion designer! 

I learned to hand knit as a tagalong with my older sister’s Brownie troop to lessons at the local yarn shop in Olympia, Washington.  I was 6 years old and loathed everything about it.  We learned the English method and I would happily have abandoned my project if my mother hadn’t made me finish it.

My mother was a knitter and I always think of her sitting in a chair in the living room with her feet on an ottoman, the New Yorker on her knees and her knitting needles clicking.  She knit primarily stockinette (probably to aid with reading progress).  We were thrilled when she learned Seed Stitch and we got something other than rib trim on our cardigans.  She is what I call a flicker—she flicks her yarn with her right forefinger.  I leaned to Continental Knit in 1995.  I wrote a Continental knitting instructional book with my former business partner in 2006 for which I did 96 illustrations.

I knitted the odd piece in the years intervening being 6 and 1993 when I started submitting machine knit designs to magazines. I had turned to machine knitting after moving to a new city where there were no jobs for my design skills.  I figured people always needed sweaters!  When I began learning how to use the knitting machine I disliked almost everything being created by machine knitters.  I pulled out old Vogue Knitting magazines (I had always kept a subscription to that even though I didn’t really knit) and figured out how to accomplish things I liked using my hand knitting knowledge (and occasionally calling my mother) on the knitting machine.

In 1994 before leaving for a vacation I picked up yarn from the sale bin of a local yarn shop because I didn’t feel I could stand to be away from knitting for two weeks.  I really enjoyed the portability of hand knitting and had a great time designing and knitting a sweater.  That sweater was an intarsia patchwork of different stitch patterns in three colors, put together in a planned random pattern.  I was hooked on hand knitting.

I started to do hand knit design as well as machine knits.  I like almost every type of stitch pattern, although I am not inclined to do much stranded knitting.  I love vintage lace patterns, and often find myself dissecting patterns to find their hidden elements.  Mostly though I am pursuing an idea, so I find stitch patterns that suit the concept.

The first knitting pattern I wrote was for a coat for a friend’s toddler daughter.  I wrote a variation of that design for a pattern that I sold to Machine Knitting News.  I think my first hand knit pattern was for Knitters.  I had a terrible time learning how to write effective patterns.  What magazines publish didn’t really seem clear to me; I think I struggled for about five years before I realized that I just saw things differently.  I call myself “directionally dyslexic”.  I have a hard time with right and left, and right side and wrong side conversions.  I do shaping for both sides in my patterns, and am pretty meticulous about tracking right and wrong sides.  I don’t have to be as concerned about how much space I use.  I also do my charts to reflect the stitches on the side you are looking at because I can’t do the mental transition.  Really, I’m not as dumb as this makes me sound! 

I have my own pattern line which allows me to write in a style that is clearer to how my brain functions. I have about 50 patterns currently available on my website, and at least that many more available on Ravelry in an old format while waiting for transition to my new format.  I always have about two dozen projects in the works.  Unlike many hand knit designers, I don’t knit my samples.  I write the patterns from swatches and they are knit (almost always just once!) from my instructions.

Knitwear design is rewarding because I get to create both shape and fabric.  I never cease having more ideas than I could possibly pursue, and every day I love sitting down to knit swatches.  The challenge is that knitwear design is not valued within the hand knitting community and it is extremely difficult to make money at it. 

At heart I am a fashion designer.  I love and follow fashion,  and I try to translate what I see in fashion for people who knit.  I look at all types of garments and translate elements and shapes into my designs.  I want to design things that, for the most part, will be fashionable in three years if that’s how long you take to knit it.  I create contemporary fashion, not fast fashion.  I am inspired by yarn, and stitch patterns, but almost always it comes back to fashion and style for me.

My advice to knitters is to enjoy the process.  It be just about the knit product, you should allow yourself to experience the pleasure of all that yarn running through your fingers, how you feel about your accomplishments, learning new things, and seeing what transpires as you manipulate your yarn and needles.  In the end, if you had to knit the same ball of yarn over and over, it could still be a pleasure (well, for a while).  We get too focused on the price of the materials we are using and how long it takes and we forget how much we get out of it.  Not only do we create things, we entertain ourselves, sooth ourselves, and help us get through things we’d just rather not (kid’s sports, waiting rooms, family visits, you name it!).

The most important things I am working on right now are books. I am focusing on redoing the Continental knitting method book.  I am changing the voice and the focus.  I want to provide how-to-knit instruction, and also give guidance through many of the things needed to transition from scarves to creating garments or more complex projects.  After that I have about five books to write!

I am a solo business owner for the first time in over 10 years.  This has proved to be more enjoyable than I thought it would be, although it is also scary and unnerving sometimes.

To view more of Jill's lovely designs, please log on to www.jillwolcottknits.com