How to Use, Adapt, and Design Knitting Patterns: How to knit exactly what you want, every time—with confidence! [Paperback]

 

 

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To give credit where it is due, this is a book that sets out to teach a great deal to the reader. It assumes the reader knows ah... maybe nothing in knitwear garment creation but would like to know just about everything about the process, from how to get ideas to how to make them work.

I think this book should attract budding designers who are thinking of making designing an important part of their career or their knitting, or maybe even budding designers who think of making knitwear an important part of their designing. Yes the more I think about it, I think this book was designed with the fledgling designer in mind and to help them bridge over to knitwear. The reason for this is in the way the book goes about its business by first teaching you to sew a muslin template to make alterations on. It's a very useful suggestion for those who would love to fumble about by trial and error, but less so for knitters who know what they want to design and simply lack the method to do it. Fortunately, it shows the reader how to proceed, but I think it is a procedure that is more useful to those who need to gain an understanding of how fabric (in the general sense) behaves in three dimensions. It is not as interesting for the knitter who has to make simple modifications, who doesn't want to invest the time in making the template, or who simply likes the mathematical/on paper approach better.

Another criticism is that despite the interest of making a template to fumble on, and the knowledge it will impart the knitter, the muslin does not behave the way a knit fabric will. As soon as you start working with fabrics heavier than dk, I think the muslin loses its powers of prediction, because the knit will be thicker and will behave in a much more elastic way. They will instantly require more ease and probably will not drape the way the muslin will. Same goes with a dk that would be tightly knitted.

One of the comments that goes with the authors' plea for the knitter to sew up a muslin template is that yarn is so very expensive that wouldn't it be nice to know everything will work out before starting. It does not take into consideration that most knitters can't afford to knit professionally; it is their time that is at the highest premium. And given the limitations of the muslin template, it's not much in the way of a guarantee everything will work out.

In this book, you will find how to calculate the number of stitches to be worked on to do pretty much any thing you'd like to do, but the way to get there is different from what is usually suggested by/for knitters. There's a detour into the couture/sewing method that seems odd to me (being uninterested and at best a little daunted by needles with holes in them) and that not every knitter wants to take. And the emphasis is on high fashion, in the sense of very extravagant, and less on what works for knitwear, or how to produce a really good knitted pattern, like something that would get published in a knitting magazine that isn't Vogue Knitting.

Contrarily to other books that will teach you how to design your knitwear like Shirley Paden's excellent Knitwear Design Workshop, you do not get any patterns that serve as illustration as to how the method works and what you can do with it. In this book, the closest you get to that, is a section on embellishing your work and frankly, it barely skims the topic.

That is not to say the book is not useful for enterprising new knitters, because the book starts with a lot of information on how to swatch, how to read a pattern, how to use the information that might seem irrelevant in a pattern to work for you, and there is a lot of discussion on the effect of different stitches. And it explains more about how the two dimensional piece's shape relates to the details of the finished garmnents. It also explores a great deal of more unusual shapes, and it frees up the knitter to think outside the box, to try designing in different directions, like for instance knit sleeve to sleeve.

Book is very interesting but have not had time to really sit down and take in all that
is showing. Will look forward to checking it all out at a leter date.

This book is amazing. Sam Elliott and Sidney Bryan gives another view at how to design knitwear and their view is simply fantastic. Clear attractive pictures, concise written instructions and a step by step process that is so easy to follow makes this book a gem. I LOVE the idea of making a paper pattern to help me to visualize my garment. This step helps to avoid unnecessary mistakes while calculating shaping. Making and fitting a muslin test garment to try on is brilliant! What knitter wouldn't want the chance to see if a garment is flattering before investing HOURS to knit it? Sam and Sidney show us how to alter the muslin for fit and transcribe that to our paper pattern. They then show us how to use the measurements to calculate the stitches and rows needed to knit the garment and how to finish the knitted garment with a professional eye for detail. Then the true gold of the book: how to change the character and function of our simple design by working it out first on the paper pattern and the muslin, then showing us how write it into our knit pattern. Change the neckline or sleeves, alter the shape, how to utilized paired increases and decreases, add stitch patterns or embellishments... they are here! This book is worth every cent if you want to take your knitting to the next level and design.

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