I have, despite being a mailman stalking nut raising mailman stalking children, at least kept him busy lately:
Sweater design has been very much on my mind lately. I have several designs that I want to implement, but have run into some problems. I can easily make a sweater to fit me, but I want to get into the design side that makes patterns for others and I've run into a few brick walls lately. Therefore, the two design books in the lower part of the photo.
There are numerous books and how-to's for designing your own sweater, but there is nothing for the aspiring designer. Here's an issue that I'm having: Grading a pattern. That's where you have a pattern written out and you want it to be expanded to fit multiple sizes. Some magazines cough: Vogue :cough tend to want to just add two inches to every number in the pattern. But, just because someone is six sizes larger than me, doesn't necessarily mean that their arm length is 12 inches longer than mine!
So where do I find out how to properly grade a pattern? When I queried designer Melissa Leapman on how to learn to do this, her answer was to read tons of patterns and reverse engineer them to find out how the professionals do it. I'm currently doing that, but wouldn't it be cool if someone wrote a book on how to do this? There's a large void in that part of the market. Someone could make a mint writing a book like that. Bonus points for them if they put in some info about the business side of creating knitting designs.
Any designers out there listening? anyone?
