Creating Original Knitting Patterns: The Sweater Vest

After many years of knitting, my mother and I have amassed a large amount of excess yarn and wool. It is hard not to amass wool since specific projects require particular colors, weights, and textures and always leave behind some excess. Throwing away the half-used skeins is wasteful, but purchasing more of the wool in order to make something substantial can be difficult or impossible. Color, weight, and texture matching is beyond hard, especially for yarns and wools that weren’t mass produced or were only produced for a season. In an attempt to use the miscellaneous pile of remnant wool, I entertain two options:

1. Invent a pattern to fit the kind and amount of wool I have.

   
   

2. Make a baby blanket and hope someone is pregnant.

Following patterns is absolutely fantastic for learning the basics of how to knit, but there comes a point when the flexibility of custom designing usurps the advantages of a pattern. I believe this point comes after a few skills have been mastered:

1. Basic stitch types; stockinette, purl, yarn-over, knit two together, etc. There are all kinds of variations (like knitting into the back of a stitch) but these are nuances and shouldn’t hold anyone back from pattern-less knitting.

   
   

2. Basic body anatomy awareness; where the body curves, where stretched or loose stitches look strange, what points on a piece will encounter the most wear-and-tear or will be required to hold up against the strongest forces of tension (the armpit seam is a sneaky one).

   
   

3. Big picture pattern visualization; being able to consider what cable, lace, or color work will look like and decide if it is aesthetically pleasing.

   
   

This degree of knitting mastery can be accomplished in as few as two sweaters. Anyone can do it, and creating original patterns can be exciting and empowering.

To get through some of my green wool, I made a sweater vest. In the accompanying video for this post, I go through some basics of making a design. According to the spirit of this post, I don’t go through all the specifics of the particular pattern, but hopefully you get some general ideas for how to create your own sweater/blouse/top.