Through my
teen years (starting at 14!), I worked at my Dads accounting practice during
tax season. I was the receptionist,
organizing and keeping everyone’s papers running through the system, and did
bits of bookkeeping or the odd (easy) tax return on the side. It was a small office and so I really got to
see all the parts of what goes behind the scenes in a small business. After I graduated, I began to study (sewing)
pattern drafting and did custom work sewing.
I was honestly very devoted to sewing.
In the midst of that, I picked up knitting needles for what may as well
have been the first time, and learned to knit.
It took a year or so, but soon I preferred knitting to sewing (even
though, to this day, I still sew a good portion of my personal wardrobe). It was a natural move to “write” my own
knitting patterns. (For me, a knitting pattern only for myself is a page of
paper with a stream of numbers and minimal explanation of what they actually
mean, not a real pattern that someone else would be able to follow.) Once I was
happy with what I was turning out, it was also very natural, not easy, but it
just happened almost on its own, to write a handful of knitting patterns just
for fun and put them up for sale. Since
I had experience working with exacting sewing patterns and all that, the
technical and business side of knit design was relatively easy. A lot of designers start into designing knit
patterns while they work in a completely different day job and try to make it
all fit. My life more or less flowed
smoothly to it, and starting at my age, before I was married or had a “real”
job, I had the huge advantage of being able to jump into giving it a full time
try.
2.
When was the moment you knew you
wanted to become a knitwear designer?
When I was
young, a lot of the parts of knitwear design were things I thought would be fun
one day - photography, design, modeling – and I have always had a huge amount
of patience doing fussy jobs. My Mom has
in her photo albums these pictures of my third birthday and this story about
how I wanted to decorate my own cake that year.
She iced it and gave me a plate of candies to stick on top. I only vaguely remember it myself, but
apparently I didn't even ask to eat a single candy till the end and very
carefully placed them on the cake. From
the photos, I can see that I made it symmetrical; it was a butterfly shape and
the right and left wings match. Truth be
told, the only part I really remember is digging through the plate of candies
and finding matching ones to place on each wing (I think I ate all the leftover
single candies at the end). I'm not sure
why. I am around a lot of little kids
(my 12 nieces and nephews) and while it seemed normal to me before, thinking
about all the 3 year olds I know, I can't imagine any of them doing that. No wonder my Mom thought it so noteworthy
that she bothered to write the story out, I seem to have an inborn sense of
order.
I don't think
I ever specifically wanted to be a knitwear designer, it was more one day I
realized I already was one and I loved it. I don't mean I realized this the first times
I made sweaters for myself – it finally occurred to me that this was what I was
somewhere around my first 1,000 or 2,000 pattern sales.
3.
Please describe your personal design
philosophy?
For garments,
I try to work out the simplest way to make a good fit. This usually involves complex increase/decrease
rates to make curves, and they are a pain to calculate and write, but I think
the end result is worth the time. It is
such a relief when I finish writing a pattern and I can relax and just knit
from the directions. I like to design
the kinds of garments I like to wear, generally in finer yarns (with the odd
exception for really cold days), lots of stockinette, carefully fit, no/minimal
seams, and precise finishing. They
probably wouldn't be my favorite to make, but I enjoy a challenge and I have
learned to love mindless stockinette, grafting, and sewing.
For “fancy”
stuff (like colorwork blankets or accessories with more decoration), I try to
come up with a key element, and then enhance and elaborate on that theme
through details everywhere else. The
hard part is predicting if something will enhance the central theme, or
distract from it before completing the item, and don't look to my work for
great examples of how this should play out. I am still very much learning! The most
beautiful things I have admired and analyzed all share this quality. There is
much detail and texture, and yet what you see is one to three primary elements
that are built up out of this mass of little unnoticed details. If I am honest, part of the reason I like skinnier
yarns is to give me more “resolution” for more detail.
4.
What is your greatest design memory?
Probably a
year from when I started writing those very first patterns, standing in the
kitchen with my Mom and one of my sisters.
Casually checking if I had any sales, as I did most days, there was this
flood of sales of one of my few published patterns, I think around 60
that day. If you recall from before, I
wasn't thinking of myself as a designer, I did it just for fun not expecting
any sales at all. I was dumbfounded and
hardly believed it, but I showed them and my mom was all excited and I realized
I had actually made a pattern that other people liked and wanted. It took a while to sink in! The success of that particular pattern was
the push I needed to decide that I would give this pattern-writing thing a
serious try and see what happened. Apart
from that incident, I would never have believed it would be possible to do it
for a living. I was the only one
shocked. I had a year or two of coming
to my friends or family in absolute awe and surprise when any pattern was doing
unusually well, and them saying back to me things along the line of “well, I
would be surprised if my pattern was doing well, but of course you can do it. I'm not surprised at all.”
5.
If you could have dinner with any
three designers, dead or alive, who would they be, and why?
Since it
wasn't specified, I am going to “cheat” and say Madame Vionnet (there is so
much technical genius in the structure of her bias cut dresses), Paul Poiret
(because I just love his harem pants and hobble dresses; turbans less so...), and any of the ladies
who designed Bohus Stickning sweaters.
They all worked in ready to wear rather than patterns, but I take more
inspiration from ready to wear than other knitting patterns/designers.
6.
Picker or thrower?
Is
“Scrambler” an acceptable term to use?
Having taught myself to knit, sticking my fingers where ever made it
easiest to get yarn through yarn and on the sticks, I don't follow either
method! I am working on learning to pick
– I challenged myself to give it a try earlier this year to speed up my
stockinette, so I sometimes pick in a long stream of stockinette. Otherwise, fingers are everywhere.
7.
It’s your last object to design (or
make). What is it, and what fiber do you use?
It is a
colorwork sweater, in laceweight cashmere that I have to purchase in white and
dye myself to get the exact shades I need.
I am picky about colors and struggle to find the ones I want. Alternately,
I might be similarly satisfied with a rectangular lace stole in cobweb weight
merino. Hard to decide!
8.
What trait do you most admire in
designers?
Fortitude. If you are going to make it, you need to be
willing to do the most mundane and picky jobs (like checking over your numbers again),
you need to learn a variety of new skills, and you need to keep slogging at it
for at least a year or two before you can expect any substantial reward for all
the effort and cash you put into it. The
fun stuff of designing is something like 5 days a year, and all the rest of the
days are hard work doing confusingly complex or painfully dull tasks. Satisfying when done, but not necessarily the
things you wake up wanting to do.
9.
What trait do you most detest in
designers?
Impatience and
carelessness. Either will prevent you
from moving on anywhere. You need to
take the time to learn to do it all well, and you won't be rewarded till you do. Be that side things (which you could hire
someone to do for you if you have the cash) like photography and writing
descriptions, or the actual design itself (figuring out what yarn is going to
say what your design is saying, working out proportions and balance to get the
effect you want, and picking stitch patterns and how to use them)
10. You
are recommending a design gift in response to a friend’s inquiry. Other than
your own designs (which are quite lovely!), what would you recommend?
For adult
stuff, Jenny F If only I had the time to knit it, I would
love a shawl like Breezy Skies. For baby/kid
stuff, Jenny Wiebe. Those are the cutest kid cardis ever!
And no, I
didn't plan to choose two Jennys, they are just the two whose patterns I would
knit if I had time. Right now I don't
even have time to knit all my own patterns, which is very sad; besides, I
do get a lot of patterns designed and published, even if my knitting is mostly
just swatching. :)
