Knitting Designer Blog - Diverging Paths Pullover in progress

Knitting Designers Blog: Diverging Paths Pullover

Today I’m going to give a little peak into what goes into a sweater design. Today’s exploration is the Diverging Paths Pullover in the Winter 2015 Creative Knitting Magazine.

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Sometimes I start with a stitch pattern idea, and other times a silhouette.  In the case of Diverging Paths, it was a little of both.

I had been wanting to do a comfy relaxed fit reverse shirt tail pullover and I knew I wanted a center cable. I had the skein of yarn I knew I wanted to use, Plymouth Homestead, so I started swatching.

Cable Knitting

Knitting Designer Blog - Diverging Paths Pullover

Sketches & Swatches

Next step is to be able to communicate your design. Bad news is, I’m not much of a sketcher, but good news is, Kara Gott Warner has a good imagination. In order to make sure the it was clear how large the center panel would be, I scanned the swatches, and overlaid them onto my schematic in Illustrator to show them at scale.

Knitting Designer Blog - Diverging Paths Pullover

Sad wrist, time to cast on.

Knitting Designer Blog

Plymouth Homestead

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, while waiting for the yummy, yummy yarn to arrive, I had hurt my wrist. I had two other sweaters being knit by sample knitters, so I put on a brace and knitted on.

Due to a shipping glitch I got the yarn late, so the nice folks at Creative Knitting gave me an extra week, but just asked if I could send some update pics. So . . . I ended up taking a few.

and finally, the finished product in the magazine

Diverging Paths Pullover

Final picture in Creative Knitting

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6 comments

  • Andrea Miller December 2, 2015   Reply →

    Best (and most timely) thing I have read all day about knitting – dreaming of how one designs a sweater as I am knitting my current one from a pattern, and trust Patty to be a source for inspiration!

  • Barbara December 2, 2015   Reply →

    I love this! I will have to get the magazine. My dilemna now is which sweater is first: Herringbone Cowl or this one!?

  • Kara Gott Warner December 4, 2015   Reply →

    LOL… Patty. Don’t be so modest. What you lack in sketching skills, (and, actually your sketches are not bad!) you make up for with your amazing designing ability. You’ll always be one of my “go-to girls.” 🙂

  • Mary Sigman January 11, 2016   Reply →

    I love this design, with one small difference. I am not a thin person, so I plan to adapt the front to be straight across at the bottom. I hope you do not mind. This design is teaching me some new techniques. Chicken that I am, I started with a sleeve to be sure I could do the twisted rib, and I’m happy to report that it is working out well.

    Thanks SO much for the video on the stretchy cast-on method!!

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