In her PBS series "Knitting Workshop," Elizabeth Zimmerman seems to instantly know the gauge for her yarn. That's because she used the same yarns over and over again, meaning she didn't have to bother with gauge swatches so often. Genius move!

In today's video, I show how to use an existing sweater as a giant gauge swatch, plus how to build a basic schematic for key elements of fit. 

Where does inspiration for a new sweater design come from? Which comes first, the pattern or the yarn?

When I first had the idea to make a stashbusting handspun sweater, I planned to find a pattern online and just follow it. But as I was browsing patterns that fit my gauge, I wasn't finding anything that really sparked my fancy. 

I decided to design my own pattern. This sounds fine in theory, but in practice, there's a lot that goes into a sweater pattern.

The fit and shaping of a sweater are like the "bones," or architechture that hold everything together. How it sits & fits on your body will affect both the look and feel of any visual patterns that are knit into it.

​Some things to consider:

• What fit are you looking for? Something relaxed, or something a little more polished?
• What's your most comfortable sweater right now? What are the measurements of it? 
• Is there a type of sweater construction you really like wearing or knitting? There are tons of options, like yoked sweaters, raglan sweaters, sweaters with set-in sleeves, sweaters worked top-down or bottom-up. These will all influence your design.

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One of the great thing about designing your own sweater is that you don't have to be stuck with what's on the shelf in retail shops.  

I do like to see what's "trendy" before I design a new sweater. Since it's such a huge investment of time and money, I don't want to make something that's going to be tired and dated before I'm even done. That doesn't mean sticking to the "classics," though - it means that I'll have a look through online shops, fashion shows, and perhaps some magazines. 

The first stage is just gathering information - lots of it. I'll usually have 20+ browser tabs open, as I search runway shows, style blogs, Ravelry, Pinterest, and more. 

It's not necessarily about copying trends (although trying to recreate a design you like is a great learning tool). 

It's about seeing what's current, and using that as a jumping-off point. 

This go-round, the trends I identified with were checks, plaids, and variations on scale. Some of those were presented in pretty traditional ways, and others were pretty out there, like this Comme des Garçons ​runway look.

You may want to make a moodboard by assembling some images of your inspiration and color palette. This can be a great way to narrow things down. 

​Sketching designs is also great. For my current project, I distilled all the ideas I'd gathered into a simple sketch of a scoop-neck sweater with a check pattern. I used a fashion journal for my sketch, but also really love MyBodyModel for customized croquis. 

If you haven't already chosen your color scheme, now is a great time. Choosing colors you like and feel confident in is always a great idea, as is filling in any "holes" in your wardrobe.

Knowing what you like goes a long way here. Hate things against your neck? You probably don't want to design a turtleneck!

​This is the point where I usually circle back to the first step. Sometimes what I found in the trend-spotting phase tells me that I'll want to do a certain sweater construction - maybe tailored cardigans are THE look. Other times, the motifs I want to work with will dictate the design of the pattern. Fitting the visual design with the pattern construction is part of the whole design challenge. 
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It IS possible to just start knitting a sweater at this point, and hope for the best. But an even better idea would be to get more of your design down on paper, starting with a schematic, a swatch, and written instructions. 

There are tons of design books out there, but one I turn to frequently is Sally Melville's Knitting Pattern Essentials. In addition to giving you the math for working out sweater patterns, it helps you think through some of the design combinations that are possible with sweater patterns. 

I'll go more into gauge swatches and schematics in my next post, but at this point, it's a good idea to have a rough idea of how the sweater's fit and construction. Will it be long or short? Snug or loose? Top-down or bottom-up?  All of these will help you move from mere inspiration to an actual pattern that you can work with.​

On January 1, I woke up feeling like I had the worst hangover ever. This was odd, since I hadn't partied, and had gone to bed early.  It turned out that after nearly four years of dodging covid, and being fully vaccinated, it had finally caught me. 

Once I was feeling a little bit better, but still isolating to keep my husband to keep from getting sick, I decided to start working on a destash sweater. 

The plan is to do an allover stranded colorwork pattern using leftover handspun from two different sweaters.

First, I dumped all the yarn out on the floor and sorted out the yarn I planned to use. I weighed it to make sure I had enough for a sweater quantity, then sorted by color and value. 

I didn't show this in the video, but it turned out to be really helpful - I used shipping tags to write down the sequence of each color, plus its weight. A lot of the colors are so close in value, that when they get jumbled in my knitting basket, it's hard to tell which is purple #3 or purple #4 - so noting that on a shipping tag attached to each ball of yarn was indispensable. I also noted the weight of each ball of yarn in grams so that I could weigh them as I knit, making sure to reserve enough for the sleeves AND body. 

In the next video, I'll talk more about designing the stranded colorwork pattern for the new sweater, plus how I worked through the design of the sweater itself.