🧶 Knitting Journey Week 1 - Design
Hi Friends,
Thanks for your excitement about my circular knitting project - I appreciate the support!
Quick recap: I’m knitting a sweater out of waste & scrap yarn, and delving into sustainability/circularity opportunities in the fashion industry. This week's topic is design, and the next two weeks are dedicated to materials and manufacturing. If you’re new here and/or missed last week’s email introducing the project, you can find it here!
v0 ‘Waste Sweater’ Design Selection
To kick off this project, I had a critical decision to make - how should I design this sweater? I don't have experience designing knitting patterns, so for this exercise I figured it didn’t make sense to create a pattern from scratch. I knew from the start I wanted to use a Lærke Bagger (@laerkebagger) design. Lærke is a knitwear designer based in Copenhagen, and when I came across her profile during the early, dark days of the pandemic (May 2020) I fell in love with her style. Her account singlehandedly inspired me to start knitting.
A signature element of her work is scrap yarn, which she uses to colorful and unique results. I’ve knitted from her book of patterns in the past, and knew I could pick a pattern that would hit all 3 of my criteria for this project:
Aesthetic - I always try to pick designs that I know I’ll really want to wear. I want to be obsessed with the end product!
Achievability - do I have the skills to make this?
Materials - can I create this sweater entirely out of waste & scrap materials??
I settled on the ‘Not So Heavy’ sweater, pictured below. I’ve been wanting a chunky, gray sweater for a while now, and this design looked like it’d satisfy that urge. It requires a quantity of scrap yarn bits tied together, and a base yarn that runs throughout the whole sweater. I have plenty of yarn odds and ends already, so I knew the main challenge would be to find a quantity of gray ‘waste’ yarn to use for the base.
Next week’s email, focused on materials, will cover sourcing and ‘processing’ the scrap & waste yarn I’m using to execute this design. Stay tuned!
Threads of Exploration
These are some of the related questions and themes I was thinking about this week, that I'd like to dig into (and maybe write about in the future)…
What is the design ‘development’ process, informed by customer/market, materials, manufacturing, etc. for small, independent designers & creators? Mid-size and large brands? And at what points does sustainability/circularity come into play (if at all)?
Design tools - what types of tools are designers using?
Do designers, brands think in terms of a Design Library? This is very common in the software product design UI / UX world - I’m guessing there are parallels in apparel/fashion, and would love to learn more
‘Alternative’ selling models, e.g. on-demand, made-to-order, and custom designs - these used to be the primary selling models for clothing and we’ve shifted to mass-produced, mass-availability, and massive waste. It’d be interesting to explore how the clothing design process has evolved in parallel with this shift.
And on these topics, I have a few questions for you!
For the designers & creators in this group - how would you describe your design (or design selection) process? What tools do you use as part of your design process? Any you particularly love (or hate)?
For the consumers in this group (aka everyone!) - have you ever purchased a made-to-order or custom piece of clothing? What was it & what was the process?
Looking forward to your thoughts, comments, feedback, etc.
Best,
Anne