Designing Knitwear: Comparing the Commercial Fashion Industry with Hand-Knitting

As a hand knitter and designer of hand knitting patterns, I notice the many beautiful sweater, blanket and accessory designs available in stores. These are usually produced on knitting machines and I became curious about how they are designed and produced.

Today we will look at similarities and differences between design methods and tools used in commercial fashion industry vs. Hand Knitting.

Design to pattern: Hand Knitting

Although the process is the same for all knitted items, we will assume that we are designing a sweater, which is the most complex type of design. The process starts out with an idea or inspiration, then often a sketch on paper to visualize the shape and major components, and the placement of design elements such as colorwork or stitch patterns. Yarn selection follows then swatching, in which in the selected yarn, small key pieces of the fabric, such as ribbing, pattern stitches, and transitions are knitted, by hand, to test, experiment, refine and make feasible the concept. The gauge, which is the number of stitches and rows of knitting per inch is generated from these swatches.

The next step is to work out the measurements. There are standard body measurements to which wearing ease is added depending on the sweater shape and intended fit. Typically the details of a design are worked out for a particular size, such as a “Small” and then extrapolated to smaller and larger sizes. This process is called “grading.” Some designers will use knitting graph paper with boxes of the proportions of a knit stitch for this step and draw the different sizes onto the paper, and others will take a more mathematical approach using a spreadsheet with formulas. Either way, this step generates the details that will go into the pattern, such as how many stitches to start with, how frequently to make increases and decreases for shaping, the number of repeats of pattern stitches.

Translating the detailed design into a written pattern is a fully manual effort in which a set of concise and repeatable instructions are written down, in sequence, for the entire garment, in the language of knitting, and including all the tools and materials needed. There are some “tools” that can be used to help in this step such as knit chart editors that can translate small charts into written instructions, and those are discussed later. The designer usually has a professional technical editor review and improve the pattern for correctness and usability, then a sample is knit, often by the designer, but sometimes by a sample knitter or a set of volunteer test knitters, in close coordination with the designer, to test the pattern and for photography.

Design to Sweater: Machine Knitting

One major feature of Design in the Fashion Industry is the compartmentalization of roles. With hand knitting patterns the designer will often design, write the pattern, and knit the final sample. Not so with the fashion industry. There are 3 different roles with specialized skills, which are: designer, programmer and technician. The designer visualizes and illustrates the sweater, chooses the colors, pattern stitches and yarns. The programmer takes the design, selects a knitting machine that has the capabilities to produce the design, and programs the machine. A program to a machine is like a knitting pattern to a hand-knitter. The technician runs the knitting machine and produces a sample of the sweater components. The designer may be physically remote from the location where programming and sample knitting happen. If the knitting machines available cannot execute the design then the programmer may have to make changes (compromises) that alter the design. Since there are multiple roles and people involved, coordination is required to prevent delay, miscommunication and error.

With hand knitting, all knitted pieces of a design (sleeves, body panels) are shaped during knitting using increases and decreases, generally executed at the edges of the pieces. In the fashion industry knitting such shaped pieces, known and “full fashioned” has only been done frequently in the last 20 years with the growth of specialized knitting machines, and the norm was and still is to knit fabric rectangles and cut them to desired shapes and sew them together as one would a fabric garment. If you look at the commercial sweaters at your local discount store you will see evidence that seams are cut and sewn with thread and a serger (a specialized sewing machine that can simultaneously sew a seam, bind it, and cut off excess fabric), as compared to a high-end and expensive sweater; for instance, one knit in cashmere; that has been knit “full-fashioned” with seams looking like they are hand-knitted. Such sweaters can be disassembled and all the yarn reclaimed.

Limitations and Strengths of Hand- and Machine-Knitting

Previously, I used the word “concise” to describe hand knitting patterns. What I mean is that hand-knitting patterns need be composed of elements that can be described once and then repeated several times. A person knitting a sweater needs to learn the patterns to be used, and then repeat them to complete the garment. A pattern that had, for instance, a different set of instructions for each row of the sleeve could be knit by a computer with ease, but would be frustrating and not enjoyable for a hand knitter. This is a fundamental difference between design for hand-knits and design for machine knitting. Hand-knits cannot be arbitrarily complex but machine knitting can. This limitation of hand-knitting leads to design compromises.

On the flip side, a knit produced by a knitting machine can only contain techniques that the machine can produce. For color expression, a machine has to support striping (most do), intarsia and fair isle/stranded color work. For shaping a machine has to support “full fashioning” and short rows. To work with different gauge yarns, you will need a machine for the desired gauge (needle spacing). These are all techniques that are in the typical arsenal of an experienced hand-knitter but add significant complexity and cost to knitting machines.

Fashion Industry Trends in Knitting

The dominant companies producing “full fashioned” knitting machines are Stoll of Germany and Shima Seiki of Japan. These companies are both working to bridge the divide between design and sample knitting, through computer aided design (CAD) technologies by integrating and automating the knitting machine programming step into the Design tool and reducing the need for the programmer. The goal of these innovations is to reduce the cost and time required to produce samples. The high cost of these machines ($200K-ish) make them out of reach for the hobbyist.

Kniterate, was funded by a kickstarter campaign, costs $16K US dollars, and has integrated the design and programming process, the latter of which is automated from the design. This machine is industrial strength but for the sake of affordability is a bit smaller, lighter and not as feature rich. It supports one gauge (needle spacing = 7 needles/inch) and can do all techniques except short rows and intarsia. It supports fair isle for short floats of less than 5 stitches.

Hand Knitting Trends

There are quite a few chart designing applications but they produce only small pieces of a garment and not a full garment design. Most can automatically generate written instructions from a chart that is created within the application. They are a great way to produce an initial draft of written instructions for pattern stitches (blocks of instructions to be repeated). The one I use regularly is StitchMastery. I am happy with it except I wish it could handle larger charts and could produce instructions for short rows correctly. DesignaKnit is a tool for whole garment design targeted at hobbyists and supporting a fixed set of garments and constructions but is really only useful to those doing machine knitting because it does not generate written instructions used in knitting patterns.

One thing that the tools I have purchased have in common is that new releases don’t happen often, so perhaps the business is not profitable. There remains a large opportunity for computerized tools for hand knit designers, but the market for them is small so I’m not holding my breath!

Additional References:

Yang, Sooyung; Love, Terence, “Integrated System for Fashion Design using Computerised Wholegarment Knitwear Production”, 2008