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Creating Knitting Patterns, Day 13: Knitting Pattern Quality Controls

Welcome to Day 13 of the Complete Guide to Creating Knitting Patterns series! Today, we are going to talk about how to implement knitting pattern quality control processes into your patterns.

What Is a Good Knitting Pattern?

Good or not good is relative, you might think. Who decides if a pattern is a “good” pattern? What makes a “good” knitting pattern?

My personal answer to this question: good knitting patterns are those which follow proven processes in the creation, testing and publication stages, which are using pattern templates and following defined style guides, have great photography and a professional look and feel, and are free of errors.

Processes and Knitting Pattern Quality Control

You may think creating knitting patterns is not rocket science, so why bother with processes like we’re about to build a nuclear power plant? The answer is simple:

Following proven processes increases the quality of your product, no matter what you are making.

Try to establish processes for your knitting pattern creation. Start with the major tasks (deciding on yarn, category, writing the first draft, sample knitting, testing, refinement, publication) and then refine each of them by adding sub tasks. What do you have to do in each step? Implementing processes helps with not forgetting any important details.

Pattern Templates

We talked about pattern templates earlier in this series. Make one and stick to it – until you improve your template, maybe; then follow the new, improved one. My patterns do not look all the same. You can clearly see progress – I talked about knitting pattern template evolution earlier this year. Feel free to use and adapt the knitting pattern templates I provided in an earlier post in this series (Day 12: Knitting Pattern Templates).

Style Guides

A style guide is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization, or brand. In our case, when creating knitting patterns, it’s about creating standards for your knitting patterns.

For instance, listing measures in both imperial and metric units, and putting imperial measures before the metric ones could be a standard. Another examples are the presence of materials, yarn and gauge information in a pink rounded box on the first of your knitting pattern pages. It becomes a standard if you decide on things like this and follow them consistently.

I dedicated a whole post on style guide for knitting patterns alone recently. You can read it here: Style Guides for Knitting Patterns.

Photography

Pattern photography has been a topic in this series already. Have a look there to learn about the nuts and bolts of pattern photography that rocks for your new pattern.

Error Elimination

We talked about error elimination via test knitting earlier, too. It’s very important to do test knitting and implement all issues found into your knitting patterns to ensure a good experience when people are knitting from your patterns!

Go And Practice!

Go and get some practice now! Creating knitting patterns in easier than you think. You can do it, too!

One thought on “Creating Knitting Patterns, Day 13: Knitting Pattern Quality Controls

  • ELDA DA FONSECA

    Hello, thanks for sharing all your acknowledge, I have created several patterns and never published them, I am getting ready to lunch them in Raverly and reading all your notes has been very helpful. for some reason link to Day 14 cannot be opened ? pls let me know, thanks very much,
    I am trying to register myself but it is taking long to open the site to fill my contact details but I guess it is some internet connecting issue

    Reply

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