How to write a Arts and Crafts Book: 30 Knitted Blanket Patterns; Designing the Blankets

For an entire year I have been writing a book of knitting patterns. It has been a full-time job occupying; days, evenings, weekends and the little spare moments between everyday tasks. I have to say “no” to a lot of things in order to finish this book on time.

The process, from start to finish, of developing knitting designs/patterns for a book

In my previous post about the book I described options for publishing, specifically whether to self-publish or use a traditional publisher. Once I had made this decision I was ready to start the book.

The flowchart shows the development steps for each knitting pattern, and the required order. In this installment of the story, I will describe the first step, Designing. This is the most creative phase of the process but it must take into consideration the phases that follow. For instance, a design must be feasible so that a knitting pattern can be written for it. And it can’t be too complex or else it won’t be possible to find a sample knitter who is capable of making it.

Designing the Blankets

The book is inspired by the Prisma blanket that I designed and tested on Ravelry, pictured at right. The test knitters for this blanket, were very enthusiastic, and since I had a lot more ideas for geometric blankets, I thought it might be best to develop them together and publish a book.

As described in my previous post, after weighing the options to self-publish or use a traditional publisher I chose the latter. I searched for knitting books on Amazon and made a list of the publishers of those books. I developed five additional blanket designs and used them as examples in the proposals I wrote and sent to publishers. Most of the publishers wanted to see an “example chapter,” and the designs I included fulfilled that requirement. Eventually I entered into a “book deal” with one of those publishers.

Theme

A book that is a compilation should follow a theme, and for this book the theme was colorful, geometric designs. I had previously published several sweaters in garter stitch with geometric designs, and was very familiar with its geometric properties. I brain-stormed about different shapes that could easily be knit with garter stitch, and about how to combine shapes into interesting and novel designs . If I could think of a clever construction method, that was even better. For instance, instead of sewing shapes together, some blankets use Pick up and Knit on previously completed shapes, or use 3-needle Bind Off to attach 2 shapes. As inspirations, I looked at quilt designs and ceramic tile designs. But many designs emerged as I was playing around with shapes or thinking about new knit construction methods.

Illustrations

Although I could have drawn the designs by hand, since these designs were geometric, it was a lot easier to use a computer tool that could copy, rotate and recolor geometric shapes. After 33 years of being an engineer I know the Microsoft suite of tools well, so I chose to use Powerpoint. In this tool I could quickly draw a design and then play with shapes and colors to make different combinations. I also know Adobe Illustrator but for me, Powerpoint is faster and is so familiar that it is almost like an extension of my brain. Now that most of the blankets are knitted, it is really amazing how much they look like the original illustrations. Since that was the goal it shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.

Colors

Prisma Blanket pattern by Margaret Holzmann, photo by Gerard Holzmann (instagram: @portraits.by.edsger). Will appear in the “Big Book of Blankets” to be available in 2021

During design, I generally used whatever colors best expressed the design. I paint so I am already familiar with the color wheel and color theory. Early on, I considered having a standard color palette for the book, but discarded this idea as being too constraining on the designs. At this stage, no consideration was given to whether yarns would be available in the colors used in the design. In retrospect, it might have been better to have selected a yarn brand and line up front for each design, because I did spend a lot of time researching to find a brand and line that offered the colors needed. For some yarn brands and lines there are so many colors, so finding colors matching the design was easy, but for other yarn lines that offer just one shade of each color or are missing some secondary colors, this was a problem. I didn’t consider whether the colors would look good with most people’s decors, although I did make a conscious effort to include a few designs in earth-tones and grays which should match most people’s furnishings.

Iterating and down-selecting

I designed in four iterations. The first six designs were developed during the phase when I was looking for a publisher, and after that four more blankets were designed. I then wrote patterns for all 10 designs, got yarn support (the topic of the next post in this series), wrote the patterns and had them technical edited and got sample knitting started. This process was repeated twice for 2 sets of 10 blanket designs, for a total of 30 blankets. Having 3 sets of blankets all in different stages of development was a challenge to my organizational skills. I used email records and a spreadsheet to track the status and open work for each design.

During all the design iterations more designs were generated than could be included in the book. About half of the designs were definitely good enough for inclusion in the book, but I wasn’t sure about the other half. So I asked for review and feedback from my publisher, relatives, friends, and any of my daughter’s friends who could be lured over to my computer when innocently visiting the house. I did observe that some reviewers liked only the blue blankets, or none of the purple blankets, so it was important to ask whether they would like a particular design better in another color scheme. I am grateful to everyone who helped me with the down-select. From this feedback I got a better sense for which designs were universally appealing.

The previous post in this series is Deciding whether to Self-Publish or use a Traditional Publisher

The next post in this series is Getting Yarn Support