How to: Design Your Own Knitting Charts

I daydream in jumpers. While other people might daydream about what to eat for tea, or what colour to paint their nails next, I find myself thinking "Wouldn't a jumper with some kind of flying pig motif on it look brilliant?" Of course, finding such a specific jumper is nigh on impossible, never mind finding a knitting pattern for one. So, to strive towards my novelty jumper dreams, I like to design my own knitting motif charts.

FYI, I didn't make or design this jumper, but it is simply too fabulous to not include in a post about knitting motifs. 

Making your own knitting charts is a great way to personalise already existing patterns, and can be used to take your own original patterns to the next level. It isn't that hard of a process either, although I would recommend past experience of knitting from a chart, just so you understand how to follow a chart.

You'll need some pens, pencils, scrap paper, graph paper and some needles and wool of your choice.

First up, I like to just doodle my ideas on paper, just to see how I would use each chart and whether it would work in reality. As you can tell from the quality of my doodles, you hardly have to be Rembrandt to do this. This just makes you think about how the motif will work, whether you need it to be large or small, and whether you will actually use it or not.

That cat jumper has been on my mind for too long now, one day I will get around to making it.

Next, I like to sketch out my design in more detail. This is going to be a pretty simple motif, only needing two colours, but eventually you can start introducing more colours and detail into your designs. At this point, you may change your mind about your design - I swapped to a jumping bunny motif.

Thinking about how large you want your motif to be, draw it out on graph paper. It's best to do this in pencil, but I have done mine in red pen to show you my workings.

Using a contrasting coloured pen, go over the lines of your design, but this time only working in squares i.e. following the lines on your graph paper. I can almost guarantee that this first motif will require some tweaking to make it absolutely perfect, but all designs have to start somewhere.

This is what my completed design looked like. Of course, the only way you will know what it looks like when it is knitted up is to, er, knit it up. I use stocking stitch to knit my designs up, as that is the stitch that will be used in the actual garment.

This is when you can see some areas that you might want to change. I thought that the snout of my rabbit was too pointy, and that the body was also too long. I just redrafted my design onto graph paper until I got a chart that really worked out well.

This is how my final chart worked out, and I'm pretty happy with the result. Now all I need to do is knit myself a jumper covered with rabbits. There's a "woolly jumper" joke in there somewhere...

Not really into novelty motifs? You could also use graph paper to design colourful patterns for fairisle, using the same technique - just colour in the graph paper squares to create a colourful pattern of your choice.

Messy back - *eek*!

I hope you go forth with your new found knitting motif knowledge and design all kinds of crazy charts. How about a chart of a Roy Lichtenstein artwork? Or a Benedict Cumberbatch jumper? You can make any chart that your imagination comes up with (no matter how weird).

Let me know if you try this, or have any questions about the technique!

This blog entry is my submission to the Deramores Blog Awards 2014. Deramores is the UK’s number one online retailer of knitting and crochet supplies.