Pottering about (the wildflowers) - my first garment design

Grab your cuppa and have a read all about My. First. Garment.

My weight has fluctuated from a small 12 to a stuffed 16, so the idea of making garments just seemed like an absolute waste of time. That, and sizing, and MATHS. But the problem is, I have fallen in love with indie hand dyed 4ply yarn, and all those GORGEOUS knitted yokes.  And so, in a COVID-19 driven era, I learn how to make garments, and my brain has been running WILD since.

The initial inspiration - nature and colour

Long walks around our local village hand in hand with my partner (how romantic? except actually we always end up with clammy hot and sweaty hands, mmm nice), we are surrounded by farmland and fields and I tell you the wildflowers are glorious. I started to put a pinterest board together to capture the colours and feels of these walks. This then evolved throughout the project.

The yarn - yum
The first yarn I wanted to use was obvious - the delectable sisters at Hook & Light, a local due who dye natural fibres from botanicals (you can check out my interview with them in another post!

The design process
At first I wasn't brave enough to do top down yokes, so I thought I'd ease in with a flat rectangle with arm holes, like a scarf-wrap-shawl-poncho-type thing... (not really a garment, huh), my sister has a commercially bought one so I asked her for a photo and the measurements so I could use that as my design base. And from there, scribble scribble scribble... one thing I have learnt is that I need a proper design notebook as I have indecipherable thought notes on the back of envelopes, backs of my child's artwork, and random pages in two different note books (which are actually my partner's work note books!). 

I did some research on the types of stitches I wanted to do, worked out counts, and of I went. But eventually I realised it was not right, I had been lazy and it was uninspired. The holes too big, sitting too far at the back, top daisy/star stitches too heavy for the bottom stitches. Because I started bottom up, I had committed about 20 hours of work already to it. BUT one thing was clear, it would be a very pretty yoke top if I could get it to work in the round, and have short sleeves. This is where Dora came in. And, don't wince too much, I frogged it all. All of it. The whole lot. 

Yup, all of that.
I did some more reading on garment design, how to measure and create shapes, what to do and what NOT to do. I cannot thank Michelle (Dora) from Dora Does who is an inspiration and without her help and support I would never have made it as far as I have. You should absolutely check out her blog. From here it all started to fall in to place, some exchanges with Michelle and I added some more rows to the yoke before split, I was getting impatient. But I was delighted with how the design was coming together, and just how imagined. I had, in all honestly, wanted this to be a spring top design, but here I am in June waiting for it to come back from the testers, so will be lucky if it comes out before the end of summer! Ah well, another lesson here is design two seasons ahead for appropriate season release timing. Which is funny as I am currently working on a summer top which will probably be ready at Christmas. 

The hardest part was the sizing maths, oh dear lord and hadn't I picked a difficult stitch to increase on in any case, let along work out sizing multiples. It took for three evenings of work to finalise the pattern sizing. I have only done XS to XL but want to re-look to see if I can make it more size inclusive. 

Thanks for reading! I will writing up design debriefs for my patterns, so if there is any detail missing here that I can include in future write ups, please do let me know!

Oh! The pattern is available now on LoveCrafts, Ravelry and Etsy - check out the links to my stores on the right ☺