I had a new pattern come out last month, and I shockingly neglected to blog about it. My new pullover is called Tessellate, and I’m sure you’ve read all of the details about the pattern itself at this point, so I’m going to tell you about the design process instead!
Sometime in 2015, I bought a sweater’s worth of beautiful blue Hazel Knits Cadence. I can’t actually remember when or why I bought the yarn, because this was around the time I stopped blogging as frequently. (Perhaps that’s a good reason to get back into my blogging habit even if very few interact and comment here anymore?) Anyway, Cadence is a very round and glossy yarn, so it was asking to be made into something heavily textured. I was very busy working on Stranded Magazine’s first issue, but Thanksgiving was coming up and I had plans to only work on personal knitting over the holiday. I knit some swatches and dove into this project while at the airport on the way to visit my parents.
After I got back from Thanksgiving vacation, I had to put it on hold for a while, but when I tagged along on a family ski trip to Canada in December 2015, out it came again! I pretty much finished the pullover over Christmas, but I couldn’t decide on the neckline treatment and had to get started on the 2016 Outfit Along pattern, Zinone, so the project got put on hold for almost a year.
Last fall I decided to stick with the simple crew neck and call my sweater finished. I was really happy with it and took it with me to my parent’s over Thanksgiving 2016. That’s where I took the warmer, sunnier set of pictures in this post.
These days I always run the numbers and write the pattern as I work. I do that even if I’m not sure if a personal project will become a published pattern because it’s easier to do that as I go, and I’m always optimistic in the early stages. That meant that it was easy to put together a pattern after I got a bunch of requests on Instagram. To keep with the vacation-knitting-vibe, I took the sample with me on the 2016 family ski trip and took the pattern photos there.
I worked on the pattern this fall and winter between other projects, and when it was done, it went to my technical editor. After that, a few friends got copies to play with, and finally, more than a year and a half after I started, Tessellate was ready to go! Now you can knit your own version. Visit Tessellate’s page here on Untangling Knots or on Ravelry to learn more of the specific details or to buy a copy.
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