My knitting patterns

Making a living as a knitwear designer 1/2

27 May 2018 • Leave a Comment

Like every personal post, dealing with subjects difficult to talk about, this one took me a while to mature and to finally write it… Let’s dive in ! As a knitwear designer, it is really hard to make a living out of it. Everyone knows the names of some famous knitwear designers (Ysolda Teague, Stephen West, Jared Flood, Andrea Moory, Joji Locatelli…)which are well-known and whom we think sell a lot of patterns (right- or wrongfully, I don’t know). In fact, this is not the case for most knitwear designers…

New knitting pattern : Rosalaine

1 May 2018 • Leave a Comment

Sophie (@sophie.kamalaine on Instagram)is a fiber friend. She is passionate about yarn, wool, their origin, how they are processed, natural dyeing. One day, she decided to go for it. Last Fall, she came to a yarn festival where I had a booth and she handed me 2 skeins of HER yarn, offering me to create a pattern with it… I couldn’t resist !

Sweet Arrows baby blanket

4 April 2017 • Leave a Comment

2new knitting patterns in 10 days… and 2 blog posts in less than a week… 2017 begins well ! If we just forget the nearly 3 months of silence : it was for a good cause ! 🙂 But I warn you : don’t expect the same rythm all year long, you might be dissapointed… 😉 Truth be told, the knitting pattern I’m introducing today was ready for a long time. It is, in fact, the baby blanket I knitted while pregnant last September. Everything was ready : the chart, the written explanations .I just had to work the page layout and organize the test-knit, but at this stage of my pregnancy, I was too tired, just couldn’t do it. So, the pattern waited its time until my brain was a (little) bit more available… After Madeleine ‘s birth and a few weeks to find a new pace in our family life, Sweet Arrows is finally published and available !

Narsissi

30 March 2017 • Leave a Comment

A few days ago, I published my first knitting pattern of 2017 : Narsissi… Narsissi is a lovely pair of delicate and feminine fingerless mittens that I imagined for a magazine. Sadly, they didn’t choose it. As it kept lingering in my mind, I decided to publish it on my own !

Cookie Surprise

22 November 2016 • Leave a Comment

I have lots and lots of finished projects to show you (some from quite a while ago), but let’s talk first about the latest knitting pattern I published last week : Cookie Surprise. When I went to Paris last January, I went, as usual, at L’OisiveThé and La Bien Aimée to say Hi and pet some beautiful yarns, such as CoopKnit Sock Yeah ! 🙂 Aimée offered me to create a shawl pattern with this exact yarn, with one goal : it had to be easy for knitters who want to begin lace knitting. I said Yes immediately (who can resist beautiful yarn ?), but told her it would be published before Fall, beacause I had other projects to finished first… And I went home with 4 lovely skeins in my bag (quite reasonnable, no ?)… I barely got home that I already had an idea : triangular shawl, garter stitch, lace arrows… I swatched and did all the math, but I had to put aside for awhile to finish other things.

Autumn adventures

17 October 2016 • Leave a Comment

Aventures d’automne (Autumn adventures) is the 3rd pattern I created around the 4 seasons, after Doux Printemps and Rêves d’été. For this season, I knew what I wanted to make : a cowl, easy to slip on when you go outside to enjoy the lasts bits of sun, when it is begginning to get a bit cold… I imagined a big braid, some zigzags and twisted stockinette to have a bit of structure. From the first sketch to the final sample, for once, I had no change of mind, no issue…

Summer Dreams

29 June 2016 • Leave a Comment

Rêves d’été (aka Summer Dreams) is the last pattern I published on June 20th, for summer, in partnership with Cécile La Fée Fil. It is the second knitting pattern I’ve imagined in my 4-seasons collection, right after Doux Pintemps (Sweet Spring). I must say it gave me a hard time…

Sweet spring

25 March 2016 • Leave a Comment

Doux Printemps (which means sweet spring in French), is the name of my latest knitting pattern, published on march 20th on Ravelry. But let’s go back to the first quarter of 2015. In order to have a bit more visibility and regularity for publishing new designs, I had decided to create 4 knitting patterns (shawl or accessories), one for each season, to be published in 2016, at each season change (which means you can expect a new pattern on June 20th, then September 22nd and December 21st). At that time, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to make as knitting patterns, but I had very specific images of the context I wanted for the photoshoot and I knew I wanted to work with indie dyers and “luxurious” yarns… For the other season, you’ll see when that time commes, but for Spring, I had this vision of an orchard in blooms and “Thinking about japanese spring” from (Vi)laines was the perfect color to stick with my theme !