Designer Tip #4: Watch Those Swatches!

Yarn crafts are not instant-gratification enterprises (okay, maybe they can be), and neither is knit/crochet design. And, as discussed in Designer Tip #3, rejection happens. If you’ve been at the designing game for a little while, chances are you’ve got a pile of swatches in your closet or at the bottom of your yarn bin. (For those who are wondering what to do with them, I have some ideas about that; but that’s a conversation for another post.) Chances are also that some of them have been sitting there a while.

Unless you are possessed of a memory beyond the lot of mortals—Mycroft Holmes, you have my permission to speak up—you won’t remember every last detail of all of your swatches. If you plan to reuse your swatches and their corresponding designs, as detailed in Tip #3 above, it will be vital to remember the yarn you used, your needle size, and possibly the name of the design if it has one. Even if you don’t intend to try again with that exact design, knowing your yarn and needle size will give you valuable information on the fabric and gauge created by that yarn and needle size together.

Above is an experimental swatch that was originally intended as a magazine submission, over a year ago. When I decided not to submit the piece, the swatch disappeared into the depths of my closet; however, I liked the fabric and wanted to replicate it for another project. I remembered what yarn I used (Knit Picks Palette) but not the needle size. My best guess is a US 4 or 5, as that tends to be my default needle size for lace in fingering weight, but I couldn’t say for certain without swatching again.

Here’s another swatch with a similar quandary. Again, this is Palette, but I have no better guesses as to the needle I used. Rather amusingly, my photographic memory recalls knitting it on my Knit Picks Nickel-Plated interchangeable needles, using a green cable rather than a purple cable, but not the actually useful information… This design is currently being rehashed in different yarn (recall this) and required a good bit of swatching and frogging when I would rather have been knitting on the sample.

Behold the new and improved swatch-watching system! It isn’t complicated; usually I have no trouble remembering the yarn I used, as texture and color tend to embed themselves in my mind easily, so my labels only include needle/hook size. For you, the necessary info may be slightly different, but the principle is the same. Anything that you think you’ll need to know about your swatch later on, especially things you’re liable to forgetting, should be on the label. Develop your own shorthand if you need to, but do it. As soon as a swatch is washed, blocked, dry, and photographed, it gets a slip of paper and a pin and is placed in storage. These pins are the cheap kind from the craft store, which I can’t use for blocking as they rust; but they’re perfect for swatch labeling. Needless to say, if you’re going to use pins to do this, keep your swatches out of reach of small people and critters.

This tip applies to non-rejected designs as well; recently I created a sample for a design that was accepted for publication almost nine months ago. Between now and then, I completely forgot what needle size I used to create my original swatch, which made for some guessing games when the time came for sample knitting. (This is why I now label my swatches after making them, even before I find out whether they’ve been accepted or not.)

Mycroft Holmes was a genius—with a better memory and better powers of deduction than his brother Sherlock—but never became a detective. In Sherlock’s own words,

He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. And yet he was absolutely incapable of working out the practical points…

Many designers are dreamers—and this is a good thing. The ideas flying through our brains and off our needles become part of life. But how about actually keeping track of our yarny dreams and bringing them to fruition? By paying attention to the practical points (such as swatch info) we make life easier for ourselves and eliminate a step in bringing our work to publication. In other words, make Sherlock proud.

Have suggestions for swatch-watching, or questions about anything in this post? Have other questions about design? Leave them in the comments below and I’ll consider them for future posts.