What is it with magicians and rabbits? I’m such a nerd that I started wondering about my own rhetorical question, and Googled it—nothing conclusive. If it’s just for the shock of pulling a live critter out of an empty hat, why doesn’t a magician go for a squirrel every now and then? Or maybe a prairie dog? Or a raccoon? (On second thought, that’s a good way to end up with infected bites. Scratch that last one.)
In any case, the point is “Why do knit/crochet designers do the same things over and over and over again?”
Almost a year ago, I wrote a blog post about reusing rejected design ideas, which you can read here. In that post I listed four main reasons why designs are rejected by publishers.
- The proposal did not include all the required information, or was not formatted according to guidelines.
- The design did not fit the theme of the call for submissions.
- The design is too similar to too many other designs, whether already-published pieces or submissions for the call in question.
- The design doesn’t fit with the publisher’s established aesthetic.
Even though rejection happens and I’ve written about how to bounce back from it, of course we’d all rather avoid it if possible. I’ve done an extensive treatment of the first point in my very first Designer Tip on putting together design proposals. Today, in response to point 3, I’ll be discussing how to make your designs stand out from the crowd.
Why Everyone Thinks Rabbits Are Magic
As I said, I looked it up. The best Google had to offer me (any magic aficionados reading this are free to inform me otherwise in the comments) is that magicians started pulling rabbits out of their top hats for shock factor, and, as a side hustle, would charge extra to children who wanted to come up onstage after the show to pet the rabbit.
Problem is, they created one of the most iconic cultural idioms in the history of the modern West.
Now, why is creating a cultural phenomenon a problem? Going viral and being recognizable is a good thing for business, right?
Not if every magician and his second cousin are now pulling rabbits on every street corner.
My favorite example of this in the knitting world is Andrea Mowry’s now-iconic Find Your Fade shawl. The kite shape, simple techniques, and color play opportunities hit all the right nails at just the right time. Just over 5 years later, the shawl has over 10,500 Ravelry projects to its name and almost 50,000 likes.
There’s one other stat no one has been keeping track of: the knockoffs.
Granted, it’s hard to classify something as a knockoff in an industry like ours, where many techniques and ideas organically permeate hundreds, even thousands, of crafters’ minds independently of one another. But when an idea is as widespread as suddenly as Mowry’s, it’s hard to ignore the coincidences. For instance, Mowry didn’t invent the kite shawl shape and kite shawls were published long before Find Your Fade made its debut—but now that shape is known to pretty much everyone who knits.
This doesn’t appear to be a problem for Mowry, as the number of projects (and presumably of purchases) is only going up. The problem is for the rest of us magicians pulling rabbits out of hats on street corners, while Mowry deservedly hangs out in the Big Top.
I think we all know the feeling by now of scrolling through Ravelry, Lovecrafts, Etsy, or any other pattern-shopping platform and being inundated by designs upon designs that, after a while, begin to look exactly alike. Rabbits come in white, brown, black, blue, and many other colors; but in the end they’re still rabbits. And we all notice when, in the middle of all those rabbits, we spot a squirrel.
Visit Lots of Magic Shows
So how to avoid this—being another rabbit that a prospective buyer or publisher will scroll past in a weary brain-fog? The first order of business is to make sure you know what a rabbit looks like. In other words, know what everyone else is doing before assuming that you’ve come up with a captivating original idea.
I only know of one way to do this: tons of research. We all have our favorite ways of finding and absorbing information, and my suggestion is to find the ways that work for you and hit ’em hard. Social media, particularly Instagram and Pinterest, which are image-based, offer a bird’s-eye view of trends and fads in the knitting and crochet communities. As I prefer more targeted searches, I like to conduct my research through Ravelry. On a regular basis, I’ll look through designer forums to check out the new releases; I keep mental notes of things that stand out as well as things I’ve seen too many of. (More info on the standouts later…) I also use the filtered pattern search function frequently; for example, I might do a search for 3-color asymmetrical fingering weight shawls and see what crops up. The way you order your search can also be instructive. “Newest first” or “most popular first” can tell you a lot about what’s currently fashionable vs. what’s successful over the long haul. Make sure to look at publication dates if you’re doing “most popular first”. (“Newest first” can bring up great new designers to follow, but that’s another discussion.)
These targeted searches are helpful for numerous reasons; for one, they reveal which areas of the market are over-saturated. Many knitters have noted the overabundance of top-down, symmetrical, triangular lace shawls. Everyone knows how these go—garter tab cast-on, work x repeats of some leafy or geometric lace pattern while increasing at the edges and spine, abruptly transition to a pointy edging or one with eyelets, and bind off (loosely, mind you). A few of these shawls are as ubiquitous as Find Your Fade. Evelyn A. Clark’s Swallowtail Shawl has over 12,000 projects on Ravelry, and in all likelihood more have been made; the pattern was published before Ravelry’s creation in 2007. But nobody’s counting the scads of lookalikes, because most of them aren’t memorable enough to be counted.
I use the example of top-down triangles deliberately; I’ll come back to it later.
Another function of these searches is to bring up unusual patterns, ones that stand out from the pack. These come up in most searches and are worth collecting someplace, to refer back to later; a quick visit to my Ravelry profile will reveal that my “Favorites” list is (ahem) lengthy. Unusual doesn’t necessarily mean bizarre, never-before-seen, or complicated (in fact, the market for complicated patterns is becoming saturated, particularly in lace-knitting circles); it means different, in some subtle or not-so-subtle way. These designs are worth studying and learning from. I’ll discuss the art of drawing inspiration from other designs in a future post (as well as the rather sticky ethics that accompany it). But suffice it to say that research, both of what you want to do and what you don’t, is key.
Commanding the Stage
Oftentimes, unoriginal designs are the result of over-reliance on what other designers are doing, or on what we think others will like (as opposed to what we actually like). I referenced my own experience of this lesson in my interview with Stone Wool a few months ago. This can come out in trend-obsessed chameleonism—yes, I made that word up, but it gets the job done—or ham-handed imitation. Or it can come out in contrariness, in thinking that we have to do the opposite of whatever everyone else is doing. This is kind of like thinking that because Mabel the Magic Maven used a blue rabbit in her hat-trick, so must we; or, to the other extreme, that because Mabel used a white rabbit, we ought to use a skunk.
In either case, we allow Mabel to dictate what we design rather than our own tastes and creativity. Whether we or our prospective buyers/publishers realize it or not, this exudes insecurity rather than confidence or real aesthetic judgement. And both are needed for success.
Now would be a good time to insert a caution: arrogance, self-preening, and snobbery are not the same thing as confidence. It’s possible for a young designer to overestimate his or her own current skills and unwittingly present themselves in a bombastic or salesy way. It’s also possible for an experienced designer with a well-developed style to look down on those who show their inexperience. And it’s equally possible for a designer in either career phase to put on a blustery image to mask insecurity. When I say confidence, I’m referring to the ability to make thoughtful, reasoned-out design decisions based on your own aesthetic preferences and to stand behind them in your own mind, while still being humble enough to self-critique (or take criticism from others) and learn for next time.
This mindset of confidence is nearly always underpins originality. Marconi and Edison were ridiculed by others in their day, but without the knowledgeable, reasonable confidence they had in their ideas, and the fearlessness to explore them, they wouldn’t have become the inventors of wireless radio or the lightbulb, respectively.
Norah Gaughan is a phenomenal example of this in the design world. At the time of this writing she’s been in the business of pattern design for nearly 30 years, and my guess is she’s weathered a lot of changes in the industry. While she’s tried out pretty much everything, as a look through her 20-page Ravelry portfolio will evidence, she’s best known for her striking and innovative cable creations. Not everyone will like them; many are unorthodox. But every piece communicates boldness, and a mind that isn’t afraid to learn or put out something quirky.
So if you’re going to pull a squirrel out of that hat, have a good reason—and own it.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Research and confidence are all very well; applying them is another story. And while a very few special people are churning out stunners from day one, the only way for the rest of us to rise is practice.
Design a lot. A lot, a lot. The best magicians practice tricks until they become smooth and reflexive—the same should be true for your design sense. As you do this, you’ll organically discover your own style: what you like, what you don’t, and what you want to spend time exploring.
You might even discover that your style is pulling rabbits out of hats. But a practiced rabbit-puller will stand out.
Sometimes A Rabbit Is Just The Thing
As I’ve said earlier, doing the opposite of whatever’s common or in fashion can often be mistaken for originality. Doing something wildly different is the obvious way to be seen; and in the case of someone like Norah Gaughan, the results can be spectacular. But not all of us need to do things that have never been done before (in fact, the more patterns I see the more I realize how rare the Norah Gaughans of this world are). Rabbits are rabbits; but a connoisseur’s attention will be caught by a chinchilla or a blanc de hotot.
A designer that immediately comes to mind for me is Jennifer Weissman of Shadystroll Knits. While her designs rarely make explosive, viral entrances, her Ravelry designer page shows that they’re well-loved. Her pieces aren’t brain-benders for the most part; in fact, she often uses traditional shapes that are much maligned, like the dreaded symmetrical triangle. But her confident creativity is apparent in the details.
If you follow this blog, you’ll have seen me enthusing about her Shh! Shawl on more than one occasion.(These photos are of the Shh! Shawl I made for myself.) This is exactly the kind of shawl that has been classed by most as boring and conventional: garter tab, top-down, increases at the edges and spine. But the single column of leaves down the spine jumps out against a background of stockinette and grabs the attention.
A closer look reveals other details, such as the repetition of garter stitch and eyelets, and the consistent presence of the center spine through all the sections. However, the leaves are what make the design pop. The simple but unexpected move of using the leaves to emphasize the spine, which most designers tend to treat as a utilitarian structural element to be ignored or minimized, and then drawing attention to them with the plain background, isn’t something to be seen every day.
Am I saying I know Weissman’s mind and how she arrived at the design choices she made? No. But I am saying that these, among other reasons, are why the design isn’t easily forgotten.
Nor am I contradicting myself, though it may seem like it. The title of this post is “Not Another Rabbit”; but I am not saying that you should never pull a rabbit out of your top hat. I am saying never pull a rabbit out of your top hat in such a way that makes the audience think “Not Another Rabbit”.
In other words, there are rare rabbit breeds; and they stand out at a magic show just as much as a squirrel.
Conclusion
There are just a few things to keep in mind on the topic of originality in knit and crochet design; despite my long-winded musings, the subject isn’t one that needs to, or should, be overthought. From the top:
- Be conscious of what other designers are doing, so that you don’t stumble into the marshy ground of an over-saturated market. Not only will this keep you from accidentally becoming a lookalike; it’s a way to show consideration for fellow designers as well, and I’ll cover that in a future post.
- Grow in confidence. This may sound a bit like saying “grow taller”. Confidence isn’t something that can be forced; but over time it will occur naturally as you grow in other areas as a designer—in your technical knowledge, experience, connections, and artistry. Which leads into the third point:
- Practice. To paraphrase Aristotle, we learn to do things by learning the things we are learning to do. Ultimately, reading this blog post isn’t what’s going to grow you as a designer. Your own willingness to put in time and effort, and to fail from time to time, is the primary conduit for improvement.
- It’s okay to be a rabbit. It really is! Despite the title of this post, creativity doesn’t consist of deviation and contrariness. The real killer for originality isn’t doing something that’s been done before, but doing it without consideration or—again—confidence and joy.
Have a question about design that you’d like to have answered in a post like this? Leave it in the comments or shoot me an email here, and I’ll keep it in mind for future articles.
