Knitwear Design 101: Introduction to Surface Pattern

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What is pattern? And what is surface pattern design?

Surface pattern design involves creating a motif or artistic element that can be repeated across a surface. The technical name for this kind of pattern repeat is tessellation.

“Pattern” is a loaded, confusing word – especially for knitters.  It can refer to:

• the instructions to knit a design; or
• the tessellation or stitch patterning across the knitted fabric.

More formally (and nerd-ily)…

It can serve as a model or aspirational figure – “If you follow the pattern, you’ll get a sweater like the one in the photo”. Or, more likely in that situation, a recipe.  Instructions are received and, like cooking, they are used as a base for creation, with tweaks made at the knitter’s discretion.

The second understanding of “pattern” is more generative. It evokes fatherly or paternal qualities that speak of growth.  Pattern is “not merely the recurrence of similar forms, but their recurrence at regular intervals” (Day: 1939, p.4).  This consonance of pattern makes the ears happy when music is played, and the eyes happy when harmonious forms are seen on textiles and ceramics.

Most surface pattern design is aimed at weavers, illustrators, or artists who design for fabric, tiles or wallpaper prints.  Specialisms like this are typically constrained by the dimensions of the canvas. For example, print designers need to know the size of the fabric, sheet of wallpaper, or tile to make sure that the pattern fits perfectly.

Surface pattern design for knitting

Knitters and crocheters don’t have quite the same problem.  This is because the surface pattern is an intrinsic part of the fabric, and the fabric itself is a constructed textile. It’s made from scratch – or a length of yarn. There’s no need to worry about fitting things into a predetermined space.  For knitting, you cast on as many stitches as you like.

That said, this freedom only works if the pattern is centred – which the designer ensures – and if the knitter understands how the pattern repeat works.  To convey this information, it’s necessary to dive into the workings of patterns and how tessellations come together. When knitwear and surface pattern design meet, we get beautiful textures. Who wouldn’t want to know more?

I share some of this in my knitwear design taster course on design development. Part 1 is about building a collection, but part 2 is about how I developed the tessellations for the Something to Knit Together Winter Edition.

Why it’s important to learn about tessellations

Regardless of whether you’re knitting or designing a pattern or tessellation, you need to know something about the unit of pattern and subsequently how the repeat is formed.  The communication of this information is what often confuses knitters. 

Cables and Fair Isle style patterns work in exactly the same way as lace patterns. However, cables and colourwork are more readily understood because the visuals are more immediate.  If your cable twists the wrong way, or if you accidentally knit a stitch or two in the wrong colour, you’ll often see it before too long! 

For lace patterns, the scale and detail might mean that you aren’t aware until a few rows later.  It’s not that lace is more difficult, but it does mean that understanding more about the design principles of pattern repeats might help.

How surface pattern design applies to knitwear design

In my view, there are three tenets of surface pattern design that are especially important for knitting and crochet:

1. All patterns have a geometric foundation or plan
   Geometry is especially important for knitting because stitches are discrete units.  Creating intricate detail as you would with fine art materials is impossible.  The line is a vector; the stitch is a pixel.  Geometric shapes are easy to form and identify because of the pixel stitches we know and love, but the geometry goes much deeper than this.
2. Turnovers are a VERY BIG DEAL
   In the same way that ‘yarnover’ is a generic term for creating a lace eyelet, so turnover is a generic term that describes the movement of a basic motif along an axis.  This movement can be radial, along a line of symmetry – or both. 
3. Drop repeats are a VERY BIG DEAL
   These are crucial for knitting and crochet because they frequently resolve technical or structural problems within the fabric.  There are two main kinds of drop repeat: the kind that drop vertically, and the kind that drop or shift horizontally. 

In mathematical terms, 2 and 3 are types of translation. I don’t want to say too much more about maths and geometry for point 1 at this stage! But if anyone reading this has used Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, it might be familiar. You’ll recognise this as the kind of thing you do under the Object > Transform menu.

Next time…

These three tenets lead back to the fact that pattern is generative. There is a notion of increasing, mirroring, or multiplying in relation to the original alignment.  Next month, I’ll talk about drop repeats, how they work for knitwear and surface pattern design, and why they are so important. You might never look at stitch patterns in quite the same way again!

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