My Design Process Part 2b: The Stitch Pattern cont.

Apologise for the delay in this post. All I can say is...life.

So in the last instalment, I wrote about how I came up with the stitch used in the border for the Join The Crew Cowl. I'm now going to explain my process for putting together the Feather Family stitches. Knowing that I wanted the stitches to represent each character, I had to think about an aspect of their personality or role in the book that could be interpreted into a stitch pattern.

Jenks

               

                                                Corbin                                                                                Ohan

Jenks, Corbyn and Ohan were the easiest to decide upon, I used Jenks' relationship with Lovey, Corbin's role as the ships Algaeist and Ohan's Ohaness (you'll understand if you've read the book) as inspiration. 

Kizzy is a badass, but at the same time she has a sweet side to her personality so her stitch pattern reflected this.

I knew that the section of the cowl dedicated to Sissix would have to reflect her scales, and initially decided to work the herringbone stitch. This didn't have enough elasticity, so I switched it out for something that was easier to work yet still providing a texture that looked like scales.

Dr. Chef (my favourite character) had to be something food related, I went about searching for stitches that (supposedly) looked like various fruits.

Rosemary and Ashby were the hardest to do, because though they play a major role there wasn't anything about their personalities that initially jumped out at me. In the end, I found a pattern for Ashby, which was supposed to be a tree but (to me) looked like an arrow head and would represent him being a leader.

Rosemary required a bit of creative thinking, she had a secret which she was keeping from the rest of the crew so I choose a slip stitch pattern. In my mind this reflected the fact that she was hiding something.

I know some of you are reading this thinking that I may have been a little too literal when choosing stitch patterns, but that's just the way I work. I like my work to truly say something about the person or thing it represents. Sometimes this is very obvious, other times it's subtle, either way I try to stay true to the theme I'm working on.

So I have my stitch patterns and I'm about to CO. However, I realise that working it flat would require 3 stitch patterns being worked at the same time. It would also make it difficult to decide how many rows should be work in each section so that they would not only be the same, but also fit into the row repeat of the Lovey section. Most importantly the end look would be going in the wrong direction.

In the next instalment I will talk about Making Changes.

How important do you think the stitch pattern is, when depicting a character or theme?