Modifications

I’ve been working on a modified version of one of my soon to be released patterns, because I thought it might be fun to show it in a slightly different style. This got me thinking about how much I love to see the ways that people modify my patterns, while I’m designing something I always end up thinking of so many different possible directions for the design and of course it’s only ever realistic for me to actually follow one or two of those. I also love how eager people are to share their pattern modifications and how easy Ravelry makes that. Sometimes people worry that I won’t like people changing my patterns, that I’ll feel precious about my vision, but that couldn’t be further from the truth – if I didn’t want people to make them their own I probably wouldn’t be publishing patterns! So here are a few of my favourite pattern mod projects, at least of the one’s I’ve actually seen – you’ve been busy, there are 500 pages to go through on Ravelry and I sadly haven’t yet had time to look through them all.

I get a lot of inspiration from children’s clothing, and have a rather childish style at times myself, so it’s hardly surprising that some of my sweaters look wonderful downsized – like this adorable toddler Coraline.

Two of the most popular modifications to Vivian are a collar and buttonbands .

Sometimes something as simple as changing the arrangement of colours slightly can add a lot to a design, I love the little stripe of the contrast colour on the edging of this Little Birds, alongwith the subtly alternating bird shades.

Here’s a cute Elijah with some contrast colour added with fabric, I love his tusks!

http://www.ravelry.com/projects/geniphyre/coraline
I quite often see cardiganized versions of pullovers, but it doesn’t seem quite so common to go in the other direction. I love these two different
ways of turning Coraline into a pullover though.


An extra special Damson with pretty lace panels incorporated into the existing edging pattern, Jill who made this even kindly shared the chart she made.

Another adorable mini Ysolda pattern mod, the chart from Little Birds is easy to insert into a basic pattern like this little boy’s vest.

Those were just a few of the many, many creative things that knitters have made from my patterns, if you’ve changed things up a little (or a lot!) in your project I’d love to see. Or maybe your inspired by what someone else has done to try making a similarly modified version of a pattern – if so, the Ravelry project notes are your friend. I love how helpful people are with their notes and here’s a tip – you can find projects with particularly helpful notes by choosing “helpful notes” in the dropdown box on the projects page for a particular pattern.