Whether made by hand or with a knitting machine, creating beautiful knitted garments is a skilled craft. Therefore, when it comes to setting a garment price for your customers, never undervalue yourself or your skills.

How to charge for knitted items is a much discussed topic amongst dedicated knitters and there seems to be no hard and fast rules that can be applied.

Certainly, it’s not adequate to use ’shop’ prices as a guideline, since this knitwear is usually mass-produced. Garments which are knitted specifically to a customer’s measurements or requirements are “tailor-made” and therefore far more exclusive than the mass-produced equivalent found in high street stores.

Probably the fairest way to cost a garment is with a calculation based on time and materials:

1. Decide on your hourly rate. This should be a fair rate for your skill. In the UK, by law, the minimum wage rate is approximately £5 (say $10 USD). Your hourly rate should never be lower than the legal minimum.

2. Time the amount of work that goes into the creation of a garment. Time spent on knitting and time taken for ‘making up’ should be kept separate. Often, the making up time can be reduced by using alternative methods of construction (using a linker instead of hand sewing, for example).

3. The cost of the yarn. If you buy a batch of yarn and only use 75% of it, you still need to include the whole 100% of the cost. You may be able to use the remaining 25% of the yarn at a later date or you may not, but at least your cost has been covered at the outset.

4. Oh, those little extras! The cost of trimmings, fastenings, linings - that very exclusive label you sew into the back of the neck - all must be included in your calculations. Add a small sum for contingencies, too. There can always be an unexpected expense - that’s Murphy’s Law!

5. What about incidental costs? These can include telephone calls to the customer, the cost of delivering a garment (petrol or postage!), packing materials and labels.

6. Total up and add more! When you’ve arrived at a total for your time and materials, now is the moment to add a percentage to that figure. This percentage is to reflect your administration costs - time spent on keeping the books, heating, lighting, ‘wear and tear’ on your knitting machine (if you use one) and promotional costs.

What’s that? Do I hear you say that the final figure is a little on the high side? So be it!

If the garment is well made and fits (and remember, it is exclusive), then you are entitled to charge correctly for your services.

However, if you really think your price is too high, the only cost that can sensibly be reduced is your labour rate. If you disregard the other costs, you’ll soon be knitting at a loss.

Copyright 2006 Linda Black

————————————————————— Based in the UK, Linda Black has written several design books for
machine knitters and is a self-confessed knitting addict.
Her web site for both hand and machine knitters can be found at
http://www.getknitting.com
—————————————————————

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Although a craft not as old as other needle arts, knitting has a long history and currently used tools and techniques have come quite some distance from nalbinding (nalbinding employs the thumb and a needle as tools for looping). Examples of nalbinding dating from the third century have been found in destroyed Roman outposts. Evidence of nalbinding is also found in early Scandinavian cultures.

Older examples, dating from the Iron Age (400 B.C. - 1 B.C.) have also been discovered. Knitted socks dating back to the fourth to fifth century A.D. as on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Some of the first knitted gloves had been produced by the thirteenth century. Luxury knitting for Liturgcal clothing such as gloves was state of the art.

Queen Elizabeth I preferred knitted silk stockings, and with good reason: Knitting adds flexibility to a garment even while adding warmth. Knitted stockings were worn mostly by men, however. An appetite for knitted stockings spread through the Royals of the time, which created a growing guild of knitters throughout Europe. However, it wasn’t long before knitted hosery was the preference of the masses, and a competitive hand-production throughout England was underway with peasants willing to knit for low wages. Fashions change, and men started to wear long pants during the time of the French Revolution, and that brought a swift end to the peasants’ trade due to the reduced demand for the long hose.

The knitted sweater is quite young as a form of garment; the first known sweaters date back only to the seventeenth century. Fishermen word hand-knitted sweaters so they could stay warm and free to move about their boats without being caught on the rigging and other parts of the boat. Sweaters knit for and worn by fishermen were known as Guernseys or Ganseys. Each village had its signature pattern. Sadly, one of the reasons for this was to help identify the bodies of men who had died at sea.

Knitwear’s popularity increased as the Industrial Revolution allowed for more leisure time for the wealthy. Men found that playing gold or tennis was much more comfortable in flexible knitting clothing rather than stiff woven fabrics. Women of today who enjoy the freedom of knitted clothing can thank the wives of those wealthy golf-club swinging men. The women of leisure enjoyed sports as well and quickly abandoned the corset in favor of the comfort of knitted garments.

Knitting found is way to America with the Puritans and was taught to all young girls, no only to prevent the evil dangers of idle hands, but to teach a valuable skill that could provide income. Once knitting in factories was in play, hand knitting became a pastime rather than a necessity for middle and upper class women. Social class was not to be ignored, however. Since peasants still also knitted, a class line was drawn in that the leisure knitters developed new ways to hold their needles so as to not be associated with the lower social strata.

Eventually knitting became a medium for creative expression and fashion statements. Colorful and different pattens emerged as the art circled the globe. Coco Chanel introduced her first collection of knitted clothing in 1916, made from surplus knitted fabric intended for undergarments.

Knitting has its own language today, including abbreviations, guage sizes, increases and decreases, special stitches, and shaping symbols. There is a plethora of tools and gadgets available to assist the knitting enthusiast, and a wide variety of knitting needles is also available. Even the simple knitting needle, once only a thumb tip or a branch of a tree, is now a basis for decoration and ornamentation. As with everything else we do, we like to leave our mark. Although not often found in a mass merchandise or larger chain craft stores, an internet search for decorative knitting needles can turn up hundreds of options: Needles with beads that look similar to hat pins on the button end, some have wire coiled around the last 1/2 inch of the needle, some are decorated with polymer clay beads. Filigree caps and other decorative jewelry findings can also make attractive embellishments for knitting needles.

When decorating knitting needles, there are a number of concerns that need to be taken into consideration. You don’t want the finding or embellishment to be getting in the way of the yarn, which leaves the button end of the needle the only place available for easy decorating. Challenges arise in decorating plastic knitting needles because the ability to use a head pin or any sort of sharp point to hold findings or beads is eliminated, therefore embellishments can only be affixed with glue or another adhesive. Since knitting needles come in so many shapes and sizes with the buttons also being of different shapes, it makes it very hard to standardize the decorating unless you use a beading technique on wooden needles. Decorated knitting needles can certainly be as extravagant as the user wants them to be within the limitations of obstructing the ability to knit efficiently.

http:www.guyotbrothers.com

Andrea Twombly
http://www.guyotbrothers.com

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There comes a point, in every knitter’s progress, when you want to design a garment yourself and translate it into a knittable pattern.

But where do you start?

Inspiration for the design may, if you’re very lucky, suddenly present itself in your imagination. You can ‘see’ exactly what it should look like, right there in your mind’s eye.

Now’s the time to sketch what you ‘see’ and make notes about colours and types of yarn to be used.

There are two reasons for doing this. Firstly, so you don’t forget it! You may not have the time to knit it right now, but you can put a quick sketch in your ‘To Do’ file for knitting later on. Secondly, by sketching it and filing it away, you clear your mind so more original ideas can bubble to the surface.

The idea of making a sketch may fill you with horror. ‘I can’t draw’, I hear you say!

Yes, you can draw. Remember that your sketchbook is for your eyes only and, providing you can understand the lines you’ve drawn on the paper, that’s all that matters. If your sketch is very basic, you can always supplement it with lots of notes.

However, there are a couple of ways to cheat with your sketching!

1. Find a photograph in a magazine or book of a model wearing something that closely resembles the shape of your garment idea and photocopy it. Cut out the shape and use the ‘hole’ as a stencil. If you mount your stencil on to card, it can be used several times for different ideas.

2. Take the same photograph and trace the garment outline. Photocopy your tracing as many times as you need and sketch your ideas on top.

The actual translation of your sketches into knitting will not be without problems but you have to remember that it’s an original idea you’re dealing with and that requires patience.

Translating ideas from paper to pattern to knitting may require modifications along the way. It’s in the manipulation of these that the real work of the inventive designer comes into play.

Copyright 2006 Linda Black

—————————————————————
Based in the UK, Linda Black has written several design books
for machine knitters and is a self-confessed knitting addict.
Her web site for both hand and machine knitters can be found at
http://www.getknitting.com
Sign up for her free monthly hints and tips newsletter here
—————————————————————

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