How to Stay Motivated as a Knitting Pattern Designer
Staying motivated as a knitting pattern designer can be tough sometimes. You know what you want to do. You might even know how to do it. But why can’t you just get on with it already?!
Designing a knitting pattern can sometimes take months from start to finish so naturally, motivation will ebb and flow throughout the design process. Motivation is often high in the beginning: your head is full of dreams and ideas of what you could come up with. But what happens when pattern writing gets difficult or everything takes way longer than you anticipated? Motivation drops and you start to put off working on your pattern.
All knitting pattern designers have been here. In fact, I’m willing to bet that most of them have half-finished design projects in varying states of completion, whether it reached the sketching, sample knitting or even tech editing stage of the process.
But just because you lost motivation with the project, it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth pursuing. If you wait for a flash of motivation to strike before you work on your patterns, you’ll likely be waiting for a very long time!
So in this blog post, I’m sharing 7 ways you can get (and stay!) motivated as a knitting pattern designer. Each have served me well in my design career so far and I hope they’ll do the same for you, too.
Just start
This might be frustrating to hear right off the bat, but it holds true for me so much of the time. In fact, I’m using this strategy right now as I’m writing! Motivating yourself to complete a task can feel impossible, but simply starting it feels a lot more doable.
Wherever you are in the design process, tell yourself to work on your next task for just 10 minutes. Once those 10 minutes are up, you have full permission to stop, but often, those 10 minutes are enough to motivate you to continue!
What are you thinking? What are you feeling?
When you find yourself in moments of low motivation, ask yourself these questions.
It could be that you’re experiencing some self-doubt - an emotion that can be a big drain on motivation. Often, that self-doubt will be coming from some thoughts that you are having. Things like “No one will want to buy my patterns, so why even make the effort to write them up?”
Our brains have a way of being mean to us in a way that they wouldn’t be mean to other people. If you’re having a lot of negative thoughts around your design work, these thoughts are very unlikely to be true. Try countering those negative thoughts with thoughts that are actually true: positive statements about your design work that you can believe in.
As soon as you start to build confidence in your work, you’ll find that motivation comes with it.
Break it Down
Imagine going to look at your to-do list and one of the tasks is “Design a new knitting pattern” - how demotivating is that?! Where do you even begin with that?
Instead of seeing the design process as one task, it helps to break it down into lots of mini-tasks. Being able to tick off each task as you go along gives you that boost of motivation as you see your progress building.
You don’t have to give each task a deadline if that feels stressful to you, but if you are motivated by deadlines, it can be helpful to plan when you will get each task done by. Make the deadlines achievable though - there is nothing more demotivating than judging yourself by your unrealistic expectations!
Another way that you can use this strategy is when you run into challenges with your knitting pattern.
It is super common for motivation to drop when the design process gets hard or you’re not quite sure what you’re doing. Rather than trying to power through and tackle the challenge in one session, it might be helpful to break the challenge down into manageable chunks.
You could plan to work on one chunk at a time. If you want to stop working after completing that chunk, you would have total freedom to do so. Or, if you find yourself with more motivation again, work on the next chunk too. The goal here is to spend time consistently working through your challenges - not to do it quickly.
Commit to a crappy first draft
Perfectionism is one of the biggest villains in your knitting pattern design story! Putting pressure on yourself to make your next knitting pattern design perfect is a sure way to burn out and lose motivation.
As with most creative endeavours, the first draft of your knitting pattern will be kinda crappy. Avoid agonising over every single detail - just do your best and come back to it with fresh eyes after tech editing.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: the knitting pattern design process is almost never linear - at least, it isn’t for me! I am always going backwards and forwards, adjusting and correcting things as I go. If I attempted to make everything “perfect” the first time around, I’d never get anywhere!
Know when it’s time to step away
Sometimes, my motivation is at rock bottom and no matter what I do, I just can’t get myself to work on a project properly. I’ve learned that, rather than pushing through, it can actually be helpful to take some time away from it.
You don’t necessarily need to take a long break. It could be as simple as putting away your spreadsheets for a couple of days and knitting from someone else’s pattern. More often than not, you’ll find yourself motivated to get back to it once you’ve given your brain a break.
Delay gratification
As knitters, we all look forward to the stage of the design process when we can start knitting up our sample. But, if you knit the sample before you’ve written the knitting pattern, it can significantly reduce your motivation to actually write the thing up!
First of all, if you find that this happens a lot to you, it might be worth thinking about why. Could it be that you don’t necessarily want to write and sell knitting patterns? Perhaps you just want to design knitwear for yourself instead. If that’s true, that is totally fine! You don’t have to monetise it.
But, if you really do want to design and sell knitting patterns in multiple sizes, I suggest that you try knitting your sample AFTER you’ve written the pattern. Not only will it motivate you to write the pattern so that you can “get to the good bit” but it will also allow you to test your pattern as you’re knitting the sample.
Remember why you’re doing this
Sometimes, it is so easy to get bogged down in the challenges and difficulties of the design process that you lose sight of why you’re designing knitting patterns at all!
I’m guessing that you’re learning to design knitting patterns because you love to knit and you want to turn your design ideas into a reality. Remind yourself why you’re embarking on this journey to help you spark that motivation you had in the very beginning.
How do you stay motivated?
When things get tough or the design process isn’t going as planned, how do you stay motivated? Share your experiences in the comments section to help other new knitting pattern designers in our community.
