Porteau Cove! A Pattern By Tiny Island Textiles

The lovely Nicola Hodges from Tiny Island Textiles has put up her gorgeous stole pattern Porteau Cove out into the world! It's downloadable on Ravelry.com! Here's the link.

Porteau Cove

I'm so happy about this pattern coming out! It's sort of a proof of concept for me! Because it's the first pattern to be helped along with the Graph Paper Cooperative in mind. 

Me and Nicola have been friends for ages and ages and she's always helped me really heavily with my designs. She has test-knitted the Lonely Tree, she has knitted samples for me, she has modelled for 6 of my patterns, she has read through my patterns and my god she has blocked almost every lace thing I've ever knit. I can honestly say that her help has made my designing process one that is manageable for me and I credit a lot of my success to her! So in a sense the two of us have been doing this sort of Graph-Paper-Coop-y thing for a while now, unofficially. 

What is this Graph Paper Coop-y thing? Well, The Graph Paper Cooperative is a thing that me and Nicola thought up over a series of conversations about supporting local knitwear designers. Nicola's been a designer since I met her, but she had never published on Ravelry. And I've always struggled with a couple of aspects of knitwear design, and have needed her support. 

The Graph Paper Cooperative was based on the idea that you need a whole pile of skills to publish patterns on Ravelry. You need to know how to design a pattern, write out the instructions so other people can knit them, you need to knit good samples out of nice yarn and have the pattern photographed beautifully and beautifully layed out and then you need to send it to testers who can give you feedback on all of those aspects of your pattern so you can tweak it further. 

It's a big process and if you're missing any of those skills it can make it really hard to self publish your own patterns. Or you may publish them but have them met with a "meh" because one or more of those pieces is missing. 

The Graph Paper Cooperative fills in the blanks so that people don't need to have absolutely every skill involved in publishing. and if you want the skills you can mentor and develop them with us. Or, if you're part of the cooperative, you can just ask for help from the other members. 

In the way that I've been asking for help from Nicola for ages, with blocking and modelling and pattern testing and sampling. And she was able to get some assistance from me with publishing Porteau Cove! 

It's Cooperative magic. 

We sat down a couple of weeks ago at my favourite coffee shop and I pulled up InDesign and we built a Tiny Island Textiles Knitwear Pattern template for her, and then we started putting the pattern together (with some photos I took from 2012 when she first designed this beautiful thing!). And now it's published and I'm just plain stoked! I hope you'll pop over and buy a copy. It's been made with love and it really is the best thing to just have a huge pile of lace knitting wrapped around your body. Also it helps support Nicola on her adventures being an awesome person who lives on a Tiny Island, raising sheep and building a textile studio cabin with her own two hands. Lovely! 

3 comments knitwear, kntting pattern, nicola hodges, porteau cove, stole pattern, Tiny Island textiles, tiny.island.textiles

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