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So I haven't posted anything in a while because… I had a baby!! She is doing really well - super chilled, and I feel like I've made a full recovery too. She's seven weeks old now and I'm just starting to feel like maybe I should be getting back to keeping the old knitting pattern business ticking over. It's a funny time, the newborn stage. You feel super busy and like you're not doing anything much at the same time. Baby's asleep cuddled up with me as I'm typing this (one handed, on my phone lol). I can't complain because she's sleeping very well at night, and I'm maybe getting an hour at most to myself through the day when she naps in her pram. Most of that time is eaten up with tackling laundry mountain… I am getting time to do a row or two of knitting here and there though. I started this months ago and put it on hold to do some baby knitting. I can't remember if I've posted any pictures of it before, my pregnancy was pretty rough towards the end so I wasn't getting much done then either. The yarn is gorgeous Tribe Yarns undyed Merino Silk Yak DK. It's so plush, supersoft, a gorgeous natural colour and very budget friendly. The cardi itself is top down with an attached shawl collar. The stitch pattern looks like brioche, but it's just twisted ribbing with increases and decreases. Keeping things simple! Fingers crossed that at a row a day I can get it done by autumn! Here's a few pictures of the baby knitting I got done too. I finished work at 38 weeks pregnant and then baby ended up arriving nine days late so I had a bit of time for knitting. The cardi is a Newborn Vertebrae (warning: link is to Ravelry) by Kelly van Niekerk and the blanket is a Chevron Baby Blanket by Espace Tricot. I absolutely did not have the mental bandwidth to design any baby knits myself! Somewhat unbelievably, I have also managed to arrange a test knit for my Brocken Spectre Cardigan pattern. The pattern was written pre baby but I'm super proud of myself that it only took me two months to do the post tech-edit redraft and put it up online. It's a cute, slightly cropped cardigan with lace detail at the shoulders. There are ten sizes and the lace had both written instructions and charts. You can volunteer to test in my Ravelry Group, or drop me an email/pm me on social media if you don't use Ravelry.
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For my upcoming pattern, Goldenacre Cardigan, I really wanted the lace pattern to run all the way from the neckline down to the cuffs of the sleeves. To my mind, the best way to do this is using a Saddle Shoulder construction. In this post, I'll give details on how to knit a top down, saddle shoulder cardigan.  Here's a diagram showing how the upper body is put together, we go through each part step by step below. In my Goldenacre Cardigan pattern, obviously there are all the exact stitch counts and patterns, but here we just give an overview.  1 and 2: work strips of lace (or whatever pattern you're using!) for the left and right saddle shoulders. These will go along the shoulder from the neckline to the top of the sleeve. I made mine quite long for a drop shoulder. Left: working a saddle shoulder. Right: Pick up and knit stitches from saddle shoulders with a cast on for back neck in between. 3. Lay out the saddle shoulders as shown in the above right picture. The cast on edges are at the centre and the live stitches are at the outer edges. Pick up and knit stitches from right to left along the top edges as shown, and cast on stitches for back neck in between. Work these stitches down the back to the underarm (shown below) and place on waste yarn/spare circular needle/stitch holder. In Goldenacre Cardigan, we add short row shaping at the shoulders for an improved fit.  Upper back with saddle shoulders attached 4. In Goldenacre cardigan, there is an attached shawl collar. If you don't want a shawl collar attached, go ahead and skip to Step 6. Maybe you could pick up stitches round the whole front to keep things neat instead. Work the attached shawl collar from centre of back neck to the front edge of the saddle shoulders. We pick up stitches from the back and saddle shoulder with a spare needle (below top left). I picked them up from a row back to avoid a big gap. Then cast on stitches for the shawl collar (below top right), then work the shawl collar stitches, knitting edge stitches together with the picked up stitches on every second row (below bottom pictures). Top Left: pick up stitches from right saddle shoulder and right half of upper back. Top right: cast on stitches for shawl collar. Bottom left: hold shawl collar sts and pick up stitches together. Bottom right: purl shawl collar end stitch together with next picked up stitch. 5. Work the other half of the shawl collar. Pick up stitches from the saddle shoulder and along the back neck to meet the other half of the shawl collar (below left and centre). Rather than casting on, we pick up and knit stitches from the existing shawl collar cast on (below left). We then work the shawl collar stitches down towards to front edge of the saddle shoulder, again knitting edge stitches together with picked up stitches every second row (below right). Don't break the working yarn this time. Left: pick up and knit stitches from shawl collar cast on. Centre: Pick up stitches from left saddle shoulder and left half of back neck cast on. Right: purl shawl collar end stitch together with next picked up stitch. 6. Left Front: Work across shawl collar stitches, then pick up and knit stitches from the shawl collar for the left front. Stitches are worked down to underarm.  Work across shawl front stitches and pick up and knit stitches from saddle shoulder 7. Right Front. Pick up and knit stitches from right saddle shoulder the work live shawl front stitches. Work all stitches down to underarm to match left front. Finally, we join right front, back and left front stitches before working down to the hem.  Pick up and knit stitches from right saddle shoulder and work across shawl front stitches. And that's it! It ends up looking something like this:  And here's a wee sneak peek at how the finished cardigan looks - it should be out for test knitting soon. Follow @littletheorem on instagram or twitter for the test call!  Quite a busy holiday here at Littletheorem HQ! My "real job" is working 3 days part time as a Maths teacher, and I look after my 3 year old for one and a half days, so really there's only Wednesday mornings and evenings and weekends for working on knitting pattern design. So I definitely make use of the holidays for catching up on business admin tasks that fall by the wayside. I've just finished reading "How to get to the top of Google" and it was a bit alarming really how badly set up my website was, so I've been doing a lot of fiddling around behind the scenes to try to fix some aspects of that. Mainly trying to add more content. I've souped up the main landing page a bit - let me know what you think in the comments! Trying to add more in depth content to my blog too. Last week I wrote a big post analysing trends in knitting patterns, and I'm hoping to make that a regular feature. I also haven't added anything to Lovecrafts for a loooong time, so I've been slowly but surely adding patterns to the Lovecrafts Littletheorem site. Don't think for a minute that I haven't had time for any knitting though! I've been working on a saddle shoulder cardigan in gorgeous Malabrigo Rios. Colourway is "Almond Blossom", I think it's a bit of a brighter/darker pink than the yarn looks on the Malabrigo Website but it's still very pretty indeed. Loving how it looks so far, it's mainly 2x1 slip stitch twised rib with big lace panels. I like how the twisted ribbing looks like fake brioche stitch. It's the first time I've tried doing a saddle shoulder, I think it'll look nice having the lace pattern running all the way from the neckline down the sleeves. The only issue is the attached shawl collar is rolling more than I'd though. My swatch lay perfectly flat! But here we are. I'll just pick up and knit a bit of ribbing around the front, and fingers crossed it'll be just fine! My Brocken Sweater is finished too! Here it is in a bump pic - you can see why I'm knitting a lot of open fronted cardigans at the moment! I have now been off work for 10 days and I’ve been suffering from symptoms of excel withdrawal. In my “real” job, I’m the Principal Teacher for Numeracy in a large inner city school in Glasgow. One of the huge reasons I’m not a knit designer full time (apart from the fact that I can’t afford it!) is how much I love teaching. Working with young people and helping them develop their skills is just unbelievable fulfilling. That and the data. If I had to rank it, I probably love teaching the most, then designing knitting patterns, then data analysis. I’m lucky that excel spreadsheets are a huge part of both of the first two options. I need to know what kids need what interventions and I need to know if they work. Add into that exam results analysis, ongoing test score analysis, attendance statistics… the list goes on. And in knitwear design too, everything I do is organised in excel. Stitch counts and measurements for nine sizes as a pattern progresses would be a nightmare to do by hand. If you found out after 100 rows that you needed to cast on one extra stitch then you’d have to throw away all your paper calculations and start again. So I’m putting lots of things I love together here really – a results analysis for “What’s Hot in Knitting” for January 2024!  Let’s break things down a little more.  Where did you get your data? I used Ravelry’s “hot right now” pattern search and filtered so it was only garments (not accessories, home etc) and only paid for patterns. I thought free things would skew the results. I’m certainly not Ravelry’s biggest fan, given their poor treatment of people with disabilities, but they surely are a good data source. I tried using Payhip and Etsy but it wasn’t really possible. Lovecrafts is massively skewed towards pattern which they also stock the yarn for. So Ravelry it is. I think in future I’ll use search by newness rather than “hot right now” because so many of them have been in the top 50 for a loooong time. I think I’d get a better snapshot that way. I’m aiming to get that done by mid January. What are the limits of the data? I had to make a few judgement calls here, there are so many more things I could have included and many things that could be broken down further. “Knit and purl” as a fabric type covers a lot of things, and “textured” is certainly a bit vague. It all becomes a bit philosophical – when does a crew neck become a scoop neck? Where do you draw the line between oversized and slightly oversized? There are a number of designers (who shall remain nameless) who only included a chest measurement in their pattern description so I had to eyeball things like ease and cropped-ness. And conversely a big thank you to all the designers who scrupulously label all their patterns features.  What were the results? Most popular garment type:
Most Popular Fabric Style
Most Popular Yarn Weight
Most Popular Garment Fit
Most Popular Garment Length
Most Popular Neckline
Most Popular Sleeve Length
 What stands out about the data? There are some really obvious things, like long sleeves are popular in winter and laceweight cardigans are not. Some things are a bit more surprising, like the lack of aran or bulky weight patterns during the coldest season. I would speculate that this is due to cost of living increases, it’s certainly cheaper to knit a sweater with three skeins of 4ply rather than 10 skeins of bulky yarn. I was a little surprised that 94% of the most popular 50 patterns had positive ease (garment measurements bigger than body measurements). Even though I’m a big fan of oversized garments myself, I thought opinion was roughly 50-50 on the fitted vs oversized debate. Although to be fair, 48% were only slightly oversized. One thing I don’t understand is why pullovers are twice as popular as cardigans? And why are cables so unpopular? Maybe someone can explain it to me in the comments!  Oversized, cropped sweaters are in - like my Burrell Sweater. What are the major trends? There were five broad pattern types that covered a huge 86% of the patterns, this is what I would label as the key knitting pattern trends for Winter 23/24:
Yoked sweaters with lace detail ranked highly, here's my versions. From left to right: Pollokshaws Cardigan, Bracklinn Sweater and Pollokshaws Sweater/Tee. What’s the take home message? It looks to me like a lot of pattern sales are coming from:
Having said that, I think the take home message should always be to knit what you like! Design what you like! Don’t be constrained by trends for sure. If you want to knit a fitted, cabled cardigan in super chunky yarn then do it! I hope knitters find this interesting and get some knitting inspiration from it. It might be useful for knitting pattern designers, but then again maybe it’s better to find your own niche than try to copy the big hitters. I was trying to find some of my own knitting patterns that fit into these trends and it turns out I am not as trendy as I thought. Maybe I should try to be more data driven in my designs? I hope this brings a little joy to any fellow data nerds, I know there are plenty of us in the knitting community, and I would certainly love feedback on my methods – I’m more of a dabbler in data than a true professional. Wishing everyone a happy new year, filled with knitting patterns that bring you happiness!  Fairisle Hearts Sweater - my yoked colourwork pullover pattern
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