Starting to generate sweater patterns in Excel

Obviously, I don’t actually know all about how I’m going to be making these sweater patterns fit people really well. But having made one sweater for myself, I have a basic feel for what I’ll be using as direct measurements, as well as what sorts of things I’ll just need to assume in order to simplify measuring for the client. The very end goal for this program is to take a set of easy measurements that a client can take themselves, gauge information from me, and spit out a pattern that can be easily read by both me and a later program, which will be able to run a set of motors which I’ll add to my machine later. The part that I want to get done right now is to build a rudimentary process for taking in measurements and gauge information and spitting out a basic pattern. The plan is to build it poorly, then fix and tune it into something that works. I feel like it’ll be easier in this case to fix something that already exists than to build it from scratch, and it’ll be much easier to build something from scratch if I’m already comfortable with it not being very good. That’s the plan, anyway.

I’m not quite sure which measurements to begin by asking for, so I’m checking around the internet for some guidance. This site has a calculator similar to what I’m going for, which takes in gauge and waist measurement and spits out a pretty detailed pattern based on percentages. It’s for a drop shoulder sweater, which is a style that seems better suited to more loose-fitting, oversized sweaters, so they by design don’t require very stringent measuring, but because I’m trying to make clothes that fit pretty closely, I’m going to stop working with that particular design. Doing more research, I think I need to look into better ways to get and measure gauge. My 40 stitch wide, however-many row long, measuring over 2 inches in each direction, unwashed, hot off the machine is probably not going to cut it down the line, but yarn is expensive and I need it to make sweaters from. I will handle that later. Today I’m researching sweater types and stuff. This blog post is not super useful for my needs, but it links to another which might be better. Reading knitting blogs is something I’ve been doing casually for a while, and the people who write them tend to know what they’re doing. That particular post was not helpful. Seems like I’m turning back to Cheryl Brunette’s 2011 “Your First Bond Sweater” series of YouTube videos for structure tips. I used her videos a lot for getting the process of knitting a sweater down, and I definitely recommend them. There was a lot of translation I had to do to get from her particular machine to mine, but it was very good to see how a sweater is built. I’ll be looking at her set-in sleeve method, which doesn’t require that I knit the sleeve before attaching it, which saves me quite a bit of time in production. The screenshot below shows the basic structure for this type of sweater, and the main difficulty of this tool will be turning lengths and widths into decreases in this general shape.

From there, I inferred the necessary dimensions, added an “Add” category to augment any measured values, and functionally, we should be ready to use this thing to make a sweater! The places where I’ve made assumptions are 1. in the generation of each final parameter, and 2. the “Add” category as a whole. I’m fairly confident in my assumptions for 1, having used similar calculations to make a sweater before, and intend to tune 2 anyways. My hopes are high! Check out my next post where I will actually use this spreadsheet to make my second-ever sweater!