Firsts Can Be Hard

I've been working on some knitting patterns that I want to sell but I need to size them.  All of the patterns I've published already are things like ladies' mittens or Christmas stockings, things that can be sold in just one size.  That doesn't work for sweaters though, which is fine.  I have a sweater and a dress pattern for Ada that I'd like to publish and I had planned to have the sweater pattern be the fourth pattern I release this year (my goal for the year was four).  I'm just finding it somewhat...I don't know what.  Intimidating or difficult aren't quite the right words.  I'm used to writing out the instructions for one size and it's almost like the style I've written my patterns in up to this point doesn't translate very well.

Anyways, I also had a hat pattern I wanted to sell in multiple sizes.  I figured the hat would be easier to write out in multiple sizes than a sweater so I decided to put off publishing the sweater pattern until next year and do the hat, I've been sitting down to figure it out and up to last night have had a lot of trouble.  Part of it is the fact that I want the increases to be spaced evenly along the hat but the different sizes I was making didn't end up having stitch counts that divided neatly into the number of increases per round.

Last night I sat down and figured I'd do things one step at a time.  I made a chart with the names of the sizes I needed and the head circumference for each size.  Then I added a column with the number of stitches each size needed to go up to.  Then I added a column where I listed the factors of those numbers.  That was really a breakthrough for me, because I realized by having the original number of stitches cast on be different by one or two I could end up with the increases evenly divided on each of the rows for each of the sizes.  An hour later and I had everything written out on paper.  I feel so good about that.  I also feel really good that the magazine submission I made this year was rejected, it really helped that I got to work this out without a looming deadline.  And I think the sweater pattern will go a lot easier now that I've worked this one out.