How to Stop Overwhelm from Sabotaging Your Design Process
Overwhelm is one of those sneaky emotions that creep in during the knitting pattern design process, and if you’re not careful, it can sabotage it.
What once felt like an exciting project suddenly feels stressful, confusing and even paralysing. This is often the point where new knitting pattern designers give up on their projects.
As a long-term anxiety sufferer, I know the feeling of overwhelm all too well, and I’ve gathered a pretty large toolbox of coping mechanisms to help fight against it. In this blog post, I’m sharing five tips to beat overwhelm so you can keep moving forward and get your patterns out into the hands of other makers!
Image description: Graphic with “How to Stop Overwhelm from Sabotaging Your Design Process” on top of an image of two hands, sketching fashion designs
Break the Process Down
Designing a knitting pattern, especially something as involved as a sweater, can be a lengthy project with lots of moving parts. No wonder designers can feel overwhelmed by how to get started!
If it’s the sheer size of the task that is stressing you out, try breaking the design process down into smaller, more manageable chunks. It’s far less intimidating to focus on the single task in front of you rather than thinking too much about what’s yet to be accomplished.
Try “Just-in-Time” Learning
If you spend a lot of time learning and reading content about knitting pattern design but find yourself too overwhelmed to actually implement everything that you are learning, I recommend that you try the “just-in-time” approach.
This means that, rather than reading everything you can find about knitting pattern design ahead of time, you should learn only what you need to complete the next step in the design process.
Not only will this prevent you from spiralling into overwhelm, but it will also stop you from going down rabbit holes about design concepts you don’t need to learn yet.
Image description: someone sketching fashion designs in a notepad, surrounded by colour swatches and pencils
Dump the Deadlines
If you plan on self-publishing your knitting pattern design and you feel overwhelmed by the time pressures of your self-imposed deadlines, go easy on yourself.
Dump the deadline and instead, start focusing on building a consistent design habit into your daily or weekly rhythm. What that looks like will depend on your lifestyle. It could be an hour of design after you’ve put the kids to bed every day, or it could be a couple of hours of design on a Sunday afternoon before you start a busy week. You choose what works for you!
If your deadlines are set by someone else (maybe a magazine or publication), you could either try and negotiate a slightly longer deadline or knuckle down to get this deadline out of the way before taking a break to focus on self-publishing on your own schedule for a while.
Work on Your Perfectionism
I know, only too well, how perfectionism can create overwhelm and negatively impact the experience of designing a knitting pattern.
Usually, it goes one of two ways: either you stop working on the pattern altogether because it’s “not good enough”, or you go way above and beyond on the pattern but never consider it “finished”. Both of these situations lead to overwhelm because, whatever you do, it’s never going to be enough to satisfy your perfectionism.
Done is better than perfect.
I’ll say it again: Done is better than perfect.
If your pattern won’t be significantly improved by spending even more time on it, don’t bother. Do your best and move on to the next step in the design process.
Image description: Graphic with a picture of multi-coloured, tangled yarn with the words underneath: Knitting Pattern Design. How to Stop Overwhelm from Sabotaging Your Design Process. www.sistermountain.com
Give Yourself a Reality Check
I often find that our overwhelm can come from our brains catastrophising the what-ifs and unknowns of the knitting pattern design process.
The reality is that, yes - mistakes do happen when designing knitting patterns, but it’s not the end of the world. The ideal situation is to put out a flawless set of pattern instructions every time, but that won’t always happen. That’s why even the most experienced designers have errata!
If you make a mistake whilst designing your knitting pattern, you will come out the other side of it, and the bonus is that you will have likely learned something, too!
Avoid Overwhelm in the Knitting Pattern Design Process
I hope that this blog post has convinced you that overwhelm doesn’t have to be part of your design process anymore.
By breaking the process down into simple, manageable steps and learning only what you need, as you need it, you will be able to stay focused on the task at hand rather than worrying about what’s coming next. Remove any time pressures, if possible, and work on your mindset around what you consider “good enough” and any potential failures.
Now that you have these tools, the design process will start to feel fun and exciting again, and even better - you will actually start to finish your design projects!