Design Project: Jacquard and Intarsia Patterns

This fall semester I took a portfolio class. It was a lot of fun and a lot of work, and I'm really happy with the outcome. We had a variety of projects that I will share, but one of my favorites to work on was this print design project. It was just not like anything I'd ever done before, and that made it exciting!

I settled on a rather weird color palate. Somehow I got really into orange, and just went with it! I decided to build the project around a cut-and-sew hoodie I had made last year, which was out of this awesome geometric double-knit jacquard (pictured below). With that to work from, I did jacquard and intarsia patterns only, with bold geometrics. It was a cool challenge to do knit-only patterns, because it meant limited colors (due to potential cost of multi-color jacquards, which would be astronomical if they were produced) and limitation in shapes (due to the structure of knit fabric). Below is my color palate, the original hoodie, and then a few of my prints photoshopped onto clothing I had made.

Another thing I enjoyed was that I got to play with multiple color combinations and offerings. I made about forty different combinations of colors and prints, hung them all up, and then narrowed them down in a very difficult decision-making process.

All of my croquis are drawn in Adobe Illustrator and colored and shaded in Photoshop. Prints were made in Illustrator. I can't find my absolute up-to-date JPEG files, actually; they are supposed to have slightly pixelated prints (to imitate a knitted chart), and a sweater texture overlay like the first photo. Oops!

The triangle sweater above is my absolute favorite, and I'm actually going to knit something very similar for my senior collection! I'm so stoked to see it come to life.