Unravelling Knitwear for Cosplay

Aimed as a guide on breaking down knitwear as it tends to appear in anime/manga/cartoon/game sources, since a lot of the time they aren't one to one with how knitwear works in real life! This guide will not cover how to knit if you haven't ever done so (sorry!), but I'll include some resources at the end in case you're interested in trying it out. I'm gonna go on a lil spiel about what started this project - you can click below to expand, or just get straight into the meat of this into guide!

Before I start getting into all the technical language and dissection, I want to talk a bit about what sparked this project. I'm a knitter with 2 decades of experience* (what a scary thing to think about!), and a cosplayer of just over a decade. I've knit a couple of garments for cosplay purposes, which got kicked off after some friends and I did a Love Live school uniform group which involved some kind of lacklustre sweater vests. I was deep in my idol game phase at the time, and ended up knitting a sweater vest for a different idol customer that didn't happen, as well as a mock cable knit sweater for the same character. I've wanted to knit more things for cosplay, but have never quite been able to pull myself away from knitting everyday garments and shawls. Maybe this'll encourage me to get back to it!

So, I've talked a bit about what I've made, but it's also good to cover off what knitting is. By and large, knitting is a technique of fabric production that revolves around making interconnecting loops from a piece or multiple pieces of yarn. Unlike weaving, the fabric produced by weaving tends to have at least a little bit of natural stretch to it across multiple directions. Historically, the majority of knitting has been produced using two or more knitting needles to knit a textile, though knitting machines have existed for upwards of 400 years. Knitting also has a cousin in crochet, which is another form of yarn manipulation done by looping together yarn with a hook. The main difference between the textile they form is that knits are (generally) made up of many rows of 'v' shapes when viewed face on, while crochet is a single row of 'v's from when viewed from the top down. There are a few other yarn crafts that serve similar purposes, but it's knitting or crochet you're more likely to encounter in the wild.

You'll hear a pretty common adage that modern knitwear is made by machines, which while true for the fabric itself, doesn't quite cover it since knit garments still require all sorts of hand finishing. There's been a recent round of chatter in the online cosplay community about being mindful of who is making costumes that came out of conversations of overconsumption with store bought costumes. While the talk I've seen has been fantastic, it is primarily focused on primarily sewn garments and the requirements of material handling, and doesn't quite go the full way to the other parts of garment construction (nor anything accessory creation related for that matter). If this is something we're looking to be conscious of, why not build the foundations to understand another aspect of it, and reconnect ourselves with the act of making things yknow?

I guess finally, the last thing that really inspired this guide is the way we talk about cosplay as costume play. Usually, when someone says that, they're probably talking about how cosplay is supposed to be fun and the ways cosplayers interact with other convention goers/the people they encounter in online cosplay spaces. But, I don't think the play aspect shouldn't just be when a cosplayer is in costume - I think play is an important part of making a costume. If you're exploring new processes or materials to be able to make something, isn't that also part of the play process? Yes, sometimes it's really frustrating (looking at every time I've tried to make gloves), but there's something joyful in learning how to do something new.

Okay, with all that preamble out of the way, let's get into the anatomy of knitwear:

Needles and Yarn

So! All knit garments, whether they're knit intentionally as garments or textiles turned into cardigans or sweaters or the like, are worked up using a combination of needles and yarn. Most commercially made knit textiles are knit up with very thin needles and thin yarn on a machine like this, but you can pretty much mix and match yarn and needle sizes (and materials!) when creating your own textile.

Stockinette

Stockinette is the most common kind of knit that you'll find. Own a sock? That's probably made from a machine knit stockinette. You can tell a fabric is made with stockinette if one side is made up of little 'V's, and the other has a bumpy texture. The side with the 'V's is generally considered the 'correct' (or 'right') side of the fabric, and if you see it in a drawn medium it's probably just drawn with no additional details. Sometimes 'reverse stockinette' is used in knitting patterns, which is just where the bumpy side is considered the correct side, but I've personally never encountered it in character art.

Stockinette is a really fab, versatile stitch pattern, and makes up the basis for a lot of fancier types of knits, particularly colourwork. If you buy a knit fabric from the store, 9/10 times it's going to be a stockinette.

Garter Stitch

Garter is Stockinette's sibling as it were, the other basic stitch pattern. While stockinette is made up of rows and rows that look the same, garter is made up of alternating rows of knits and purls. It'll have alternating bumpy rows with a longer stretch of difference that reverse stockinette does. It's a little less common to see a full garment made up of garter stitch but it is a key component of a lot of cable patterns.

Ribbing

That thing you find at the bottom, end of sleeves, and neckline of jumpers! Ribbing is a stitch pattern made up of alternating knit and purl stitches. It pretty much looks like a column that pops out (the knit column), and a recessed column (the purl column). Makes a super stretchy fabric with a decent amount of structure. Is the devil to knit, if you're hand knitting expect the ribbing to take at least twice as long as you expect it to. Thankfully, ribbings are the 1/10 of the knit fabrics you can typically buy.

Cables

This is where we start getting a little bit fancier. Cables are a variety of stitch patterns where some of the stitches cross over each other. When they show up in anime/games they tend to be stylised into a braid pattern, but there are plenty of types of cool cables ranging in complexity that can be done.

Colourwork

Colourwork is exactly what the name sounds like, it's when there's two or more colours of yarn being worked with in the same piece. This includes everything from block stripes to fair isle all over designs. Colourwork shows up a lot in live action sources*, and is also pretty frequent in drawn ones. The great thing is there are a bunch of ways to mimic the effect that I'll talk through a little later.

Lace

Lace is the last type of stitch pattern, I'll talk about, and like cables it covers a really large range of patterns and motifs. In the simplest form, it's a pattern made up of increases via yarn overs, and decreases (essentially knitting two or more stitches together so only one remains). Like ribbing, it tends to be pretty springy, and is often worked with in a garter pattern, with one row a combination of the knit stitch and various increases and decreases, and the other the purl stitch. You don't see it very often in anime/games since the type of lace that shows up is usually woven/bobbin/etc, but, well it's my favourite type of fabric to knit and I wanted a chance to mention it.

Fringes/Tassels/Pom Poms Now, none of these are technically a knit stitch, however they're a big part of yarn crafts! Fringes is a decorative element you see mainly with scarves/wraps, made up of dangling yarn that adds a bit of movement to a piece. Tassels are similar, if more anchored, and generally involve a number of pieces of the dangling yarn bundled together with an additional tie around the middle of the tassel. Pom poms are those funny round guys you usually see on the end of beanies. I'll link a couple of fun tutorials for them at the very end of this post.

Okay, now that we've got a chunk of language out of the way, time to do a dive into some examples to try and match things up! -->