The Design Department at Mary Maxim is where the creativity flows into a fibre artists magic. The Design Team not only creates your favourite crafts but also scouts for the best new products to feature in the catalogue. The team develops new yarn ranges, designs nearly all of our new Mary Maxim exclusive kits including: knit, crochet, latch hook, plastic canvas, and general crafting kits. The design team also writes and proofs patterns and assists customer service as needed to work out customer's concerns and pattern issues. The Design team keeps constant communication with The Customer Service Teams and our Social Media Team to find out first and foremost of what people are asking for when it comes to new kits and patterns to design. The Social Media Team and the Design Team work together to bring you the best new designers and design ideas. Suggestions get emailed almost daily, and those are looked at first and foremost before anything else when it comes to choosing what to try to develop.  We enjoy receiving your feedback, it helps us adapt and adjust our designs to your needs.  

Our Design Process

Every member of our company helps with the inspiration process; we have a wall dedicated to ideas. When anyone in the company sees something fun, whether it be in a magazine, at a store, their own creation, they are encouraged to write it down and pin it on our board. When the design team meets, all of these ideas are literally put out on the table, and we look at what new yarns will be coming in and decide which ideas would work best for our customers and for our yarns. From there, we take ideas from one place and some from another and with a little inspiration from our favourite yarns, we develop incredible and unique pieces for you. Once ideas for designs are chosen, the team gets to work on the development of the patterns. The design starts with deciding which stitch pattern would best achieve our vision. Then expert fibre artists develop a gauge swatch if it works, then we move forward. If not, we try another stitch and start over. Next, we draw a diagram of the shape that we want for the piece, and using the gauge swatch to figure out the number of stitches they should have at each point; we draw "map" out of the pattern. Depending on the complexity of the pattern, at this point, it may go to one of our home knitters or crocheters with the "rough draft" of the pattern, and they work the piece up, making notes of any problems they are having. Then they bring it in the office along the way so the team can look at it to see if it is coming out as they expected. Every single project gets a worksheet where we can verify the exact yardage of yarn that went into it, and we always add 10% to be sure customers have enough yarn.

The Best in Exclusive Crafts

 

Overall, Mary Maxim tries to cater to the customer when coming up with designs. We encourage you to keep sending feedback and design ideas to help aid in the process of creating projects that you would like to make. Our goal is to make you happy, along with a quality project that will last for decades. We hope that you enjoyed learning about how our design process develops your favorite projects.

Stay Tuned

We have so many great resources on our blog just like this Cable Stitch Tutorial.  Make sure to check our categories for Free Patterns, Blog Exclusives, Best Products, and Exclusive Crafts.  We also have more informative yarn guides, full of wonderful crafting ideas and incredible yarn.

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Happy Crafting!