Best way to create a design on a sweater

Hi there - I am wanting to make a hoodie for my grandson (I have the pattern I want to use) and he wants a beach scene on it. I have some ideas in my head of how I want it to look, but is there an app that any of you use/could recommend, that I can design the pattern on on the computer rather than drawing it all out on graph paper by hand. I’m thinking waves, sand, beach hut, creatures etc using intarsia and duplicate stitch and thought it would be easier to do the design on computer as I may change my mind on placement of things whilst designing it and don’t want to have to keep re-drawing it out.
Thanks all

There are sites like Chartminder, Knitbird and Stitch Fiddle to help with computer design. I played with Stitch Fiddle quite a while back but I haven’t had any experience with the others.

https://www.knitting-chart.com/kc-ios/
https://knitbird.com/

Hello
I have used stitchfiddle to make a colour work chart and the other programmes look pretty much the same. I’d say it’s not great for designing, rather once you know the design it’s helpful for marking up a graph prior to knitting. You can then follow row by row as you knit.
My suggestion for designing an intarsia scene and to have the ability to rearrange, resize, duplicate, add and remove with ease for the actual design process would be to use a drawing or graphic programme you already have on your computer. The sort where you have a bunch of basic shape options (basic blocks for sea, sand, sky, hut, basic circle for sun) readily available and which also allows some degree of freehand drawing. Drawing or graphics programmes tend to have the ability to make some new shapes by adding 2 or more shapes together and ‘grouping’ them (eg basic fish made with oval plus triangle, select both shapes and ‘group’ so they become 1) which allows you to duplicate the shape with copy/paste and reposition them anywhere. You would be able to make a beach hut with door and try it out in different colours and positions for instance. There are usually different ‘line’ options to make thick lines, wavey lines, zig zag lines etc easily too. Your design on one of these programmes would not need to be exactly what you would knit, a basic fish shape can be detailed at a later point with your own design for scales, fin and so on, a basic wave shape can be detailed with shape and colour later depending how refined you’d like it.
You could also import images to resize and move around, eg a picture of a beach hut.
Starting initially with a rectangle, scaled correctly for the size of workable area you will have on the sweater, and working your first designs within this rectangle would help, you can break out of the refines of the rectangle later so the sweater didn’t look blocky.

Stitchfiddle, and most likely the other programmes too, allow you to inport an image and that would give you the basic design on a grid of the correct size and you could then change individual stitches to a different colour if needed, to add more detail to the basic picture.

What I find cumbersome on stitchfiddle, if you start with a blank grid, is having to place every individual stitch one by one. The paid for version (which is low cost and you can sign up for a short time then revert back to free version) will give a few more options, filling whole rows for a stripe, copying a bunch of stitches to make a repeat, but not the kind of design freedom you describe and which I would also want. It’s good for repeats like stranded colourwork if you already know what you want and just need to chart it with few alterations before knitting up.

I hope this helps. Happy designing!

Thank you so much - I’ll check them out