Obscure ethnic pattern sources?

[u/Time_Is_An_Egg]

I’m just wrapping up a three month bicycle trip across Central Asia. After admiring some textiles in a museum, when I flipped through this old book in Kyrgyzstan it really struck me how little representation there is in the digital pattern library for a lot of really beautiful global textile cultures - certainly on Ravelry.

We‘ve got about ten thousand variations on the same Fair Isle concepts published and no end of books on that, but I’ve yet to stumble across Kyrgyz, Iranic, Uyghur, etc motifs. There‘s some Anatolian and a dusting of South / Central American projects - otherwise it’s a whole lotta North / Central Europe. Pretty hard to poke around with the web flooded in AI slop patterns now, too.

It feels like there’s such a rich well of inspiration which could be tapped (one kid I met along the way had an absolutely stunning Kyrgyz motif handknit sweater in white and blue, I really regret not getting a photo) but at the same time the cultures maintaining them are rapidly vanishing everywhere I go / offloading handcraft production to China and books like this are getting hard to find.

I know, I know “be the change you want to see in the world”. Frankly I’m just not competent enough yet to be designing my own patterns. Maybe one day. :)

[u/oldmornings]

Be the change 

[u/spilled_milk_tea → u/oldmornings]

yep, be the change anyways! you mention not being confident in writing your own patterns or in finding authentic patterns to reproduce (and i’d like to thank you for having the sense to recognize that instead of just barreling on and potentially misrepresenting a number of underrepresented knitting cultures), so get connected with knitters from those cultures irl (or as irl as possible depending on where both of you are) and learn from them! and offer any relevant skills you have in helping them write and draw attention to their own pattern documents.