Custom Portrait Knit Christmas Jumper

A photograph is the one piece of artwork that cannot be resized into a knit — it has to be re-drawn for the needle. This build takes a head-and-shoulders shot and charts it at 100 needles by 104 courses, which on a 12GG bed is a 28 x 28 cm block sitting between the rib and the name band. Three yarns carry the shading and the fourth is the ground, and that is a manufacturing limit rather than a design choice: every extra tone is an extra feeder, an extra float behind the panel and a stiffer reverse, so a photograph greyed into sixteen levels is not a jumper anyone would wear. The order of work is what decides whether the face survives. We set the black point and the highlight on the photo first, then quantise, because a face and a plain background sit about thirty levels apart and will otherwise land in the same tone and come out as a mask. Then the chart is judged at 1.5 m — the distance a shop floor is read from — and re-cut if the eye socket or the jaw line has gone. Around the block the panel stays deliberately quiet: seven vertical stripes counted per size rather than widened, a name band on its own twelve courses so a change of name never touches the face, a row of side motifs, and an optional chevron, zigzag or diamond border worked in the same pass as the body. Everything is one front panel, so nothing is cut and matched at the armhole. What we will not do is knit a face we have no right to: a named player, a club crest or a licensed character needs the written licence on file before artwork is released, and the photograph has to be yours. MOQ 100 pieces per colourway with sizes splittable inside it, sampling 7 days from a photo, bulk 20-25 days after PPS approval, DDP to US, EU, UK, AU and JP.