Most knitwear briefs arrive as a reference image and a fabric description. Both are useful. Neither says how the piece should be built, and that decision does more to the finished garment than the yarn does.
Three choices set it: the gauge, the construction, and the finishing. Here is what each one changes.
Gauge: how fine the knit is
Gauge is the number of needles per inch on the knitting machine. The number goes up as the knit gets finer.
3gg to 5gg. Chunky. Visible stitch, real weight, holds a shape on its own. Cable knits, heavy cardigans, statement layering pieces. Uses a lot of yarn, so cost per piece runs high on expensive fibres.
7gg. The middle ground and the most common request. Substantial without being heavy. Classic crewnecks and cardigans sit here.
12gg and finer. Light, drapey, close to jersey in hand. Fine merino tees, thin layering pieces, knit dresses that need to fall rather than stand.
The practical point: a factory tooled for one band will make that band well. Ask before you design a range that spans 3gg to 12gg, because a single machine floor rarely covers it.
Multi-gauge describes a machine that can knit more than one density in a single piece, so a ribbed cuff can be denser than the body. It is a capability, not a category, and it is worth asking about if your design has a heavy trim on a light body.
Construction: how the panels are made
Cut-and-sew
The machine knits a long length of fabric. The shapes are cut out of it and sewn together, exactly as a woven shirt is made.
Fast and cheap. It also cuts through the knit structure at every edge, so the seams need overlocking and the piece can grow or twist with wear. The cut waste is real, which matters when the yarn is cashmere.
Right for simple shapes, high volumes, and lower-cost fibres.
Fully-fashioned
Each panel is knitted to its finished shape. The machine adds and drops needles to form the armhole curve, the shoulder slope, the neckline. Nothing is cut. The panels are then linked together stitch by stitch.
More machine time, more skill, more cost. In return the stitch runs unbroken to the edge, the shaping sits where you drew it, and the piece holds its line through washing. The fashioning marks at the shoulder are the visible signature, and on a good piece they read as a mark of quality rather than a detail to hide.
This is what most premium knitwear means when it says "knitted, not cut."
Whole-garment or seamless
The garment comes off the machine complete. No linking, no side seams.
The cleanest result available and the most demanding to program. Set-up time is long, so it earns its cost on repeat styles rather than one-offs. Worth it where a seam would be felt against the skin, or where the silhouette depends on nothing interrupting it.
Techniques that sit on top
These are pattern methods, and they combine with any of the above.
Intarsia. Blocks of colour knitted directly into the fabric with no floats behind. Reversible, no bulk, and the only clean way to put a large colour block into a knit. Slow, and it needs a machine and an operator who can do it.
Jacquard. Colour carried across the back of the work. Faster than intarsia and heavier, with a visible float on the reverse. Right for small repeating motifs.
Cable and rib. Structural stitch patterns. Cable adds weight and dimension. Rib adds recovery, which is why it lives at cuffs and hems.
What this costs you
Roughly, in ascending order: cut-and-sew, fully-fashioned, whole-garment. Intarsia adds meaningfully on top of any of them. Finer gauge takes longer to knit but uses less yarn, so on cashmere a fine piece can land close to a chunky one.
The useful move is to decide construction before you decide yarn. A brief that says "fully-fashioned, 7gg, merino" can be quoted accurately. A brief that says "a nice sweater in merino" will come back at whatever construction is cheapest to make, and you will find out which one when the sample arrives.
Matching the build to the piece
| If the piece needs | Choose |
| Volume and structure | 3gg to 5gg, fully-fashioned |
| A classic hand that lasts | 7gg, fully-fashioned |
| Drape and lightness | 12gg, fully-fashioned or whole-garment |
| No seams against the skin | Whole-garment |
| Large colour blocks | Intarsia |
| Lowest cost at volume | Cut-and-sew |
None of this is exotic. It is the vocabulary a knitwear factory uses internally, and a brief written in it gets quoted faster and made closer to what you drew.
Tirarin is a custom knitwear manufacturer running 3gg to 12gg, fully-fashioned and whole-garment, in cashmere, merino and recycled fibres. The same floor knits performance fabric for activewear and heavy-gauge knitted outer layers.
