Pattern releases

Verso tee

For obvious woolly related reasons, I’m a big fan of winter, but after we had an unusually warm couple of days last weekend I realised how ready I am for spring. It was so nice to feel the warm breeze in my hair instead of having it tangled up in a scarf. (Yes, I know I’m calling 16°C ‘warm,’ but it was, it really was! 😉) We’re probably going to have to wait a few weeks for the spring weather to return in earnest, but I’ve already started to slowly put away my woollens and bring out my cotton and linen knits.

I designed Verso with spring in mind – it’s slightly cropped, loose and breezy, and with the elbow-length sleeves and knit in a DK weight, it will be great for milder, not-quite-summer-yet days.

The inspiration came from the basic white t-shirt, and thinking about how to add interest to a simple top while keeping it minimal and clean. It’s knit seamlessly from the top down, and the sleeves are picked up from the armhole with the sleeve caps shaped with short rows.

The pleats are assembled with crochet, which is stronger and sturdier than just sewing them in place. I made a fully illustrated step-by-step tutorial of the assembly, which was really fun to draw up as well.

Verso is knit in The Fibre Co.’s Luma, a blend of wool, cotton, linen and silk, which knits up to a fabric with a great weight and drape. I do recommend steam pressing the folded pleats if possible, and Luma takes very well to that as well.

This design is part of The Fibre Co.’s Yarn Support Programme for independent designers. I think their support of indie designers is brilliant and inspiring, and I’m so honoured that my design was chosen for the programme. The pattern is currently available exclusively at WEBS.

Perfin cardigan

All photos by Amy Gwatkin for Pom Pom Quarterly. Illustrations by Elena Skoreyk Wagner.

Have you seen Pom Pom Quarterly’s new spring issue? This one is all about stamps, with each design inspired by a stamp from a different country, and a couple of really lovely articles about mail and knitting as well. It’s a beautiful issue, really thematic and with such the attention to detail in the graphic design and the paper cut illustrations by Elena Skoreyko Wagner.

My design, the Perfin cardigan, was inspired by this Brazilian stamp. The single, bright red colour was the first thing that caught my eye when I saw it in the mood board, and when I noticed where it was from, I felt I just had to sketch a design with it.

Originally, the idea was to knit the sample in a yarn from the stamp’s country of origin, but in the end we settled on a yarn local to me instead. Because I’m from Brazil myself and emigrated to The Netherlands in my childhood, I really liked the idea of bringing the two countries together – like a stamp might! The yarn is Ovis et cetera’s Shetland DK, spun from Dutch sheep and dyed by the talented Saskia, who was born and raised where I now live. And who, by the way, used actual stamps to ship the yarn to me!

The cardigan itself was inspired not just by design on the stamp but what it celebrates too – the advent of airmail. The stitch pattern was derived from the grid in the background and I wanted to use a single colour like the stamp, so instead of colourwork, the grid is made with eyelets – which makes this cardigan not too warm even though it’s knit in wool, perfect for spring. I also wanted to reference the aeronautical them in a small way, so the double breasted buttons are a little nod to pilots’ jackets.

Inkwell pullover

The new amirisu magazine was published last week, with my newest design – Inkwell. This pullover is made up of 4 panels, with colourwork down the centre and stockinette along the sides. When I first started sketching this, I had been sewing a lot with my bodice block, which gave me the idea of incorporating a princess seam in a knitted sweater.

Originally this was only an aesthetic consideration but when I began designing it, the seam also became a construction feature. The shaping required to make the seam line diagonal on the centre panel is also what staggers the vertical stripes after each horizontal one. On the side panels, the seam line becomes a secondary waist shaping point. I think the seam could also be a great place to add, remove or modify shaping – for example to add bust shaping.

I also made a colour picker so you can visualise some colour combinations you might like, try it here!

Alinea cardigan

Alinea is my latest self-published pattern, a sport-weight cardigan that I brought out last month. It’s a beautiful autumn day today so I thought I ought to write a little bit about my favourite autumn cardigan!

I originally knit the first prototype of this design two years ago, and it was one of my favourites for a long time – still is, actually! But there have always been a few details that bothered me a bit – the body was a bit too long and stuck out of all my coats, the neckband at the back neck was a bit too loose and the sleeves slightly too wide. I don’t want to admit how often I get a sleeve caught on a door handle wearing this grey version, though that probably says more about my clumsiness than the design..!

The final version of the design has all of my favourite elements of the prototype – the ease, the lines, the pockets – with more refined proportions and a better fit. It’s a really versatile cardigan that’s easy to dress up as well, which is always a big plus for me as I’m always cold and always happy when I can wear something warm on the off-chance that I need to dress a bit neater! The name, ‘alinea’ means paragraph in Dutch, which I thought was quite suitable, a block of text for a cardigan made up of mostly straight lines and blocks. Read more about it on the pattern page or on Ravelry.

Diesis for Pom Pom Quarterly

All photos by Nicole Mlakar for Pom Pom Quarterly.

Meet Diesis, my newest design for issue 22 of Pom Pom Quarterly! This autumn issue was guest edited by Juju Vail and aren’t the knits, models, photos and styling just beautiful? I was really drawn to all the pattern mixing and the rich, bold colours that Juju wanted to use and was so delighted to see how it all came together.

For my piece, I started doodling stripes, checks and crosses and came upon this stitch pattern that has a bit of each of these elements. As I was working on the sample, I realised the all-over pattern the stitch created looked like a bunch of double daggers, the typographical symbol ‡, also known as a ‘diesis’. The way the stitch grows at the yoke is my favourite bit of the design but I also love the extra deep cuffs and the way they affect the proportions of the jumper.

I had sketched at least 8 combinations at some point but narrowed it down to these two. In the end we decided on the black and off-white with contrast cuffs and the John Arbon Viola colours were the final, and absolutely perfect, piece to the puzzle.

If you also like to play around with colour, I made an interactive colouring page here with colour pickers for each colour so you see what all sorts of different colour combinations will look like.

Some details on the jumper: it’s knit top-down in the round, with a circular yoke. The stitch is a mosaic/slip stitch pattern, which means only 1 colour per round so the knitting goes fast and the entire garment is nicely stretchy. There are some short rows at the back neck worked into the stitch pattern to make sure it sits a bit higher than the front neck. The body has an a-line shape. I’ve written the pattern in a way that should make it easy to modify the length of the cuffs, if you prefer a more conventional cuff length.

Minamo for amirisu

Issue 12 of amirisu magazine was published this weekend and I designed a pattern for it, Minamo! It’s an a-line shape pullover, with contiguous set-in sleeves and a lot of short-rows – with plenty of stockinette but definitely not a boring knit. As it’s knit top down, in the round and in one piece, there’s very little finishing involved.

the submission sketch; hi faceless ladies!

For this pullover, I wanted to combine a geometric element with a more organic one – the parallel stripes playing with the flowing, irregularly shaped hem. Instead of having the stripes independent from what’s going on in the rest of the sweater, they follow the shapes of the sweater itself: dipping at the back along with the hem, and also following the shaping at the front.

After shipping the sample off, I knit myself another one, this time in that dark green unravelled Colourmart yarn from my last post. The yarns are quite different – even though they’re both merino wool – so the finished pullovers look a little different too. My row gauge for the second one was off, which I figured would be fine as I’m a bit taller than the amirisu model. It does mean the armholes are a fair bit deeper too, and combined with the drapier fabric, the fit of this second version is more casual and relaxed.

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