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.