sweater

Strophe pullover

For amirisu’s 17th issue, I designed a luxurious and super easy to wear dropped shoulder sweater, Strophe. Overall it’s an easy and relaxing knit, quite straight-forward, with a couple of big and small details to keep things interesting!

I named it Strophe after the Greek word for turn, though actually thinking about boustrophedon writing (but could you think of a weirder name for a pattern, haha), which is a style where the writing direction changes on every line, from left to right and then from right to left. The reason for this is that there are some extra turns to this sweater. It’s knit from the bottom up, flat (like a cardigan), with stitches are picked up at the fronts to make a band (like a cardigan) which is then joined together at the front – unlike a cardigan. The remaining stitches are bound off for the neck opening. This means you can make the v-neck just the perfect depth for you. It also means you could just not join the fronts and wear it like a cardigan 😉

Another couple of details I like are the bias rib texture, it’s so easy to memorise and wraps really nicely around the back of the neck, and of course the gentle bubble sleeves. The sweater was knit in mYak Baby Yak Medium and it’s so dreamy! It’s light and incredibly soft and the drape is wonderful for this design. The colour Mustard is really beautiful and deep, I’m a little surprised by how much I’d like to incorporate this colour into my own wardrobe.

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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