On finding calm in the pattern, and the new collection two years in the making

Words by Anna Wheeler

i. Knowing what you want more of

New collections don't begin with a fixed picture in my mind. They build slowly, out of the collection that came before. I notice the small things: which piece someone reaches for twice, which colourway sells out first, which pattern a customer asks about again after they've already bought it. I live alongside the current collection for a while, and think about what could have been done better.

This time, what kept coming back to me was pattern. Or rather, was there too much of it. We had some wonderful Fair Isles and jacquards last season, and I loved every one of them, but was the collection too busy?  Some women just want something calm they can wear with a patterned shirt they already own, or fold into a wardrobe that has its own patterns already. So this new collection needed more plain knits. More Arans. More quiet, so the pattern pieces that are still there can be properly seen, rather than competing with each other for attention.

ii. The way I actually work

I wish I could say I sit down with a clear plan and follow it through, but that has never been how I design. I work in little clusters. A few days of sketching and sampling, then I stop and simply live with the samples for a while. I cut them up. I make small, imperfect things out of them and wear them around the house to see whether I still reach for them once the initial excitement has worn off. Then I do something else for a few days, before coming back for another go. Eventually there has to be a point where I stop circling and make the final decisions, and that edit, choosing which ideas to keep and which to cutcan be hard as i have spent time and effort on all the designs.

The very first thing I made for this collection came out of that habit of cutting things up, which is something a lot of people in the trade would tell you never to do. I took one of our Blockley scarves, a design everybody already loved, and cut it apart to see what else it might become. What I made was a little twisted snood. I wore it all weekend and knew, by the Sunday, that it would go into the new collection. It's one of my favourite pieces, and it began as a little rebellion with the scissors.

iii. Colour, this time

There are colours I return to every season without quite meaning to. There is always a green. There is always a blue. I love a pink and a red sitting together, colours that seem to lift each other up rather than simply sit side by side. But the colour I keep coming back to for this collection is a limestone neutral, the kind of rich, classic cream, just like a traditional Aran sweater. It goes with almost anything.

There is also a dusky pink in this collection that surprised me. Knitted on its own, it's an unnatractive colour, not fresh or pretty in the way pink usually reads. Beside a rich burgundy, though, something happens. In our stripy Notgrove neckerchief, that pairing works well nd looks fantastic. On its own, as a whole block of colour, that pink doesn't really flatter anyone. It needs company. A touch of it against the right neighbouring colour i, which is exactly the kind of thing you only discover once you've knitted the stripe on the machine and tried it on.

Some of the best colour decisions in this collection weren't decisions at all. I threaded up a set of colours straight from the yarn box one afternoon, more or less at random, thinking I would use every colour of the rainbow and just see what would happen. The moment it came off the machine, I knew it was right. The rest of the colourways took considerably longer to get right.

iv. The doubt that never quite goes away

I don't think doubt ever leaves you as a designer, and I've stopped expecting it to. Every idea goes through a stage where it looks a little ugly, a little wrong, and you have to decide whether to keep working through that stage or to let the idea go. That decision is a feeling more than a formula, and I think, it's a real skill. I still catch myself looking at what other designers are doing and wondering if my designsand ideas have come at the right moment or missed it entirely. You can have a genuinely good idea that simply arrives too early or too late, and neither is much use to you.

I keep half an eye on what's moving in the wider world too. It tells me something useful about timing, even though I have no interest in building a collection around it entirely. When brown came back in as a seasonal colour, and I already had it sitting in this collection...I did smile to myself, its a fantastic base colour, i had no idea it was going to be trendy.

v. What's new, and the rule I finally broke

The clearest shift in this collection is the plainer pieces: the Arans, the cables, the textured single colour knits. I had wanted to add something like this for a while and never quite landed it, until this time it simply clicked. Making a single colour piece still feel like Cotswold Knit meant thinking hard about where the interest and detail should sit, if not in a printed pattern, and the answer turned out to be in the structure itself, in the stitch and the knit technique.

I have said for years that I would never do plain knitting, and that I would never use black. This collection has a plain triangle scarf in it that I love completely. I think the rules you set for yourself are worth breaking the moment they no longer serve the work. I don't have the team or the budget to overhaul the whole collection every season the way a much bigger brand might, so change for us tends to arrive at a crossroads rather than all at once, and this felt like one of those moments.

If you're looking for my favourite piece in the collection, it's the Tewkesbury twisted snood, with its bobbles and pointelle lace detail. I already know we need to make more of them.

vi. Who it's for

I design with a particular woman in mind, and if I'm honest, she looks a lot like me. Someone who wants a piece that can carry her through an ordinary day and still feel right for an evening out. As I've got older, I've wanted my own clothes to do more of that work, to feel refined, to help me feel put together without having to think too hard about it. That's really the direction Cotswold Knit is heading in, knitwear that's soft and beautifully made, but smart enough for the occasions that matter as well as the ones that don't.

There's a detail in this collection I hope people notice, even though it would be easy to miss. Texture stitches can get lost in a darker yarn. That's part of why I chose that lighter limestone shade so deliberately. In a paler colour, all the work that goes into a stitch, the bobble, the lace, the pointelle, actually shows up so much more. Hold a piece close and you'll see it. From a distance, in the wrong colour, you might never know it was there at all.

vii. Heritage, with a twist

If I had to sum up this collection in a single line, it would be heritage with a twist. Elegant, refined, genuinely easy to wear, but rooted in something older. The kind of British knitwear that has always been made this way. Two years in the making, in one sense, and yet still shaped by the same habits I've always had: watching, doubting, cutting things up to see what they might become, and trusting the moment a colour comes off the machine and simply feels right.