My Starting Point

Every piece I design starts with my experiences outside. Rousham Gardens, Bourton House, the gardens I've grown to love throughout the seasons and near to me here in the Cotswolds. I love to notice at my own pace, the colour and the shape of what is actually in front of me, the things pulling at my attention.

i. From the garden to the sketchbook

I carry a sketchbook with me on these visits, and what goes into it is loose, the early threads of ideas and inspirations, lines that wander the way the plant I noticed, itself wandered, nothing drawn to a ruler. Later, in my studio, I scan the page into the design program on my computer, and that is where the shape of a new piece begins to take form.

ii. What the screen can and cannot tell me

A lot of the design work happens on the computer first. I colour up the pattern digitally and work to match the yarn to what I can see on the screen. The match is never quite exact, a screen and a length of yarn hold colour differently, but it gets close enough to start working with the relationships between the colours, to see whether they harmonise or pull against each other.

Then I am back on the machine, threading it up and knitting colour samples, this takes time and patients and this is also the most exciting time and its the only place that a design proves itself. On screen, most things look plausible but on the machine , I can really tell what's working.

iii. Where it all starts again

The shapes come from the same place they always have. The garden, wonderfully organic and wandering with nothing built to a straight line. I lay the shapes down first, then let the colour fill in around them, the way it has worked for me since the beginning.

A feeling, a shape, a colour that stays in my mind. Everything else in the process, the screen, the sample, the hours at the machine, exists to test whether that first instinct was actually right.

iv. The other kind of patience

Even once a colourway is confirmed on the machine, the piece itself still has a long way to go. A confirmed sample settles the colours. Everything else such as trims, seams… the places where two edges eventually meet, comes later, and comes slowly.

That slower work suits me, if I am honest. The excitement of a new colourway arrives quickly, all at once, in a garden or in front of the machine. The finishing that follows asks for something entirely different, the same patience I have learned to trust at the linker, one stitch, one seam, one small decision at a time.

I think that is really the whole shape of how I work. An instinct that arrives quickly, in a garden, in a colour I cannot stop noticing, and then the long, unhurried work of proving it was right. Each half depends entirely on the other.