The Inspiration
My designs begin with colour, or more honestly with a feeling. I am drawn to the colours you find in nature at particular moments: the green of moss after rain, the soft pink of a fading rose, the particular blue of a winter sky just before it turns. I keep a collection of antique textiles gathered at markets over the years, and they thread through my work too, as pattern references and colour memories.
“Every time you look at the scarf you see something a little different. That is intentional.”
My grandmother had a farm cottage garden where vegetables and flowers grew together without any particular regard for where things were supposed to go. Fuchsias along the borders, snapdragons that moved when you touched them, roses planted for their scent, not just their appearance. I spent hours in her greenhouse as a child, entirely absorbed. I think that garden taught me something important about design: the most beautiful things have no rigid repetition. Variety is not a flaw, it’s character.
"I want to make something that will last beyond the moment."
Cotswold Knit is for women who choose with care. Women who would rather own fewer, better things. Those who understand that a well-made lambswool piece, properly looked after, can last twenty years and improve with each one.
Each collection links to the next making it easy to build your collection piece by piece, season by season and year on year knowing that it will work in harmony.
The Studio
My studio in Warwickshire is a light and airy, creative space. It houses two knitting machines, a hand linker and a large work table. The simplicity is intentional. I want to stay close to the making, to understand every stage of how a piece comes together before it leaves me. Every Cotswold Knit piece begins here as a prototype I wear and live in: to the supermarket, on the school run, in the garden. I want to know how something feels after weeks of being worn.
The Materials
I choose all my yarns the same way I choose my colours: by what feels right, and by what the design needs.
Lambswool
We use 100% lambswool, RWS-certified and spun by Todd and Duncan on the banks of Loch Leven in Scotland. Lambswool comes from the first shearing of a young sheep, when the fleece is at its finest. It has a natural elasticity that gives it body and bounce. It breathes. It improves with age. We choose it because it is simply the best material for what we make and soft on the skin due to the micron count in the premium grade Geelong fleece.
Bouclé
Bouclé is made using a highly specialised spinning technique that creates those tiny loops and curls. The fibre itself is very fine, and without a small amount of nylon thread running through it for structural strength, it would break during the knitting process and would not give you the longevity I require. The nylon is structural, not cosmetic. It is not a shortcut. I do not use synthetic blends anywhere I can avoid them, and I continue to look for better alternatives as the industry develops them.
Merino blend
For some pieces in the collection I work with a combination of merino and bouclé, knitted on a very fine 14 gauge machine. The merino is smooth and clean, which means the bouclé reads against it: those distinctive looped fibres come forward and you get a gentle three-dimensional relief in the fabric, something tactile and quietly alive, without any heaviness or stiffness. It is one of the most wearable things I make.
The Story
I didn’t set out to build a brand. I set out to make something with my hands, for people I loved, during a time when that felt like the most honest and caring thing I could do.
I trained at the Royal College of Art and spent over twenty years designing for some of the most prestigious names in fashion: Missoni, Alexander McQueen, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Whistles, Marks and Spencer. What I learned in those years, more than anything, was that the detail is everything. The difference between something good and something exceptional is often invisible until you hold it.
What I kept from those years was the craft and the standard. What I let go of was the pace, and the assumption that more is always better.
It was 2020. Lockdown had arrived, and the company I was working for in Italy had stopped needing designs. For the first time in my career, I had time on my hands, time to think about how I wanted to work and what I actually wanted to make. I started knitting scarves at home in Warwickshire. Not as a business. As gifts. Something made slowly and with care, passed to friends and family during a period when a handmade gift felt like the most direct way of saying: I was thinking of you.
Word spread, as it tends to. Friends mentioned them to other friends and people I had never met got in touch. Gradually, quite surprisingly, something began to take shape. Cotswold Knit grew from a gift rather than a strategy, an origin we take pride in.