Developing a Design Idea

A couple of months ago I had a crop jumper design published in Knitting magazine. The cable pattern on the garment was developed from photographs and sketches of ideas taken on one of the French Treats Knitting Holidays I taught on several years ago. Here is a picture of the finished garment.

Three years ago when I was teaching in France with Sasha Kegan I was teaching a workshop on cables and at the time I was asked to develop some cable patterns based on an Abbey we had visited the previous year. This was quite challenging as I didn't remember seeing anything  that would obviously work into a cable pattern.

The only image I could think of that might lend itself to being worked into some kind of cable was the ceiling in the cloisters at the Abbey. so I started doing some sketches and tracings from the pictures of the ceiling.

Playing around with these images, particularly the drawing on the right hand page of the image above did remind me a bit of some cable stitch patterns I had seen in one of my Japanese stitch library books. I went through the stitch library book and chose 2 stitch patterns to try knitting. I was also thinking about these stitch patterns being used in a cushion cover so knitted both at the same time with moss stitch between each pattern.

Having knitted this sample I liked the left hand pattern where the cable disappears into the 'arch' above and on the right hand pattern I liked the lace used to edge the cable. Both patterns came with charts so it was much easier to play around with the patterns in chart form. I worked up another chart and when knitted it looked like this.

I thought it worked OK as one of the samples for the knitting holiday that year but when I got home again I decided to work on the pattern a bit more to refine it a bit more and also to make it into more of a motif pattern than an all over pattern and here is the finished result...

The finished garment is knitted in an Aran weight cotton yarn. It is a long sleeve crop jumper but it would be quite easy to re-work as a normal length jumper.