Floriston

©2013 twistcollective.com; photography: Jane Heller

I know it sounds funny, but I do a lot of designing on my bicycle. I live in a mountainous place, and no matter where I ride, there are always hills and more hills. To keep myself from thinking about my legs on those endless climbs, I pass the time working out the details of new designs.

On some rides last summer it was a cardigan design that kept me diverted. The idea was to create a modern shape that would skim the figure and be easy to wear, but with a bit of elegance…something feminine, but not girly…with lace details, but a geometric motif rather than a floral one…on and on it went, to the top of the hill.

The result is Floriston, just out in Twist Collective's Spring 2013 issue. It's an airy, open-front cardigan with clean lines and a little surprise – a sweet inverted pleat at the back.

©2013 twistcollective.com; photography: Jane Heller

Some more details:

• A wavy eyelet-and-rib pattern forms the cardigan's front bands and is repeated on the inside of the pleat.
• A bit of waist shaping keeps the silhouette sleek.
• The sweater fronts widen slightly at the bottom for some subtle draping without an excess of fabric.
• The bracelet-length sleeves have a little vent detail that echoes the back pleat.
• The sleeves and hem have a crisp I-cord edging.

I love the way that Twist styled the photos of Floriston. The model has such grace and charm, and that floral-print skirt is adorable. But I'm not a very girly girl, so when I had one made for me, I indulged in a lovely charcoal grey. So far I've only worn it with jeans and a tank, but I'd also wear it with some dressier ankle-length pants and short boots, or with a slim sheath dress. Pretty sure I'll steer clear of the bike shorts, though.

Tenaya: It's the details

Photo: ©2012 Carrie Bostick Hoge

I admit it: I'm a geek. While most knitters look upon swatching as a dreaded ordeal, I can't wait to dive in. I love swatching up a new stitch I've found in a stitch dictionary, imagining how it can be made to work in some garment or other I'm thinking of. Even better is working out my own unique lace or cable pattern. But best of all is when I have to engineer or re-engineer some detail, figuring out how to get the fabric to do what I want it to do.

With Tenaya, the top-down set-in sleeve cardigan I designed for Twist Collective's Fall 2012 issue, I had an awfully good time. The cable pattern is one that I'd been fooling around with for a while. It's an asymmetrical three-stranded open braid that is mirrored on the fronts and back of the cardigan. Nothing complicated, but the asymmetry keeps it entertaining.

The seed stitch that adds such a rich texture to the button bands and neckband provided me with some fun engineering opportunities as well. I find that the edges of most buttonholes, especially the one-row type, can look rather sloppy. They look even worse when worked on a seed stitch ground. For Tenaya, I tinkered with the two-row style of buttonhole, finessing the methods of binding off and casting on stitches until I found a way to produce crisp, clean, square edges.

The main challenge with the neckband was how to decrease the circumference without interrupting the seed stitch pattern. The faux I-cord that begins the band and the real I-cord that binds it off gave me some places to stash decreases invisibly. And I love the way that those edges echo the slipped-stitch ribs that separate the cable and eyelet panels on the fronts and back.

Litchfield

©2011 twistcollective.com; photography: Jamie Dixon

My Great-Grandmother Nettie Mae Colby was a prolific knitter, and what she made was mostly mittens. She made them for her family, for the hired men who worked on the family farm, for folks around town. In this she was abetted by my Great-Grandfather James, who would bring her reports of children with cold hands and the approximate dimensions of the needed mittens.

The mittens she made were extremely fine, knit on steel pins, probably #000 or #0000, and apparently very warm. My mother had a treasured pair that she lost some years ago. She mentions them every winter. This past year one of her cousins unearthed a pair, and passed them along to me. I made a fairly faithful reproduction of them for my mom – though I could only bring myself to use #00 needles.

Nettie Mae taught me some interesting tricks with those mittens: the rolled-edge cuff, and the purled gutter around the thumb gusset. Somewhere along the way, I became rather fascinated with mitten construction, and came up with a few of my own improvements. The result is Litchfield.

I have always liked the anatomical shaping of “technical” mittens, those used for skiing or ice-climbing, and used them as a model for the shaping that I built into the design. And where Nettie Mae made a purely functional mitten, I can’t resist embellishing those small blank canvases with a little balanced asymmetry.

Designing a companion hat was a natural progression from the mitten. The suggestion for its shape came from Twist Collective's editor, Kate Gilbert. As soon as I heard the word 'cloche', I saw the hat perfectly – what fun to take that asymmetrical cable, and make it run around the band. The technical challenge was to create a brim with enough structure to keep it from going floppy as soon as the hat was washed. My solution was to use a ribbing pattern that comes together before the rolled edge to form a sort of buttress to the brim. It was quite an interesting puzzle to work out.

The pattern name? It's the New Hampshire town where Great-Grandma Nettie Mae's steel pins were kept so busy.