Dedicated to Jessie, whose curiosity during the pilot of Knitwear Design Initiation incited me to share this story of the Isblomst shawl with the beta group.
In 2012, whilst working at Peter Jones in London, I met a ghost.
This lady wasn’t a literal spirit, but one of those mysterious, wise knitters who appears, drops a lifetime of knowledge, and vanishes before you can even ask her name. She was likely Nordic, with an accent I couldn’t quite place, and she spent an hour of her time drawing out the construction logic of a Faroese shawl on a scrap of paper for me. (I say an hour, but even now, fourteen years later as I prepare this post, I have no sense of time. All I know is that she was unflinchingly generous and giving. However long we actually spent together, it was perfect and gave me everything I needed.)
She told me about the central spine. And last, but not least, she told me about the long, shaped wings that were meant to be tied behind the back for warmth while working.
My pattern-cutter brain caught fire. I saw apparel architecture.
From 2D to 3D | From Shapes to Forms
Most of us are used to the standard triangular shawl. It’s beautiful, but it can be a bit of a fidgety garment. It slips, it slides, and unless you have a shawl pin or you’re standing perfectly still, it eventually ends up around your elbows. The only shawls that I’d seen at that point were the triangular ones where you increase out, and you have the eyelets going down the centre. They were all very geometric and beautiful, in colours, lace, and all with amazing borders.
This was something else. I had never seen knitting like this before.
I really appreciated that there was more structure to the Faroese shawl, still thinking along my home planet pattern cutter lines and how to get darts in here. I thought, “Well, if you can tie it…what if there is something in these wings?” Because they’re just so much bigger! And my mystery knitter was saying that you could pick them up and go in the other direction, or you could knit the wings straight. And I thought, hmm!
I wanted to know: Could I make a shawl stay put using only the logic of the stitches?
The Stroke of Luck (that was actually skill according to Jessie):
I spent over a year experimenting with the Isblomst shawl. I knew I needed to create darts in the fabric to make it contour to the shoulders and bust, but I didn’t want to sew them. Instead, I wanted the knitting to do the work.
The main reason — that I felt — that a lot of shawls will come off, and why a lot of them are so big, is because they just don’t come across well enough. You need loads of fabric just to get them to stay put. And I thought, “Can you put gathers in here somehow?” If there was just more room over the bust area only, it would sit in one place because you don’t want it to not fit there. You want it to be quite nice and firm and secure to wear despite having the extra fabric for coverage. I felt that just having that much more room would help immensely. How could I do this?
The thing that came to mind, just because of who I am, was lace — because it has that lovely lateral spread. The compound effect of eyelets! And I knew that it would be the most open and generous fabric that I could possibly create.
Dart Manipulation, Knitted Shawl Edition
I decided to manipulate the tension by ‘gathering’ the main body of the shawl as I attached the leaf lace trim. I needed a ratio. If I’d been sewing, I’d have known how to handle the fabric — and had the freedom to pull up the easestitches as needed. And this was 2012. I wasn’t as confident with knitting maths as I am now. Being a bit overwhelmed by the sums at the time, I chose the simplest one I could count: one-on, one-off. It was just easy to remember every other row. One of my brain’s weaknesses, as I’ve written before, is losing count, and it happens very often. But I thought one on, one off; start there.
I skipped every second row of the shawl body as I knitted the leaf trim onto the garter stitch selvedge. I was worried that it would create holes or look wonky. But when I cast off and draped it over my shoulders, the magic happened.
That 50% pickup ratio acted like a series of invisible bust darts. It pulled the fabric in exactly where a woman’s body needs it to sit.
The 94-Year-Old Test: Isblomst’s Results
The real validation didn’t come from my maths, though, not by any means. It came years later when a knitter named Marion showed me the Isblomst she had made for her 94-year-old mother. Her mother wears it every single day. Why? Because it stays put. There’s no faff whatsoever. It provides the warmth of a cardigan with the elegance of lace. It did everything I had hoped it would do when that beautiful, mystery knitter set my brain alight and my needles and pencils to work.
The Lesson for the Thinking Knitter:
We (this might be a royal “we” 😉) often think that complex results require complex processes. I thought that about my body of work for a long time, and I’m unlearning that, or banishing that misbelief. I didn’t expect to look back at one of my earliest designs until Jessie — to whom this post is dedicated — encouraged me to see things differently. But Isblomst taught me that sophisticated engineering — the kind that makes a garment truly wearable — is often hidden in the simplest rhythms.
Sometimes, all you need is a “one-on, one-off” logic and a willingness to see your knitting as a piece of engineered clothing. Sometimes we are too close to our own lightbulb moments to see them as the brilliance they are. To me, it felt like winging it with a simple ratio; to Jessie, it felt like magic that she could actually understand and replicate.
And to you, reading this now; I hope you feel the same.