Most people see a lace shawl and think of fragility, or maybe delicacy. I’ve already told you about the time I saw a lace shawl and thought of structure; the idea became Isblomst. This time, the idea of structure took a different route via Westcott, in the Surrey hills.
When I began designing the Westcott shawl, I was reminded of a feeling I remembered from my grandparents’ house — a specific mid-century balance of glamour and comfort. On that trip to the Surrey hills to visit a friend, right in the middle of bluebell season, I passed a vintage furniture shop that had an Ercol rocking chair in the window. I grew up in a house with exactly that kind of mid-20th century aesthetic. So I wanted to create something that felt as sturdy and timeless as a piece of Ercol furniture, yet as soft as a memory.
But as any apparel designer knows, nothing is ever that straightforward! Yet, the hiccup I experienced actually made Westcott a better shawl. Even if it took a few years of hindsight!
The Deadline-Driven Short-Row Pivot
Halfway through the original sample, I realised Westcott was behaving more like a capelet than a wrap-around shawl. The angles were too sharp; the drape was too fixed. And I’ve nothing against capelets; it just wasn’t what I wanted (but I have left those directions in the pattern notes if you’d prefer that. You just omit the short rows). In the fashion world, I would have cut a new toile in calico. In the knitting world, I had to engineer a solution on the needles. Whilst sticking to the deadline from Knitting magazine, and with no time to rip back!
So I introduced short-row shaping into the stocking stitch panels. It was a calculated risk on the fly that allowed the shawl to swing and drape over the shoulders without needing constant adjustment. It turned a square piece of lace into a three-dimensional garment that moves with you. Like the Isblomst shawl, Westcott won’t slip off your shoulders or strain at the bust — but for completely different reasons, and with a different engineering solution.
More Than Just a Pattern — an Heirloom
Several years later, after I added Westcott to my shop, a wonderful knitter shared on Ravelry that she made her Westcott using yarn spun from her own Alpaca, Otis. She held it together with silk mohair to replicate the glow of a sweater her mother had made for her in the 1960s. There’s that mid-20th century connection! — and in exactly the decade my grandparents had bought the wooden furniture I knew and loved. Seeing her wrapped in it, just as snugly as I imagined it would be, and reading her words about the precious memories it evoked, was worth everything it had taken to bring the Westcott shawl to life. Every feeling of trepidation four years earlier, when I was on a deadline charging down a one-way street.
That is why I spend weeks, months, years — whatever a design needs — obsessing over moments of quiet in my charts and short-row vectors in my shaping. I know that in the short term I’m designing a project for your knitting needles. But in the long term, what I really hope is that I’m helping you engineer a treasure that — much like that Ercol rocking chair that travelled all the way from the Surrey hills and now lives in my home — is built to last for generations.
