Inspiration: Melanie Porter

Found inspiration for interior pieces in Melanie Porter's work. She uses hand-prepared British wool that she dyes into rich, stunning colours. To then felt & knitted to create chunky & contemporary fabrics which then get transformed into beautiful.

Re - Knitted Garments

As a development to knitting some old garments by cutting them into strips, I decided to try knitting them by keeping the garment whole or keeping the knit attached to a recognisable piece of the garment. Knitting the garments adjusted their original shape and size, reducing the overall size.

Inspiration: Claire Anne O'Brien

East London based textile designer: Claire-Anne O'Brien, looks into a sculpture approach to textiles. With an MA in Knitted Textiles from the Royal College of Art she experiments with the form, construction and scale of knitted fabrics.

I found it interesting how she is effectively creating interior pieces by knitting with lengths of knit. I also liked a use of bold colours.

View her website: Claire-Anne O'Brien

Exploring Knit: Other Yarns & Knitted Garments.

In my knit sampling process I also looked at knitting other materials. Plastic bag knitting had been bought to my attention a couple of years ago, but I had not yet had a go at it myself. I looked at knitting with thin & thicker plastic bags, alternating the colours to create a marled effect.

Another idea came to mind, taking inspiration from Claire Anne O'Brien, the idea of knitting with something that is already knitted. So using the same technique I'd to create yarn out of plastic bags, I took to cutting an old woollen jumper in strips and knitting that into a sample.

This then led to trying out the same idea on knitted jersey tops & t-shirts.

Exploring Knit: Photography.

For the final major project of my degree, I decided to look into a subjects that have always interested me in every day but throughout my course I have tended to shy away from: print and knit. I wondered about the possibility of turning knit into a print.

To get the ball rolling on this idea, I begun to create knit samples: both by hand and on a domestic knitting machine. I generally to basic stitches, changing needle sizes or tensions, to get the general idea of the knit structure. From this I begun to take photographs, looking at the close up detail of the build in the samples.

I experimented with changing the needle sizes mid-way through samples.

Then moving on to looking at creating ladders in the knit and making it so pieces would unravel.

The holes in the samples allowed me to play with the idea of layering. The possibility of show the stitch structure on both sides of the sample piece.