Inspiration or Iteration?
How do your design ideas take shape? Is it through inspiration or iteration?
Part of a semester-long assignment when I taught Machine Knitting 2 at Parsons School of Design was maintaining a design journal. Each student was required to collect and document ideas, sketches, images, and notes inspired by nature or human-made structures. The practice aimed to foster an awareness of their surroundings and encourage students to recognize the design potential and inspiration in their everyday lives. Ideally, there would be no final project panic as the end of the semester approached. The diversity and creativity captured in those journals often led to remarkable, original explorations.
Design inspiration can come from anywhere — sometimes when we least expect it. As machine knitters interested in design, texture, and color, whether using a Kniterate or doing manipulations on a manual machine, translating inspiration into knitted fabric is always an adventure.
But let’s be real. Although I’ve kept many a design journal, my favorite developments most often are created through repeated modifications. Each iteration begins with experimentation or a past error, with no nature study or human-made structure that inspired it. For me, inspiration happens more often when diving deeply into a particular technique and asking the question, What would happen if…?
With a journal and design project due the last day of class, many of my students’ “inspirational” images may have been retrofitted to their final project. I see you!
Natural and human-made structures
Both natural and structures designed by humans are classic sources of inspiration for knit designs. The repetitive yet evolving pattern of waves, the delicate layers of mushroom gills, a brick wall.
Could stalks of bamboo have inspired the following swatch? They didn’t. It’s a racked herringbone stitch pattern gone wrong, resulting in lots of tucks, yet zero slanted stitches. I love the result of this mistake, even though the fabric is double knitted and heavy. (I like heavy fabrics, but I was aiming for something lighterweight.)
After months of knitting only racked ribs in preparation for the release of the Racking Workshop, I took a detour. What would happen if I used a different structure to reproduce the look of the bamboo stalk swatch? If I used the plating slit, I could easily add a second color. The purls could be a third color.
Taking It Further
Before the Kniterate, I had mostly stayed away from purl (a.k.a. links-links) swatches. A links-links fabric is defined by the knits and purls in the same wale, quite visible in the swatch above. Even with the transfer carriage on my Passap DM-80, transfers and keeping track of transfers could be tedious. With the Kniterate, using the Stitch Block and Front<> Rear Transfer commands, it was possible to easily create the type of purl fabric I love.
What would happen if I split up the ribs and added some unbalanced ribs to the mix? The development below is a modification of the swatch above. Once the fabric comes off the machine, the split ribs distort, and the reverse jersey rolls. Deep texture achieved!
Textile Technique Crossover
Sometimes design ideas come from a textile cousin like weaving. Woven fabric textures can trigger knit stitch patterns. Houndstooth, a woven structure, has been translated many times by domestic machine manufacturers to punchcards and digital files.
For decades, I have admired the fiberwork of weaver Olga de Amaral. I first came across her art years ago in American Craft magazine and have followed her work ever since. I was therefore quite surprised and very honored when Caligraphic Paris, a young brand unknown to me at the time, named me as an inspiration along with Olga de Amaral!
I caught this de Amaral piece in a group exhibition last summer at the Museum of Modern Art, Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America 1940-1980. The layers of texture nd color gradations are extremely satisfying. Her work inspires me in a way that is beyond technical tweaks at the knitting machine.
Further Reading
More about links-links [on ResearchGate]
More about Olga de Amaral [on her website]
O!
If you’re a Kniterate user, my prerecorded Designing with Kniterate - Session 3 (The Tuck Loop (Plus Plating) provides help with using the Stitch Block and the Front<>Rear Transfer commands. If you’re not an owner yet, I’d be happy to give you a virtual tour of the machine.