I think, as a designer, it is easy to get comfortable with what you know and what you are used to creating. That’s why I found the latest design brief from Sirdar a real challenge but one I found inspiring and interesting to work on. Sirdar has just launched a brand new yarn called Shawlie dedicated to shawl knitting and I have had the pleasure of working on a selection of designs for this yarn.
The yarn is space dyed in soft colours and the yarn content is a mixture of acrylic, alpaca and wool. I’ve not worked with acrylic a lot previously, but this yarn has a nice soft feel and a slight halo that makes it really lovely. I am usually a big fan of bamboo needles but with this yarn I found that using metal needles made the stitches flow better than on bamboo.
I worked on a few swatches and design ideas and sent off my suggestions to the design manager at Sirdar. They made their choices and I got to work on the details. I ended up designing four different designs; one small triangular shawl with leaf patterns, one large triangular shawl with peacock stitch, one rectangular wrap with lots of texture and one large, relaxed snood with cables and diamonds.
With this project, I created the patterns, but did not make the samples so it was really exciting to see how the designs turned out! They have all just launched on the Sirdar website alongside two designs by Emma Wright. I really like the striped crescent shawl she has designed using two colours, the yellow and grey look fab used in this way!
Which one is your favourite?