STRUCTURE

So, I’ve been putting off writing blogs forever. I like to write, and I like to talk to people about craft stuff, but I’m not comfortable with self promotion. I get squirrelly. I bit the bullet and asked people to send me questions on Instagram and Threads to get the ball rolling and more people responded than I was expecting! That was encouraging. So here’s the first of a few posts based on those questions:

It’s hard to answer one question without diverging into multiple downstream threads and byways. I’m not very good at keeping to one topic (to understand A you have to understand Z first!) So forgive me in advance for the rambling

Knitting is fascinating to me precisely because you’re creating the fabric at the same time you’re creating the garment, there’s a lot of follow on consequences to how it’s made. We are used to having stretch in clothes now- micro machine-knits, jersey fabrics, stretch fibres, are so ubiquitous that your average person has possibly never thought much about it. Negative ease- clothing that would cling to you in some places and give way in others was until 19th century either the provenance of very planned structure (boning, facing, lacing, etc) or knits.

Unless you are pretty deeply into dress history or clothing making, you probably don’t often think about the structural requirements of clothes; Possibly haven’t much considered clothes as structures, at all.  (To be fair, if you’re reading this, you, personally, probably have. I like to think I have few illusions as to how you found my blog)  Have a look in your closet, and think about your woven dresses, shirts, or trousers. In order for those items to fit you, they needed to be cut from flat material in what to non-sewists can appear to be arcane and mysterious 2d shapes, which are then put together into a 3d shell that will cup your body with a margin of ease— space for your body to move and shift inside them. The clothes are composed so they can go over the weirdly shaped sticks and bumps of our bodies and (hopefully) not bind or pinch in areas that require a surprising amount of freedom. This is all done from material which is, mostly, not actually very forgiving— the way it is cut and made up is where the magic happens.

When you’re hand knitting you’re essentially just wrapping string anti clockwise around a needle for hundreds of metres, trapping that foundational coil with another coil, and then another. It’s a slow-kinetic bed of springs. All this wrapping and twisting gives the fabric made an inherent bias and an absolutely massive amount of built-in ease. Like most things, its best qualities are also it’s worst. You want that ease, but you also need to fight the stretch and the bias.

CALM YOUR TITS, KNITS.

Seams, dude. Seams are the bones of clothing. They are inelastic, solid. They’re what bears weight and channel tension. Pieced knitting is the OG way to tame the wobbly springy beast of knitted fabric. Bonus: if you’re knitting flat and making up after, you can achieve refined and specialised shapings, which you can then ease together in the making up to create some impressively tailored fits. Seams are brilliant.

Unfortunately, I can’t stand pieced knitting.

I cannot for the life of me stay in the same gauge over the span of one project.  As you might have guessed from the meandering nature of my writing, I’m…highly distractible, (Why yes, I do have ADD, thanks for asking) and I’m frequently bouncing between projects and ideas. If I am knitting a sleeve on my trips in the metro, and the back of a jumper at home, the two will be in two totally different gauges by the time they’re all done and meant to come together. I’ve been knitting since I was nine years old. This is an immutable fact of who I am.

So what can I do?  Knits have loads of forgiveness, heaps of ease. And because of that when they are knit seamless and in the round, they, well, wiggle. They shift, they creep, they twist around and around. As a person who has done their fair share of sewing and pattern blocking, I know I need seams. I love seams. So I plan them in.

Since I was quite small I’ve also enjoyed origami. When I was child my grandmother (whom I was raised by with my mother) realised pretty early that I was very manual and enjoyed drawing and fine handcraft. She would give me paper with instructions on how to make little animals or flowers and she knew she’d bought herself several hours of kid-free time to do whatever it was she needed to do around the house. One summer I remember I spent many hours dedicated to making the smallest cranes possible, carefully cutting paper down to ever smaller sizes, and using pins to help me fold them.

Seeing the little figures appear and stand from the tensions created from folds and counter folds (and later, when I discovered modular origami!! The satisfaction of putting them all together! What a time to be alive.) was fascinating, and top down knitting carries on for me where origami leaves off.

When I’m building out the plan for a new garment I’m designing I’ll first cut blocks for it out of tissue paper at a quarter scale, as I would if I were sewing it. Then, I’ll join/tape them at the neck. From there I’ll mark where I want the seams to fall, and then I start the process of deciding where I’m going to make my compromises. There are compromises everywhere. From foundational things such as stitch height compared to width meaning certain angles not being possible without extremely convoluted manipulation, to things like ‘if I make this increase rate happen every third and second round its just going to be a frank pain in the bum to knit’.

Here, friend, is the answer to why and where I’ve put the CINCs (cabled increases) which are both conveniently capable of increasing a fabric laterally on every row while still looking lovely, and creating a strong, twisted, inelastic ‘seam’ from which the weight of about a kilogram’s worth of yarn can hang for a lifetime. All those fussy slip-stitch welts? Seams, bud. The welts are half the row length of the final fabric, the weight of the fabric pulls them more snug and they act as stops for vertical drag. I’ll mention here that it also makes me feel very clever that they finish edges beautifully, and stand more proudly from the fabric as the knit ‘settles’ over time.

There’s big things, like those, and little things. For example, in KOTE, the pockets (which will stand up to a lot of use and are a separate layer on the front of the garment) are double knit to be more squat—there are less rows than the surrounding fabric. This helps combat the inevitable “pouching out” that patch front pockets often get. I sacrificed what I would consider a more elegant height to width ratio for this, but it also made the double knitting section for that cardi more straight-forward. Compromise, but function on the back of it.

Building the final structure of the garment literally into the fabric as it is made is an endlessly fascinating adventure.  Foundations and finishing matter. How the ground is prepared for a building to stand affects the the likelihood of it staying up, as does the way it’s finished off to protect its bones. Any process that makes an object should account for how that object will live and how it will stand up to its life. I may not always achieve what I’m aiming for, but I’m always trying.