Twist Collective Blog

Design Process: Whirlpool

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Published on Monday, 10 December 2012 04:00

 Whirlpool is Christina Harris' first contribution to Twist Collective. We are pretty happy with it, and we hope you are too! In this post, she shares how this gorgeous garment came to be, from the first idea to the finished product. You can also find this post (and more about Christina!) on her blog.

The idea for my Whirlpool vest started almost a year ago as a collection of  vaguely related sketches in my notebook.

Then I charted and knit this swatch with a certain idea:

I decided I wanted something that was less linear, more interlocking, but still vaguely circular. Which led to this:

and this:

I thought, at first, I would make a dk-weight stranded cardigan:

and got this far. It has quite a thick fabric and might work well as an outdoor (or hockey-watching in cold arenas) jacket, but I began to think a smaller, lighter-weight sweater would be something I would wear most often, so it morphed into a vest.

When Twist released their gorgeous mood board for the Winter issue it included several images of naturally-occurring repetitive elements that reminded me of this project so I decided to try my luck and submit it. I'm so happy they liked it, too