I am so pleased to be the next stop on the blog tour for Jean Moss's new book Sweet Shawlettes!
Jean Moss is a British knit designer that has worked with fashion houses of the likes of Ralph Lauren! Her newest book Sweet Shawlettes is filled with designs that are sure to please every knitter's neck and shoulders.
Here are a few of my favorites!
I am especially excited to try the Penumbra Cowl. It uses the simple Japanese shadow knitting technique - one that I have yet to try!
The patterns are well written and I like that she offers a bit of the traditional and non traditional style patterns. The pieces are divided into 4 sections Country, Couture, Folk and Vintage.
Jean was amazing enough to take time to answer some questions!
When did you learn how to knit?
Originally I learned to knit before I went to school because I wanted to be like my beloved grandmother who spent hours teaching me. A fallow period ensued but my interest was rekindled in my teens when I started to make my own clothes. It was the swinging sixties and I loved what I was seeing on the street and in magazines, but had no way of achieving anything similar other than to pick up my needles again. From then on I was hooked. It never occurred to me that I'd ever be able to make a living out of it, especially as I had no formal training in design, but after getting requests for sweaters I'd made for the kids, I decided that it might be a way of making some extra cash from home. No-one was more surprised than I was to find that very quickly I was presenting my designs to luminaries such as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein and they were placing orders! It was a meteoric learning curve!
What made you decide to make the book Sweet Shawlettes?
The book came to me out of the blue when Erica Sanders-Foege, then a senior editor at The Taunton Press, rang to ask if I would consider doing it. The working title was Sweet Shawlettes, but Erica assured me I could change it if I didn't like it. However, for me the title had a certain broad brush appeal – whimsical, feminine, could even be ironic - or it might have been that I'm just addicted to alliteration, but knowing how difficult it is to come up with decent book titles, I quickly applied the if it's not broken, don't fix it principle.
I agreed to submit a synopsis and by the time I'd finished it I was completely hooked on the idea. Previously most of my books have concentrated mainly on sweaters, and this gave me the opportunity to explore a totally different form. Shawls, capes, cowls, furbelows or anything that can be worn around the neck was the brief and I was thrilled to explore as many ways of interpreting it as I could. It took me on an interesting journey exploring the construction, techniques, yarns and the history of neck wraps and I'll always be grateful to Taunton for offering me this opportunity.
Can you describe your design process?
In all my design work I travel an identical road. Every design has its own cooking time – some simmer slowly like a casserole for months, while others are immediately on a fast boil and just tumble out. At the start of a book, I usually try to give myself two weeks of displacement activities, like gardening, playing guitar or cooking, which seem to be good for propagating new ideas. I do a rough drawing, then choose yarns and colours I'd like to use, then I swatch, swatch, swatch until I get a combination of yarn and stitch which seems to reflect the look of the design. I always sketch the design on a person (I'm no great artist, but I find even if I draw a stick woman it's invaluable for focusing on the proportions) and from there I'll try out different versions of it on a mannequin using any fabric I have around. This gives me a very good idea of whether or not the design will work. When I have the version I like, I complete a specification sheet, then make the chart and schematic and finally crunch the numbers.
Thank you so much Jean for creating such a wonderful book! Buy your own copy here!
Lucky for you all, I'm giving one copy of Sweet Shawlettes away to one of my fabulous readers! Leave me a comment by Wednesday 1/25 (midnight EST!)
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For more stops on the Sweet Shawlettes blog tour visit these fabulous blogs!
