design spotlight: Yomp

KC and I came across Yomp as we were sorting through our samples the other day, and I was reminded just how much I love this sweater, which we released last year as part of our Allover project. KC loves Yomp too, and the sample sweater that I knitted in the second size looks absolutely fantastic on her.

I thought you might be interested to hear about the rather extended processes that go into developing a sweater like Yomp. This is the basic stuff that goes on in the background here, and with which I’m almost always engaged, but which I rarely write about, because it involves the secret things that, once knitted, may or may not be released as designs, at some point, during a future project.

When I knitted Yomp, I was right in the middle of a particular cold-weather sweater knitting kick, which had begun with Mooch

I often get into such kicks (indeed, I find myself in the middle of one now), in which I create several sweaters riffing on the same construction. For me, such kicks, or riffs, are generally about two things: the basic aesthetic or look of a design, and second, the technical puzzles that this look involves. With Mooch, the look I wanted was that of an allover colourwork sweater, with a circular yoke, and a feeling of top-to-bottom balance.

Mooch involved two puzzles to achieve this: first, figuring out and charting a circular yoke whose colourwork bands niftily disguised its integrated decreases, and second, finding a way of bringing together, and balancing out, several different patterns and yarn shades through the body, sleeves and yoke.

My Mooch puzzle solution involved only using patterns that were multiples of four (which you’ll see is the case for the hem, neck and cuff ribbing; the small and medium sized motifs on the body and sleeves, as well as the larger bands of colour through the yoke). The small motif used here proved to be particular crucial: I knew that grading this simple pattern through multiple sizes would be relatively straightforward, and its familiar rhythms also meant that it would be easy for the knitter to ‘read’ her work at the crucial point of joining sleeves and body. Bingo!

I was pleased with Mooch: a design I found both visually appealing and technically elegant (as well as cosy and wearable). But I felt that there was more that might be done with a circular yokes, allover colourwork, and the number four. And so, the next sweater I knitted was Yomp, which is a riff on all of these essential themes. How so?

Yomp involves exactly the same design puzzles and conundrums as Mooch: that is, balancing a palette of several shades from top to bottom; creating a circular yoke chart with integrated shaping and finding simple and elegant ways of combining quite different allover patterns. And just like Mooch, Yomp is a sweater that is all about the number four.

The number four repeats over the 2 x 2 corrugated ribbing, which provides a preview of the yoke’s four shade palette, at cuff and hem . . .

. . . the body’s familiar Norwegian lus motif is, of course, also a multiple of four. . . .

. . . and the yoke chart involves factors of four as well: if you look carefully at the image above, you can see how the those first blue triangles repeat over eight stitches.

This yoke pattern is my variation on a fairly familiar Icelandic theme, in which the geometry of interlocking lozenges naturally creates a particularly nifty way of squirrelling away the shaping. When I was in Iceland in 2014, I saw a man at a petrol station wearing a lopapeysa in natural sheep shades with a yoke designed on this exact principle. I have never forgotten that yoke.

Worked from bottom to top, Yomp finishes at the neck with yet another multiple of 4. You’ll see that there’s conventional 2×2 ribbing here, rather than the corrugated variety that appears elsewhere: I felt that multi-coloured ribbing might interfere with the yoke’s visual continuity, which I wanted to preserve.

So that’s Yomp – a yoked sweater for cold weather that’s all about the number four.

. . .and clearly I had not had quite enough of this particular design puzzle, or its many interesting solutions, as I went on to knit two further sweaters exploring the same essential ideas . . .

Skiftie . . .

. . . and Kaav – a companion pullover and cardigan, which bring together diced motifs with winter snowflakes and whose circular geometry is once again built around patterns and motifs which are all factors of four.

The fact that I liked this sweater style and its construction is obvious since I explored it four different times – but why was that the case? Well, to my mind, this is simply a great sweater from a knitters point of view. There’s lots of interest in the knitting, but all the shaping-thinking has been worked out: you don’t have to worry too much about ‘keeping the pattern correct’ when joining the sleeves and body (which can be tricky with larger charted motifs), and you don’t have to worry about any lines of shaping interrupting the colourwork patterns (because I’ve squirrelled everything away). The circular yoke means that the knitting is completely seamless and continuous, and there’s no steeks for neck and armscyes, as there would be with a drop sleeve design. The only steek in any of these patterns, in fact, is the straightforward one which divides the two fronts of Kaav.

And if this construction works for the knitter, then it is good for the designer too: having figured out the tricky technical aspects with Mooch, I knew I that I could use this groundwork to develop some really interesting yoked sweaters that (unlike some constructions) would work easily for many different body shapes. Grading some kinds of sweaters for different body proportions can be really hard work, but I enjoyed working on the grading of Mooch, Yomp, Skiftie and Kaav, which all have a similar size range from 35 to 61 inches.

That was the end of this kick for me, as I then moved on to explore different garment constructions, and a new range of attendant design puzzles.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this design spotlight! I’ll try to make it something of a Friday feature in coming weeks.