Rebecca’s book

Many of you will be familiar with the work of Rebecca Osborn: a super-talented designer who lives in Nunavut, Canada and whose Thaw shawl was a stand-out contribution to KDD’s 2021 My Place project.

Well, four years later, Rebecca has published her first book: a fabulous collection of 12 designs in KDD’s Milarrochy Tweed. This is completely Rebecca’s project: we were very happy to provide some yarn support, but she’s done everything else herself, from initial concept through writing and designing, to working with test knitters and tech editors, and finally to the book’s photography and layout. The result is a joyous, gloriously knitterly tour de force.

At Rebecca’s kind invitation, I wrote a few words to introduce her brilliant new book, as follows:

In the summer of 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge injured his foot and was forced to stay at home while his friends took a long walk in fine weather over the rolling Somerset hills. With nothing to do but sit in his garden, the poet was feeling out of sorts, but soon turned his hand to doing what he did best: composing a poem. The result was one of the Romantic era’s defining statements about the transformative potential of the human imagination. In This Lime Tree Bower My Prison, Coleridge turned the difficult experience of confinement around into a wonderful poem, and a powerful celebration of creativity. 

All migraineurs will be familiar with the moment of inevitable surrender.  Like Coleridge’s friends happily wandering over the hills, life goes on around you while you must stay here, quietly in your lime tree prison, waiting for the pain to pass. By any measure, a migraine is an unpleasant, strange and tedious experience: something to which no one could ever look forward. Yet in this remarkable book, Rebecca Osborn has turned that experience around with a series of imaginative transformations of which any Romantic poet would be proud. Drawing with great care and curiosity from her own identity as a migraineur, Rebecca has created a collection of patterns and poems that are searching, thoughtful, celebratory, vivid, energetic, and even funny. 

Hand-knitting is all about care and comfort, and it seems entirely fitting that it provides the medium for this book’s deep exploration of migrainous experience. Rebecca’s four chapters—or four triptychs—form a sort of extended meditation on the varieties and vagaries of that experience with a series of pieces to protect your head, warm your hands or wrap around your body. Gorgeous garter stripes and shimmering stranded knitting bring plenty of opportunity for colour play, while innovative multi-directional constructions and nifty seamless, slipped-stitch tricks make each pattern something to engage as well as inspire. 

I particularly admire the way in which the collection as a whole conveys such a powerful impression of the feeling body: from Hemisphere’s satisfyingly slightly-out-of kilter organic shapes to the brittle, interlocking stripes of the stunning Fragile shawl, there’s a palpable connection between intense physical experience and pure aesthetic form. 

It has been an enormous pleasure to witness this project develop from the small kernel of an idea to the point at which, in possibly the best example of knitwear photography I have ever seen, a postdrome Rebecca might be pictured on the Arctic tundra beneath a gigantic hand-knitted slice of comforting butter on rye. At every stage, Rebecca has impressed me not only with her superlative design skills and unstoppable imagination, but her ability to make things happen with genuine commitment and lightness of heart.

 The best creative work has transformative effects upon the world around it. Long may Rebecca continue to produce such work. Congratulations!

May I conclude by encouraging you to support Rebecca’s project (you can buy the full collection as a soft-cover printed copy or an e-book, or purchase each of the patterns individually on Ravelry). I feel it’s important that all of us knitters continue to buy patterns and collections directly from the designers we enjoy, especially because independent designing and independent publishing are in a very different place to where they were when I began to build my own career in knitting 15 years ago. The economics of producing and distributing print are much more difficult and more complex; there are fewer magazines and fewer collections in which to make a splash, while social media algorithms inevitably seem to favour the lowest-common-denominators of design. This makes Rebecca’s achievement with this highly original, highly creative project all the more impressive.

Please support her work by purchasing a book or individual pattern, if you can.