Samhla

It’s Friday, and it’s time for a new Knitting Wester Ross pattern. It’s a real treat today to introduce the work of our talented guest designer, Lucy Hague.

This is Samhla: a completely reversible wrap, featuring lace and travelling cables, inspired by Gairloch’s Pictish symbol stone.

Club members will hear about this stone and its significance in Sunday’s essay. In Gairloch, it is something of a local icon, and I really wanted to include a pattern in our Wester Ross collection which was inspired by, or referenced, it, but I also felt I wasn’t the best person for the job. I knew someone who was, however, and that is Lucy.

One of the many things I admire about Lucy’s work is the way that she produces pieces that are always visually suggestive of their source of aesthetic inspiration, while never slavishly reproducing or representing it. Whether they are inspired by the geometry of a Medieval stained glass window or an illuminated manuscript, Lucy’s patterns never strive to be the thing itself, but are rather transformed by the process of great design (and a great designer) into an amazing, completely different, something else.

Lucy has most definitely created an extraordinary something else with Samhla (which is, by the way, a Scottish Gaelic word for a symbol or a figure) . After sketching, overlaying and tessellating the shapes of the Pictish stone’s large salmon motif, Lucy has combined slipped stitches, lace details and travelling cables in a series of sinewy lines which ebb and flow across the fabric.

Worked over a garter stitch background, the cables and slipped stitches take on a corded, high-relief effect, which is echoed by the neat, integrated i-cord edges. The wrap is completely reversible: that is, there is no right side and no wrong side: both sides look exactly the same.

Sounds perplexing? Though Samhla is intriguing, it’s also a surprisingly intuitive and straightforward knit in which clear charts mean you’ll always see where you are going. Like many of Lucy’s patterns, it’s also incredibly beautiful, in that distinctive way that things made by hand can sometimes be.

Best of all, though, Samhla is also really wearable: knitted up in Ooskit’s pale, soft Riach, this wrap is a versatile, neutral, cosy throw-over that works so well with many different types of outfit.

It’s also very easy to make your Samhla wrap longer or shorter by adding or removing repeats (as instructed in the pattern).

I’ve often been blown away by Lucy’s work with travelling cables, but I honestly feel that she has topped everything with Samhla. The effortless beauty of this piece, encapsulates, I think, the work of a great designer who is confident enough to pare everything back, and reduce an aesthetic to essentials.

Congratulations on this gorgeous piece, Lucy! Thanks so much for creating Samhla: we are all very proud to include it in the Wester Ross collection.

Thanks, too, to excellent model, Karen and changeable-day photoshoot assistant, Jim.

We have Samhla kits in the KDD shop and The Samhla pattern will be winging its way to your Ravelry libraries and inboxes shortly! Enjoy!