Still Unfolding
The residency has come to an end, and I find myself genuinely glad I gave myself the time to do this.
I did not produce a full collection. That was never quite the brief I set for myself, though I will admit there was a part of me that wondered, somewhere in the middle weeks, whether I should be aiming for one. What I produced instead was something I think matters more right now. A month of strengthening technical skill on the machine, of seeking out problems rather than avoiding them, of pushing both my own capability and the machine's a little further than either of us had been pushed in some time.
It reminded me of something I had let slip quietly to the back of my mind. I have been knitting on a machine for twenty years. That is not a small thing. Across those twenty years I have developed a specialised set of skills aimed at producing modern, elevated knit construction, and somewhere in the busyness of running a label I had stopped actively reaching for the edges of what that skill set could do. This residency put me back in contact with it.
The residency itself has concluded, but I do not want this to be where the experimentation ends. I hope to keep returning to this kind of work, technique exploration without a commercial brief or a clock running against me, because it has reminded me how much there still is to learn and how much further the creative and technical boundaries can be pushed when nothing is constraining them but curiosity.
In the days since, I have cleaned up every sample, darned in the ends, and photographed the full collection of swatches. I am slowly working through formalising the technical notes that sat scribbled beside each one on the wall, turning a month of working documentation into something that will serve as a proper reference for the practice going forward.
Fifteen swatches. Fifteen small records of technique, time, and persistence.
A genuine thank you to Tara Whalley of Shop Gal, for inviting me to take part in the Cute and Cozy pop up and for giving me the space to put the art of machine knitting, and my own practice, on display. The opportunity came at exactly the right moment, and I am grateful for it.
The Undone Work is finished. What it has opened up is not.