The Undone Work

A machine knitting research residency

Artist Residency — May 2026
Shop Gal, 248 Johnston St, Fitzroy

About the work

Loré Loré was born from the love of making something beautiful that can be cherished. Something intentional. Since 2009, knitwear designer Lorena has worked in natural fibres, wool, alpaca, cotton, silk, producing small-batch accessories and garments that are made to last and made to be felt.

From the beginning, the work was grounded in slow fashion values: not as a trend, but as a natural extension of how Lorena grew up understanding quality. What is made by hand carries something that cannot be replicated at scale.

Not everything that can be made is worth making.
And not everything worth making has ever been made.

The machine

Despite the name, the domestic knitting machine is not automatic. Every piece begins with calculation: stitch counts, tension, row ratios, shaping mathematics. The carriage is moved by hand. Stitches are manipulated by hand. Needles are selected, transferred, repositioned, by hand.

It is a meditative, technical, and at times unforgiving craft. Hours can pass in the tracing of a single technique. The gratification of completing something you have designed and constructed from the first cast-on to the last cast-off is unlike anything else.

The residency project

When Loré Loré became a production label, something narrowed. Developing technically complex knitwear is time-consuming in ways that are difficult to account for in a price. In those early years, when handmade craft was still a niche conversation, justifying that labour was genuinely hard. Slowly, the deeper exploration of what the machine could do fell away.

At university, the technical skills were still forming, yet that was the last sustained period of working through technique for its own sake. This residency is the first real opportunity to return to that, now with considerably more skill and experience to bring to it.

The swatch library

Each week across May, new swatches will be added to this wall. Each one documents a technique: the stitch structure, the yarn used, the time it took, and the handwritten calculations behind it.

Some of these techniques have never appeared in production work precisely because the time they require makes them commercially unviable. Garter stitch requires the knitting to be turned every single row. Large cables require manual intervention at each cross. These are not failures. They are the edge of what the domestic machine can do, and the edge of what a maker can reasonably produce and sell.

That honesty is part of the project. The wall is a record of a designer weighing creativity against viability, and for once, letting creativity run without that constraint.

Studio Notes

What follows is a record of the work as it happens. Each entry documents a technique, a swatch, a material decision, or a reflection from the residency. Some entries will be brief.
Some will go deeper into the mathematics and the making. All of them are honest.

The wall is still being built. Come back and watch it grow.