Grayrigg

I wanted to take a moment to highlight one of my designs that was released earlier this year. It was a long time in the making, and I’m really proud of the final result. Meet Grayrigg!

The design is named for a small village in Cumbria, UK, not far from where my brother lived for several years. For this sweater, I wanted to play with a large, intricate cable motif up the center front and back, and a smaller version along the sleeves. I also wanted to try my hand at a saddle shoulder – I love the look of a saddle shoulder, but I’ve always shied away from working them into a design!

I worked on the large double cable design first, and created a good-sized swatch when I was finally satisfied with the motif.

I then modified the motif to create a narrow cable for the sleeve.

After working out the cables, I had to fit everything together into a cohesive design. Although I kept the shaping simple, it turned out to be quite tricky to work the saddle shoulder into the body while making all four cable motifs come together seamlessly! After a lot of frogging and cursing, I was able to make it work.

Here is my first sample, knit in an Aran weight natural wool. My next door neighbor very kindly modeled it for me!

After submitting to Knit Picks, I was pleased to have it accepted to their annual Cables collection for 2022. After tech edits and very helpful test knitters working through some revisions, we ended up with two knitted samples of the sweater, both in Knit Picks’ luxurious High Desert, my absolute favorite of their wools. The smooth texture of High Desert really shows off the intricacy of the cable work on Grayrigg.

When Knit Picks shared the photos, I fell in love with their photo shoot. Everything was perfect – the models, the mood, the colors. The images were atmospheric and really captured the theme and title of the collection: Thicket.

Knit Picks put in the effort to photograph the sweater with more than one model, and each showed off the design perfectly.

The collection was released in early 2022, and I had yet another pleasant surprise: Grayrigg was chosen for the cover! I think the image is absolutely stunning, and I’m so happy to have Grayrigg featured on the cover of the collection.

I would recommend Grayrigg for a more experienced knitter, particularly someone with experience reading complex cable charts or instructions. However, with patience, anyone can work through the cables and make that saddle shoulder shine!

You can purchase Grayrigg as an individual download from the Knit Picks website, or you can purchase the entire Thicket collection – I highly recommend all the patterns in this collection!

Stay tuned – I have more designs to show off in the near future!