My Graduate Knitwear Collection, Nearly 20 Year On, Lessons Learnt & Progress Made
Looking Back & Forward Thinking
How useful is it to look back at the past?
For me it depends on my intention; am I thinking about something that happened in the past with a view to improving how I do things in the future? Am I ruminating on something unresolved that has no solution? Or am I reflecting on my past self and seeing how far I’ve come to appreciate the improvements I’ve made?
Last weekend my Mum gave me my portfolios from when I was at university in 2007. It was fascinating to see how I was overflowing with ideas back then, and how experimental my knitwear was. It was also interesting to see pictures of my graduate collection from 2007, for which I won the Visionary Knitwear award at Graduate Fashion Week. It feels like a lifetime ago, but I'm still just as excited about knitwear!
Reflecting On My Skills
With all the skills and knowledge I’ve accrued since 2007, I can appreciate how creative/boundary pushing my work was, but also how technically basic it was! I have learnt so much and grown so much in the intervening 19 years; I’m much more skilled, I understand so much more about how to use different fibres, but unfortunately I now have so much less time to experiment.
Even though I have a degree in Fashion & Textiles I’m largely self-taught when it comes to knitwear; I did a weeks-long knitting workshop (taught by a freelance knitwear designer bought in to show us how to use domestic knitting machines) during my degree and thereafter I was on my own!
Learning Through Failure
There were no teachers to show me how to link a garment together (I didn’t even know what a linker was!) No one to explain to me how to design a knit pattern. How knitting machines need to be maintained (for my graduate collection I used a machine that I didn’t know was faulty which meant the edges of the pieces that I knitted had loops and faults along the edges) One needle was bent, so there was the same fault running through every piece I made, and I didn’t know how to change the needles. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, which was both a blessing and a curse.
Some of these limitations helped make my collection more interesting; I integrated knitwear into regular textiles because I didn’t know how to make a fully knitted garment. I purposely made ‘pulls’ in the knitwear (snags that were part of the design) because I didn’t realise that that was big no-no in the world of knitwear! I didn’t know how to shape knitted pieces, so I gathered and folded pieces to make them the shapes I wanted, which made for more interesting designs.
Looking To The Future
On reflection, this is a theme in quite a few areas in my life; if I don't understand something fully, instead of asking someone for help, I’ll battle it out by myself trying to work it out, often getting things wrong, but sometimes coming up with a more interesting/creative way of solving a problem. I do love making things harder for myself! It’s a fine line to tread: knowing when to ask for help and being self-sufficient.
Looking to the future, I’m going to make more time to experiment, and I’m going to ask for help more often when I need it! When you look back a decade or two, what can you learn from your past mistakes and achievements? Are there things you've done that you dismissed at the time that you can now look at with pride? It’s a worthwhile endeavour if you can be kind to your past self, they did the best they could with what they knew!
Comments