Rachel Hunter

The first career I remember wanting as a child was acrobat/contortionist. The second was fashion designer.

I took sewing classes throughout elementary school and made my own homecoming dress (a simple lilac sheath dress with frilly sleeves). As children and young adults we try on all kinds of hobbies and interests, not knowing which ones are an innate passion and which ones we’re doing to fit in with friends. While working on a sweater sleeve in 2018, I realized I was doing what I’ve loved since I was 8 - making, fibers and textiles edition.

Willowwood is dramatic and gentle, structured and soft. I would even dare to call it high-concept. It was love at first-sight. Woolfolks’ Far is like a cloud spun into yarn; I can hardly believe it’s 100% wool. The body of this sweater is quite simple, with a lovely little twisted rib at the hem of the body and sleeves for some subtle interest. But this sweater is all about the sleeves, with its bobbles and color work reminiscent of Gothic Revival window panes. Let me talk about these sleeves for a moment.

Though knitting has gained in cultural cache over the last decade, “knitting” as it exists in the collective consciousness still largely evokes great-aunts in a church basement making afghans out of acrylic Red Heart yarn from a big box store. (No disrespect whatsoever to great-aunts, afghans, churches, basements, or acrylic yarn.) Willowwood turns all that on its head.

Those of us who identify as sartorially sensitive will never forget that one garment we wanted so badly to work, but it just didn’t. I can still remember vividly an aqua pleated trapeze dress from 2007, the effortlessly glamorous life I pictured us having together, and how it actually looked more like a circus tent on me once we were alone together in the dressing room. RIP.

These days I’m more focused on simple silhouettes that can be dressed up or down, depending on the occasion, but less-than-ideal fit is still a deal-breaker.

For me, growing as a knitter has been more than just fewer dropped stitches per row and tidier increases and decreases. It’s also understanding gauge, drape, and the mechanics of garment construction. Tegna was really the first time I put all of these together, and the result was a fitted, yet drape-y, tee that looked exactly how I imagined it would.

The pattern as it’s written creates a boxier fit. However, sensitive as I am to the circus-tent effect, I chose to grade the pattern slightly and start smaller at the bottom, then gradually increase as I worked toward sleeve separation. It worked beautifully.

To get the exact drape I wanted, I used two fingering weight yarns held double. One was 100% linen, the other a 60/40 wool silk blend. This combination makes for a neutrally breezy vs insulating top that can be worn year-round.

I met Katie in 6th grade. She is my first close friend to have a baby. I knit this sweater extra big so Baby could grow into it. Baby is now two-and-a-half, calls this “the Rachel sweater” and dresses her baby dolls in it. Can a heart melt any more than mine has? I doubt it.

I forget whether I picked out the pattern or the yarns first. With two exceptions, they all came from Sew Happy Jane at Oregon’s Knot Another Fiber Festival (Knitters can’t help themselves with puns, I’m so sorry). I am so sad that my first year attending was also the festival’s last, but I’m double-plus grateful to have gone. Marie Greene’s Sweater Whisperer class and Stephanie Pearl McPhee’s seminar on the history of knitting (that also covered everything from staple length to why you should pay for patterns) allowed me to really take off the metaphorical training wheels. Even though I’d been knitting for more than ten years by the time I attended this conference, there’s a clear line between my work before attending, and after.

I knit for more than ten years before attempting socks. Some knitters do nothing but socks. With their gussets and short rows and provisional cast-ons and afterthought heels, they seemed a totally different breed to me. But now I’ve made some socks and can confidently say, they’re not so different.

Socks are great. They knit up quickly. They are mostly mindless. They fit in a purse. They are a great use for really loud, speckled, self-striping yarns. They feel wonderful.

I bought this sock yarn based only on a photo on Instagram and its description, from a local dyer. She said the colors came to her in a dream, and she named it Opal Creek, for the gorgeous wilderness of the same name in Oregon. I love deep aqua-greens, purple-grays, and gold-ochres. It was a joy to work all the colors at once into a texture that made them sing.

I started these socks as the reality of COVID-19 in Oregon was setting in, a long-awaited tropical beach vacation was on the chopping block, and I couldn’t look away from the news but oh my goodness did I really need to look away from the news. It was cold and raining, I put on the stupidest show Netflix had to offer (it’s Love Is Blind btw), picked up yarn and needles, and went for it.

Here is the story of how I learned to knit: in 2005, my best friend was a knitter. She owned a thick visual stitch dictionary and I loved paging through it. She offered to make me a scarf. I liked how brioche stitch looked, and picked out two colors for it. She tried to learn, couldn’t figure it out, and ended up making me a double-knit scarf. Meanwhile, she taught me the basics of knitting, bought me a skein yarn for my birthday from Mable’s on SE Division (RIP) and I made a hat. I never forgot about brioche knitting; if my friend couldn’t figure it out, it had to be tough.

This was all before Knitting YouTube was A Thing.

Let me take a moment to express my sincere gratitude for Knitting YouTube. As a visual learner, it’s nothing short of a godsend. I’ve used it to master the tubular cast-on, the German twisted cast-on, the Turkish cast-on for sock toes and sweater hoods, right-handed fair-isle knitting (more on that above), and yes, even one and two-color brioche.

I started the Parlour shawl in the spring of 2018, the first spring in the house my partner and I bought. It was the first project where I took the time to go back and fix my mistakes, instead of plowing through them to get to the end and feel the rush from a new finished project that much sooner. Slowing down like this was tedious. Frustrating. Exasperating. Do I appreciate this shawl more for having taken the time to attend to all its small details? You have no idea.

I knit the majority of this shawl on two trans-Atlantic flights from Portland to Berlin and back, during bouts of jet-lag in various Air BnBs, and on high-speed trains, all while listening to The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton on Audible. I found the pink yarn to finish it at Li’l Weasel in Paris’ Passage du Grand Cerf. Its flecks of gold and blue and white pair perfectly with this shawls other colors.

Knitting this shawl is easily one of my happiest life experiences.