Karie Westermann is a knitwear designer and tutor working across the UK and Europe. Her client list includes Rowan Yarns, Edinburgh Yarn Festival, Oslo Strikkefestival, Malabrigo, Blacker Yarns and Eden Cottage Yarns. Karie also regularly appears in knitting magazines and podcasts. She is an experiences and sough-after tutor with more than 15 years’ experience teaching at all levels.
Knitting the Landscape
Psychogeography is about seeing your local environment in a new light: bike lanes, paths worn by human feet, and old forgotten rivers. It is about wandering about your home town and looking closer at things you pass every day.
This class will be an exploration of how to express your memories and thoughts of a specific place using knitting as a medium. Knitwear designer Karie Westermann will talk about her own experiences designing knitwear inspired by specific landscapes – from shawls mimicking submerged beaches to hats taking visual cues from her Glasgow cityscape.
Then, together, you will begin to explore your own landscapes on the needles. What is the fabric of your own place? How can you translate the way you navigate the City into a wearable piece of knitwear? Karie will guide you in thinking about textures, stitch patterns and colours – and make you look at familiar streets in a new way.
Materials:
- Bring yarn that you associate with the place you want to explore. Scraps are great — bring a selection!
- Bring appropriate needles
- Pen & paper
Skill level:
Beginner & up. If you can cast on/off and knit & purl, this class is fine.
Little Effort, Big Effect: Mock Cables & Twisted Stitches
Sometimes a little effort is rewarded by great effect. Mock cables, twisted stitches, and Japanese mini-cables all look complex, but are surprisingly easy to work once you learn the secrets. We’ll play with textures and techniques as we knit wrist warmers together.
With designer and author Karie Westermann at your side, you will learn about how to mimic cables using lace techniques, twisted stitches, and elegant Japanese slipped stitches. Together you will work on a wrist warmer that will enable you to work on projects that look like cables – but without the bulk and the risk of dropped stitches!
Skills focus:
- How to work twisted stitches
- How to work mini-cables and twists without a cable needle
- How to use lace techniques to create the illusion of cables
Skills needed:
- Knit, purl, working a yarnover and doing at least one decrease
- How to read an easy chart
- Working in the round
Materials to bring:
- 1 ball of DK
- 1 pair of 4mm needles (whichever you use to work a small circumference in the round)
- 1 pair of 4mm needles (whichever you use to work straight)
- Selection of stitch markers
- Pen and paper
- Tapestry needle
The Knit-Tea Retreat 