I Studied Textile Design at the Glasgow School of Art, specialising in knitwear after my first year. While some Textiles and Fashion Design students pass there designs onto manufacturers to produce, GSA placed alot of emphasis on us being highly trained at the manual production aspect of out specialisms as well as the design process.  Initially we were trained to machine knit on domestic Brother machines; the chunkier effect they produce means you can see the stitches really clearly and get a good grasp of all the different techniques. I was always desperate to get onto the more fiddly intricate stuff, but starting out like this really helped me learn the basic principles of how to manipulate stitches and achieve effects that could be applied when we moved onto using the lovely fine industrial machines later on.

A couple of photos of very early work…!