For this small knitwear collection I was inspired by graphic t-shirts. I wanted to explore color blocking, patterns, and symbols in knitting. I used the stockinette stitch to create all my knitwear garments. I would fully plan out my design first, treating each stitch like a pixel of an whole image. 

 

With the first garment, I wanted to play with opposite-meaning symbols. I chose to do the sun and a rain cloud as I thought it would also be a good opportunity to play with color blocking.

 

With the second garment, I wanted to do a section with a symbol, a bold pattern, and a fine pattern. I chose to do a tree because I liked the challenge of having to knit all the extending branches and roots. The garment is actually one long strip and wraps around the body with strips of double cable knit to help hold it in place.

 

For the third garment, I chose a skull because I thought it would be interesting to take a harsh and somewhat frightening symbol and make it out of heavy knit fabric thereby softening the look of it. I knitted a vest as I was inspired by the simple silhouette of a leather vest which commonly featured "tough" looking motifs such as skulls. I didn't want to leave the front blank so I double stitched the phrase "live fast" taken from the quote "Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse." The quote is often attributed to James Dean, famous for his Rebel Without a Cause role, and it matched the pseudo-tough style I was going for.

 

I used a fairly heavy yarn so all the garments have an oversized look.