Brooklyn Tweed Blog — Original Patterns

January is here. It’s a season of contrasts: bare branches against the cloudy sky, lights dancing in the early dark, warm woolens against the frosty air. It can be a blue time, a bleak time, a season of solitude when we scuttle into our warm homes rather than lingering to talk with neighbors. Trudging through chilly rain or shoveling another foot of snow from the drive, we can forget that growing things are storing up energy and pushing out secret roots to make ready for spring. Knitting helps many of us take pleasure in this time of regeneration. The frenzy...

There’s always extra room in our knitting bags for a hat that offers a relaxing knitting experience coupled with great style. With this in mind, we asked Brooklyn-based architect and knitwear designer Emily Greene to design our first Outpost pattern, and her wonderful unisex Hatch Hat really checks both boxes for us. Requiring only the most basic of stitches (knit, purl, and simple decreases), Hatch is a fun and friendly pattern. Aside from a few transition rounds which might require your attention, the project’s ease and simplicity will allow you to knit while carrying on a conversation with friends or...

Since clothing is an essential human necessity, an initial awareness of fast fashion’s pitfalls can be disheartening. Rather than becoming overwhelmed by the enormity of the scope of fast fashion and its range of issues, though, we choose to focus on things we can change by thoughtfully considering how our role as a business in the textile industry can support the burgeoning slow fashion movement. In its present form, slow fashion has been steadily gaining a foothold in the crafting and making communities over the last decade. We find this movement and the conversations it inspires deeply significant, being firm...

Welcome to BT Backstage, a series of posts introducing some of the folks who bring our patterns and designs to the knitting public. Once the concept for a new design is sketched and swatched, the work begins to translate the designer’s vision into a knittable pattern. Robin Melanson, our Senior Tech Editor, has been the linchpin in this process since we began producing design collections in 2011. We talked with Robin about the demands of her job and the skill set that allows her to bring to life more than 60 patterns for Brooklyn Tweed each year. BT: Let’s start with...

We are so very proud to welcome Gudrun Johnston to our design team! Gudrun has been an inspiring presence in the independent knitwear design community for many years and we are thrilled to be collaborating with her. Gudrun was born in Shetland, where her mother ran a successful knitwear design company called The Shetland Trader. Gudrun revived the name to publish two collections kindled by love of her homeland. She now lives in the United States with her family, but returns frequently to Shetland to visit and lead knitting tours. Gudrun’s heritage is prominent in her design work, whether she is...