Introducing Sarah Solomon

In this year of many changes we have also added a new member to our creative team. Sarah Solomon joined us earlier this year as the new Director of Knitwear Design.

Sarah Solomon is a knitwear designer, writer and teacher based in New York City. She started knitting as an adult, fueled by a passion to knit sweaters. She fell in love with the physical practice of knitting, as well the idea of being able to create fabric one stitch at a time with the fiber of your choice, literally building garments from the ground up.

With a background in woven construction and dressmaking, Sarah brings a love of details and fine finishing to her hand knitting designs and enjoys creating and teaching techniques that are simple to master but yield beautiful, long-lasting results. Her interests range from all aspects of traditional hand knitting to re-imagining ready-to-wear and machine-knit details for hand knitters. Sarah’s patterns and articles have appeared in Interweave Knits, Knitscene, knit.wear, Pom Pom Quarterly, and Vogue Knitting, and in collections by yarn companies large and small. In addition to her design work, Sarah has worked on the editorial team of Vogue Knitting Magazine and teaches knitting at shops and events around the country. In her design work, she enjoys creating garments and accessories from exceptional yarns that are knittable, wearable, and designed to last. Sarah is also an avid sewer and spinner and loves handwork in many forms. 

We sat down with Sarah to learn a little bit about her background and her approach to knitting and design. 

Q: How did you get started with knitting?

A: I actually didn’t start knitting until I was an adult. I had been sewing and designing woven clothes since my teens and had considered going to design school, but my love of books won out and I went to a liberal arts college instead and I didn’t do any designing during that time. After college when I was working in New York City, that interest in design sparked again and I wanted to pursue some formal training in woven construction, so I started taking night classes in Pattern Drafting and Draping at the Fashion Institute. It was a wonderful, all-consuming, experience but is was also utterly exhausting; countless hours bending over the drafting table and sitting at the sewing machine left me with terrible back pain. I still wanted to be able to create clothing but I needed an outlet that was less harsh on my body. The wise man who is now my husband suggested that I try knitting. So I took a class and quite literally overnight, I became completely absorbed with it. I bought a stitch dictionary and would look at it every night before bed; I would dream about stitches. I suddenly had a single-minded desire to be able to create my own knitting patterns and it got me started making things up almost from the very start.

Q: What inspired you to start designing?

A: When I was still quite a new knitter I discovered a book on the Twisted Stitch knitting of Bavaria and around that same time a friend of mine was describing the need she had for something to keep her ears warm while biking to work. I decided to make her a headband adapting stitches from traditional Bavarian knee socks. I made it, it was pretty, AND she wore it to work every day in winter. This sums up my perfect design experience because I love the problem-solving aspect of design and I'm happiest when working on something that fulfills a real need. As design is now my full-time work I sometimes have to play a little trick in my mind to perceive a design as "necessary" but working with Harrisville yarns makes that connection very clear for me––I feel that my job is to showcase the work of the mill and illustrate all of the wonderful possibilities the yarn has. But there's almost always an eye to the practical–– a thought to when an item will be worn, or how it will function in someone's wardrobe, as well as the kind of knitting experience it will provide. That's what separates designing for hand knits from other types of clothing design. You need to consider the experience of making equally with the experience of wearing. And this is really why hand knits are so special to us; they represent the time and effort it took to make them as much as the final garment.

Q: In what form does inspiration for a new pattern first come to you? Is it a daydream that you find yourself doodling, a memory of childhood wallpaper, a vintage magazine, an organic pattern found in nature, etc.?

A: I am amazingly non-visual for someone who works in a visual medium. I more often get a feeling about where something will be worn, in what weather, for what purpose, and the sort of feeling I want to have (or want the wearer to have) when they wear it. Often landscape plays a big part in that and I love traveling to new places as the land and weather always generate a lot of new ideas for me. I don't actually know how those notions eventually become a garment. It's rather a mystery, even to me. The rest of the design process is very methodical and mostly about problem-solving and making a thousand decisions about how to execute the initial idea, but getting the seed of that idea and letting it take shape as a garment is the mystical part. In general, I'm more of a words and sounds person than an image person, so I also very often draw inspiration from a song or a character in a novel, thinking about moods or situations and getting a sense of the garments that would suit those conditions. But most of all, it's the yarn in my hands that sparks the inspiration of the design. I describe myself as a yarn-first designer so most of the time I'm really just spending a little time with a yarn, putting it through its paces and listening to what it wants to be. Once that idea is planted, about what texture or fabric would look good in the yarn, that concept starts to swirl around with memories and stories and my mind sort of works backwards to connect this new idea with something old that's been rattling around my head for quite some time. So in the end, most ideas don't seem that new, they seem like they've been there all along.