Welcome!

I'm a knitwear designer, author, teacher, and small-press publisher based in Northern California. I design and write patterns for modern, accessible garments and accessories, with a particular penchant for cabled sweaters and hats, and for using unique, thoughtfully conceived yarns. I want to help you make things that you'll love both knitting and wearing, and that use classic, straightforward techniques to create sophisticated, ready-to-wear inspired textures and fabrics. I'm passionate about details of garment, yarn, and fabric construction, and about helping you understand the "why" of both my design process and the designs themselves.

I’m a tinkerer by nature, and shortly after I started knitting, I found myself doing a lot of modifying. I spent hours trying to find “the perfect pattern” that looked exactly like what I had in my head, doing math to modify other patterns to swap out stitch patterns or change measurements, and eventually thought, “Hey, what if I started from scratch?” I published my first pattern, the Jenny Lake hat, in 2016, and since then, have focused on developing designs for the kind of knits that are truly wearable in everyday life and are engaging and enjoyable to knit at the same time.

Early in my knitting life, I was totally intimidated by what I thought of as “complicated” knitting—cables, colorwork, lace. A few years later, though, I knit my first colorwork project, a tiny “Peanut” vest for my youngest, and it turned my knitting world upside down. This “complicated” knitting was totally doable—and it was addictive! That tiny vest (which Avery has long since grown out of) was a gateway drug into more complex knitting projects, and into a love of cable knitting that animates a great deal of my design work. Cables continue to amaze me in their many, many permutations of the ways they manipulate and add texture to fabric, and I’m fascinated by using such a simple technique to create fascinating new forms of knitted fabric. I love helping knitters explore how cables work in knitting and how knitting these kinds of cabled projects can work for them, whether that’s in a class, in the text of my patterns, here on my blog, or in other media.

I’ve had the amazing good fortune to work with and come to know a number of producers of thoughtfully conceived small batch yarns, makers who are bringing interesting, unique yarns to the world in a small-scale, artisanal way, and are helping to contribute to reviving an American fiber and textile tradition that has diminished sharply from its storied past. I’ve worked with many of these folks on a number of projects, but most notably two books of accessory patterns highlighting the work of some of my favorite independent yarnmakers. Both books, entitled Independent Fabrication: Volume 1 and Volume 2, are available from Sandreed Press.

In addition to my self-published patterns and books, my work has been featured in By Hand Serial, Interweave Knits, Knit.Wear, and Interweave/F&W Media’s Wool Studio V. My digital patterns can be found on this website, on Ravelry, and in yarn shops that participate in Ravelry’s In Store Sales program. My books and printed patterns are available at select yarn shops, including Los Altos’ own Uncommon Threads, and I teach knitting- and design-related topics throughout the Bay Area (and on occasion, elsewhere). A native of the Washington, D.C. area, I now live in a very small town south of San Francisco with my husband and two children.

I very much hope that you’ll find something that speaks to you here, whether it’s the designs themselves or the approach that went into their making. I’d love to get to know you and your knitting better—what inspires you, what piques your interest, what brings you back to your needles and your project bag at the end of a long day. In the meantime, pull up a chair, grab your favorite skein, and let’s get to work—it’s always sweater season somewhere.

Happy knitting,

Sloane