Susan Duckworth

How I work

My main interest has been in working from traditional patterns, and recreating them using colour and texture. The relationships and proportions of colours to each other are endlessly intriguing. If you take just these two aspects, the possible developments are infinite, and I can see they will fascinate me throughout my like. When working with colour I think it is important to give yourself a huge range, rather than just a few tones. When I'm designing something, I surround myself with enormous quantities of coloured yarns. Then through a process of building - adding and taking away - and squinting at it all to see the effect, I go into a kind of colour trance until interesting combinations begin to appear - and then the fun begins. Simple stitch patterns (like stocking stitch) lend themselves to this approach as you can concentrate entirely on the patterns if the colour is not too taxing. But with more intricate patterns I knit up a great many swatches - my working swatches - and Swiss-darn over the colours, rather like overpainting, to get the right balance. I have trucks of these discarded swatches, which are quite as important as the final piece.

When I first began to knit seriously I was absolutely overwhelmed by the limitless possibilities the medium provided. I worked flat out day and night developing stitches found in old books, recolouring, adapting and working out new shapes. At first I restricted myself to natural and neutral tones - soft warm browns through to cooler creams. In this way, I was concentrating on the stitchcraft, not the colour so much; that came later when I felt more competent. Certainly, designing for knitting provides great scope for using colour in a bold and exciting way - I am not too thrilled by very soft, safe colour combinations such as often appear in furnishing fabrics.

After a period of experiment, when I was luckily able to support myself with freelance makeup work, I joined 401½ workshops, a diverse group of artists and craftspeople. This coincided with the beginning of the knitting 'revival', when there was a great deal of interest in hand-knitting design, and overseas buyers flooded into London. Soon I began to acquire a variety of clients: individuals and shops like Browns, Whistles and The Beauchamp Place Shop, and other design companies like Dorothée Bis and Gudule. One of my earliest commissions was for a seven-foot American footballer, and another was for a dog - a tiny, pampered Yorkshire terrier that lived in Eaton Square. I made it a richly embossed padded and beaded winter jacket - but at the first fitting the poor creature collapsed under the weight!

Many of my early pieces were very intricate, even more so than they are today. I worked sometimes all night to complete them. On several occasions I tried to speed things up by combining hand techniques with machine knitting, but soon found that no machine could cope with the number of colours and variety of textures that I wanted to use. For this reason, too, it is virtually impossible to adapt these designs to mass production.

From 401½ workshops, I moved into my own studio in Maida Vale in London, and took on assistants and more knitters to make up the growing numbers of orders. The actual selling of the designs is very interesting and provides important feedback from buyers, helping to keep the designs moving and developing. But I soon found that I was not interested in running a huge business, especially if this meant spending more of my time on administration, and less on the design side which I love best. About that time, too, I had my first child and the attraction of commuting began to pall. So I had a large workshop built in my then house in Farnham (that's the UK one), and worked from there. Some years ago, Hugh Ehrman began using some of my designs for knitting kits, and this for me was a new and very welcome development. I like to think of my designs being worn by lots of different people, rather than just hanging in displays and exhibitions, and the kits bring them within reach of anybody with reasonable knitting skills.