Make Piece

I have been doing an internship now for a month for a company called Make Piece. It's a knitwear design company based in Todmorden, about half an hour on a train from Manchester Victoria. Behind the label there is two ladies: Nicola Sherlock and Beate Kubitz. Make Piece is all about sustainable UK produced luxury knitwear. All the yarns are coming from the UK, they even have their own sheep (60 shetland sheepies to be precise). They were recently on Country File on BBC One. The episode doesn't seem to be available on iPlayer anymore...

I go to Make Piece once or twice a week to work with their machines. My new favorite machine is Brother Chunky ( I can't remember now what number it is, but I am looking to buy one, so if anyone hears anything, please let me know! ). Even though working with chunky gauge machine, the garments that I have made, are knitted with fine yarn. I also work in my own studio during rest of the week to carry on practicing the designs that I learned in Make Piece studio.

The toughest thing to learn has been fixing things. When I started to use machines, I used to just do practice samples, where it didn't really matter if I just started again. In the point when I started to produce garments, I was so careful that I didn't really make any mistakes anymore (cos I didn't really exactly know how to fix it if yarn broke or I lost a stitch). It was the new way of managing the tension by hand rather than trough tension wire that got me into few blood pressuring pickles, but luckily I have gotten trough that stage where I constantly snapped the yarn. At this very minute though, there is a garment in my studio that I have to undo into a certain point. I think I haven't done the "undoing" right, as it has turned into a god forsaken mess. I did fiddle with it for nice three hours today, but when the sun started to go down, I decided to go home. I am hoping to wake up very early tomorrow to go and see if my heart is healed enough from today's struggles and I could just carry on. I have started to find my Finnish "sisu" from inside me since started this internship. (Sisu is a word or a saying about Finnish people, that they are very stubborn and don't give up, I didn't really think that I fitted in that stereotype until now). But I am there to learn and I think after a while I will be seriously good knitter.

Here is some designs by Nicola Sherlock that I have learned to knit at Make Piece: (images from www.makepiece.co.uk)


Foxglove Shrug





Edgeway Shrug



Garments on these images are not the actual garments that I made, they are just images to show which ones I have been knitting at Make Piece.

To see more of Make Piece beautiful designs go to:

www.makepiece.co.uk

They also have a blog:

http://www.makepiece.co.uk/pages/NEW-label-we-want-your-help.aspx?pageid=415

So,

Let's campaign for wool!

Kisukiskis

Valpuri