Every crystal on a Cardigan Knitwear piece is sewn on by hand. Mine. One at a time, in response to the particular knit in front of me. It is an unusual thing for a knitwear label to do, and it is rarely explained, so here is the explanation.
It began with what came before. My previous brand grew to carry a great deal of embellishment, embroidery made by expert hands in India, including on the knitwear. When Cardigan Knitwear started to take shape, I knew I wanted to embellish again, but more simply this time, pared back, if that word can be used to describe the effect of placing crystals against knit. And I knew I wanted to do it myself.
The knits decided the rest. I had it in my head to work in two stitches that could hold and encase a crystal: the 2D tuck stitch, with its little pockets of space and landscape of depth, and the half cardigan, for its vertical tracks, and because it is a cardigan. Also, because I love the stitch. Those two decided the size of crystal I could use and how it would have to be attached. The hand followed from the knit.
As for why by hand at all, when an intarsia or jacquard could be knitted in or a machine could set an embellishment: it comes from a few things that arrived around the same time and gave me the footing to begin. I will write about those another day. But underneath them is something older in me. I have always wanted to know how to do something myself before I would ask anyone else to do it. I trained as a pattern cutter on Savile Row so that I could one day direct pattern cutters. I learned to knit to understand knitting and how to direct it. Sewing the crystals is the same instinct. Only this time, rather than directing other craftspeople to do the work, I am doing it myself. It is the one part I keep entirely in my own hands. I think it is more special that way. More personal.
And, as I will come to, it is a way of speaking to someone.
People assume, I think, that a knit made in a factory is an industrial thing, and that a crystal is therefore a decoration applied to a machine-made object. With Cardigan Knitwear, neither is quite true. Every Cardigan Knitwear piece is made one at a time, by a single person on a domestic machine, no minimums, one of one. Nothing about it is automated. So the attention of a hand-placed crystal is not a strange flourish on an industrial base. It is continuous with how the whole thing is made. Care meeting care.
Next comes the reading.
A cardigan arrives with no crystals on it yet, and at first, I sit with it flat on the worktop. Just looking. I count stitches. I count the little holes the 2D tuck makes, the vertical rows of the half cardigan, and I weigh what that means for where a crystal might sit. I look at the seams, the pockets if there are pockets, and I try to see how it will fall on a body. Sometimes I put it on myself as I work, and change my mind. I place crystals loose on the surface and move them around. I use pins, setting them by instinct across the part I am reading, then adjusting as I go, removing some, adding others, all to a feeling and an eye rather than a rule. Even the styles that carry a repeating pattern still have to be read, or the crystals end up looking as though no one decided anything. Each one goes down in relation to my overall sense of the piece, and in relation to the ones already fixed. One answers to the next.
This is why the pieces cannot be identical, even when I try.
There is one style at the moment where this is most fully true. The Opera Cardigan, in midnight navy, with small clusters of three crystals, reminiscent of pointelle lace, of constellations, of shapes from flora and fauna. Three exist. One small, one medium, one large. That is all, so far, and each is the only one of its size. They echo one another, and at a glance they read as the same piece, but set side by side they are not the same at all. A motif I liked on one, I might carry to another in a different arrangement, resized, re-placed. The medium wants something the small does not. The same cluster of three falls differently across the three bodies. This holds for the Grandad too, with its baguette crystals set in the vertical tracks of the half cardigan. Even if I made three mediums, one colour, one style, all at once, they would still be three different things. No matter what happens.
Which brings me to the two conversations I am really having as I work, both of them silent.
The first is with the knitter. I do not know her. There are many of them at the factory, all women, and though I may have passed one or two on a visit, I know none of them by name. But when I hold a piece to place its crystals, I can feel where the knit has itself changed. Tension in one part, ease in another. Denser here, airier there, a passage that feels quick against a passage that feels calm. I do not think it is possible that the fabric carries nothing of the hands that made it. Something is passed, even if it is only in the fibre itself. So I imagine, without any way of knowing, a day behind the work. Someone at home unwell, perhaps, and the shuttle moving faster through the body of the knit. An ease as the afternoon closes, worked into the sleeves. I am not claiming to know her. I am saying that when you touch a thing that closely, for that long, you feel that a person was there before you, and you answer them. She gives the piece something. I feel it, and I add my own.
The second conversation is with whoever will wear it. As I stitch, I sometimes say something over the work, a private thing, meant for the person who will one day own the piece. I do not know who that is. I may never know. But the message goes in with the crystal, and it stays there, between me and them, unspoken and unread. That is the part I will keep to myself.
So the crystal is not really decoration. It is the place where the most attention is concentrated, the part I will not give to anyone else, and the point where two people I mostly cannot see, the one who made the knit, and the one who will wear it, are, for a while, in the same pair of hands.
