My design skills for knitting and crocheting have definitely evolved over the years. I have loved knitting ever since my mother showed me how when I was about 6 or 7 years of age. When I was around 10, knitting was taught in the primary schools in the state where I lived here in Australia, for one ‘activity’ period each week. The teacher was going to start everyone off with a garter stitch square, but I’m afraid that I was the precocious child who put up her hand and said I didn’t just want to make a boring old square, I wanted to knit a jumper (sweater)…and so I did. Made in 8 ply (sportweight) pure wool, and to a pattern, it was primarily in stocking stitch (stockingette), with a V-neck, ribbed bands and it had about a 4” wide blackberry (trinity) stitch panel up the front.

When I was in my teens I figured out for myself how to crochet, and I did quite a bit in the late 60s and early 70s, making things up as I went along because at that stage I had never actually tried to read a ‘proper’ crochet pattern. The hippy fashions that were popular then allowed you to get away with pretty much anything – although I have to admit that, because I had never quite figured out how to turn corners properly, most of my granny square designs came out as ‘granny circles’!

After creating crochet garments off the top of my head for a while, it seemed like a natural progression when I went back to doing more knitting again that I would decide go for originality there too. In the mid ‘80s I was graphing out my own intarsia designs, and by the ‘90s I had created very many one-of-a-kind hand-knit wearable art garments – not only vests and sweaters but also full length overcoats.

It was fun while it lasted, but unfortunately so much knitting eventually began to play havoc with my hands. It was probably the repetitious movements that caused it, but the pain always seemed to get worse as the knitted pieces got larger and heavier. Since I have never been able to just sit and watch TV without having something else to occupy my hands, and because I loved knitting so much, I started to experiment and found that working with just a few stitches at a time seemed to be OK.

I felt happy that by knitting in this manner I would be able to at least use up some of my (rather large) stash of leftover yarns. I would begin by creating a tiny knitted shape, binding off the first yarn after just a few rows. Then picking up a few more stitches with another yarn I would knit again for just a few more rows. Working outwards in any direction in a random manner, I found that I could soon built up interesting areas of usable knitted fabric. By shaping them so that they matched a paper pattern I was still able to create the pieces that I needed to create garments, and all without ever having to calculate the size from a gauge swatch – so mixing yarns of very different thicknesses was no longer an issue.

This was back in the days before yarns became as exciting as they are today, so, even though these pieces were fun to make, I still felt that they were a bit flat and uninteresting. After creating a couple of early freeform garments in this manner, I then began to add knitted bobbles and ruffles on the surface where needed to create additional textural interest.

I soon realized that working such bobbles and ruffles would be much faster if they were done in crochet, and I found that I really enjoyed alternating between the two crafts, and was pleased to discover that this also relieved the strain on my hands. Soon I was adding even more crochet to my work, particularly shells and circles in various sizes, to create ‘curves’. Even though at this stage most of my freeform creations were probably around 80% knit, the added crochet helped to give the more angular lines of the knitting a softer, blended and more feminine appearance.

I also created a number of garments that combined both crafts, but still kept the knitting and crochet areas separate, as in this coat with a freeform knitted bodice, and crochet circle sleeves.

It was at about this time that a fellow knitter told me about a number of books published in the UK in the late 80s, and not long after that I was lucky enough to meet James Walters and the late Sylvia Cosh (authors of ‘The Crochet Workbook’), when they visited Australia. I was able to see firsthand some of the wonderful garments they had created with ‘scrumbles’ (Sylvia’s word for the small, freeform crochet patches she worked with). They encouraged me to put even more crochet into my work, so I set to, learning some of the more complex crochet stitches, and began adding them to my work.

Although freeforming in this manner can be done using just one craft or the other, most of the fabrics I create nowadays are a combination of both knitting and crochet. I like to differ the proportions in each garment, depending on the look or amount of drape I want to achieve, and the effect is synergistic: twice as many stitches to play with, but it seems that there are limitless combinations possible, making every small patch totally unique and a work of art in itself.

Back in the late ‘90s my daughter built me a website, and I was constantly surprised at the number of people who contacted me asking if there were ‘patterns’ available for my garments, or whether I had written a book on how I created my pieces.

When working with so many different yarns in any one garment the number of variables meant that actual patterns would have been pretty impossible…but a techniques book was another matter. So I began writing, and with a lot of help from my daughter, Dimity, we published my first book, ‘Freeform: serendipitous design techniques for knitting & crochet’ in 2002.

You will also find photos of more of my creations in the ‘gallery’ pages, an easy guide to creating a freeform-style patch on the ‘what is freeform’ page, plus lots of links to other ‘freeformers’ and textile artists from around the world who use knitting or crochet as a medium. There are also links to various on-line exhibitions and discussion groups where freeform crochet and knitting is featured. And if you sign up for my newsletter I will keep you informed of any other interesting yarn-art sites and articles that I come across each month.