This mood board sort of fits with the paper bag series but without a paper bag!!
It was put together at the same time so follows the feel of the last 4 boards.
The inspiration has come from some great interior shots of rugs, tea towels, ceramics and blankets, but we included grey/charcoal tones to make the palette and bit edgy and ‘unpretty’ – it’s often a good way to make something predictable and obvious more interesting and unusual.



The yoked mohair sweater is such a fab shape – love the look!

We are going off piste today with our Monday Mood appearing on a Tuesday!!
I was completely thrown by the unusual occurrence of a UK Bank Holiday combined with good weather, as a consequence I forgot to post this weeks mood board.
So here it is – this is perhaps my favourite bag, a lovely pea green diagonal stripe.
I then found this great pic of a lettuce and these oversize vintage maps and… I am so into this fresh green colour.
It’s the last one in the paper bag series next week as I have currently exhausted our collection.



The Temporary Tuesday Mood will return to Monday next week!!

So I have been playing with my ball point pens again, I really liked the effect with the blue pens I tried the other day so I have had a go with the pink and green ones this afternoon.
These really are just rough sketchbook doodles so I now may try to illustrate one of our actual sweaters in more detail over the weekend.

As mentioned on Monday I have been itching to do a few sketches with my fancy coloured ball pens for a change.. here is the first one sketched very quickly on one of my really lovely tear sheets



Will try a few more and post them soon.

So following on from last week’s Blue Bag board this weeks is much more bold and graphic inspired by this great red and white zig zag bag.

It prompted me to look back at a couple of my old sketch books where I had some menswear tear sheets.. the black and white pic was made to sit next to the paper bag.

I also hunted out some great colourful ballpoint pens I bought a few months ago, I knew they would come in useful for a few mood board scribbles, I think I may attempt a couple of illustrations with them this week… keep watching!



We love the red and white fairisle in the bottom left hand corner too, a simple but really effective pattern.

We are having contemplations about other regular blog spots, if you have any ideas, let us know.. our thoughts so far are “a what’s on our desk spot”, an illustration Wednesday and a truebritknit trend spot! Keep reading.

Well this is the last of our hat boards, we may add more later in the year.. this is a favourite or ours and Belinda has excelled herself with a very clever pattern of this bang on trend peaked cap.

It would be a great cycling hat, very apt in our part of London and a great accessory with an East London fixed gear bike. We have even added the lovely print to the board our Dutch friend Ton (cyclist extraordinaire) had of a vintage cycling cap which really looks like ours and Belinda spoke about last week… of course we had to add a small bobble. F.A.B!

The small picture of the edge of a coffee cup on a blue stripe cloth is from another favorite book of ours called ‘A Year of Mornings – 3191 Miles Apart’ which is a photographic collaboration by Maria Vettese and Stephanie Barnes who have taken some of the most beautiful photographs of their domestic lives each day over a year… take a look at the book, we find many of the photographs so inspiring and have many of them in our sketchbooks, especially good for colour and pattern ideas.

Anyway, enjoy Hats 4.

As we are writing blog posts about our accessories we thought it would be good to show a mood board for each one. This is for our kingfisher blue beret with a finished illustration, along with some images that inspired us.. this is how the design process works… we find colour palettes and yarns first, knit the swatches, then do some design development. That’s lots of quick sketches of our ideas in various shape and stitch combinations. Once we have hit on one that really works we will then write the pattern and knit a first sample.

There will be a board for each of our hats over the next few weeks… so this week its the kingfisher blue chunky beret which became the Beret St Edmunds. Next week will be the mood board for the Canterberet.

We have been working on an accessory story the last few weeks and this is the colour palette that has inspired the choice of yarns.

The teal blue/green/grey colours are inspired by the artist Claire Basler who paints large scale floral still life paintings and her house is a living version of the work. She lives in a former iron works on the outskirts of Paris. The two centre photographs are from an article Elle Decoration ran in March 2010 about her living and work space… it’s stunning … and so is her work.



The designs inspired by these colours will be appearing on the website over the next few days.

Happy Valentide!


The next Valentine mood features the yarns we used for our Hearts of Midlothian, we love the cream trad Aran option especially when paired with vintage mismatched pearl buttons but as Belinda said last week – what a very special gift for a bride.

The hearts featured here are from top to bottom:

Traditional candy paper, the vintage end paper we featured on our ’12 days of Knitmas’ and the cover paper from a 1953 Penguin edition of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which really inspired our Hearts of Midlothian colour palette.

The last heart is my old silver perfume container which I shall be wearing on the 14th. This inspired our small pink heart. Watch out soon for our Mothering Sunday pin cushion designs we are developing at the moment.
We added this moody Aran pic which represents a real celtic romance as well as a beautiful sweater!

As it’s coming up to Valentine’s Day we have spent the last few days mulling over what to suggest you hand craft for that certain someone in your life … partners, mothers, children, best friend, David Beckham etc… to inspire us we have put together a couple of mood boards to get us thinking.

Hearts, flowers and arans all appear on the next two Monday Moods before the 14th of February.
We have designed a great Valentine’s knit which could also double up for Mothers’ day or a beautiful wedding day gift, we will be posting a pattern shortly.

Anyway here is Valentine 1 for all the romantics out there!

For your info the Amor Sweater is by Ashish and the chunky cream aran sweater is by Rodarte.